Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft

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Browsing Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft by Subject "Changing environments"

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    Issues Management unter veränderten Umweltbedingungen
    (2023) Wnuck, Corinna; Schweiger, Wolfgang
    The idea of issues management aims to ensure that companies actively exert influence on other environmental developments through early identification and strategically planned participation in publicly and organisationally relevant issues. The goal is to maintain their own room for manoeuvre and secure their corporate reputation. Environmental conditions play a central role in shaping issues management. These have changed noticeably since the first issues manage- ment approaches at the end of the 1970s. Digitalisation, medialisation, globalization, and the transformation of the public sphere through digital structural change are the drivers of these changes. Issues management has not yet been tested for its validity under changed environmen- tal conditions. The overarching research question of this study therefore is: How do companies shape issues management under changed environmental conditions? The empirical study uses qualitative, guideline-based expert interviews to examine how issues management is carried out today under changed environmental conditions. For this purpose, the research question is deepened on the basis of six issue management dimensions: the concept, the structure, the process, the management, the actor and the resource dimension. For the research, 22 experts from the agency/consultancy context and the corporate environment were interviewed. Conceptually, issues management has not altered under changed environmental conditions. It remains a preventive function that identifies issues in the corporate environment as early as possible in order to secure and enhance the companys reputation and to deal with these issues in a strategically planned manner. Issues management has a deprioritised existence in many companies, partly because the overlaps with other disciplines are high. Therefore, in many com- panies issues management is practised but not called such. At the structural level of issues management, changes due to digitalisation and globalisation are becoming visible. Modern is- sues management organisations have to work faster, more agile and more flexibly than before. They have to identify issues globally, in real time, and prepare them in a way that is appropriate for different cultural areas. This requires efficient and transparent information and knowledge management systems as well as flexible resource adjustment options. The study shows that changes due to digitalised environmental conditions are effective on the processual level. Due to the acceleration of environmental developments, the process phases run faster or parallel to each other. Reflection and reaction times have shortened with increasing issue complexity. Fol- lowing the sequences of the Scrum logic from software development, an alternative process model is developed in the study that maps the simultaneity and growing complexity of environ- mental developments. The management level is characterised by changes due to accelerated environmental developments, globalisation, medialisation and changed public structures, which are evident to different degrees in the individual phases of the management level. The study shows that the evaluation of issues management is still a challenge today and is only carried out with limitations in the companies. Agencies see a lack of will here, companies justify this with the lack of meaningfulness of the results about the actual performance of issues management. At the actor level, the transformation of the public sphere is having an effect. There is an in- crease in the number of situational, volatile and well-networked sub-publics, which are grouped around various issues and ensure that once an issue has arisen, it can no longer be laid to rest. In addition, the balance of power has shifted in favour of previously weakly represented groups. Furthermore, "journalism bypassing" is a frequently observed phenomenon. On the resource level, issues managers need a significantly expanded repertoire of competences and skills due to digitalisation and medialisation. Furthermore, the use of digital tools in issues management is increasing. At the time of the survey, these were primarily online monitoring tools, editorial management tools, collaborative work platforms and virtual team environments. AI and chat- bots, on the other hand, are the exception. Overall, the study concludes that the changed environmental conditions make the idea of issues management more relevant than ever. Although not always under the name, strategically planned early recognition and management of issues has become established in most compa- nies. At the same time, the environmental changes have a strong impact on implementation. Furthermore, there is a need to catch up especially in the area of digital and data-based corporate communication. This is where potential lies dormant to remedy some of the problems identified in the paper.