Research

The main focus in the research area of strategic communication lies on financial communication and sustainable communication. More specifically, the research group studies the role of financial news, corporate communication and investor relations and its influences on the financial markets, market participants and the broader public. Furthermore, facing increasing climate risks and public pressure vis-à-vis corporations to act more sustainably, we investigate how organizations communicate sustainable business models and strategies to internal and external stakeholders and its effects on sustainable transformation processes within and outside the organization.

Find out more about our current projects.

In the area of media management, we focus on innovative business and financing models of media enterprises and their effects on diverse audiences. Current trends such as the increased use of podcasts by news media organizations as well as journalists who are switching to online platforms to sell their journalistic content via subscription newsletters are starting points for the group’s research endeavors. At the core of this research area always stands the question, how to secure a fair and independent media system that is imperative for freedom of expression and well-functioning democracies.

To understand the research phenomena with more breadth and depth, our research group is committed to employ a mixed methods research approach. By combining both qualitative (e.g., interviews, focus groups, text analysis) and quantitative (automated and manual content analysis, network analysis, survey) research methods as well as (interdisciplinary) research perspectives, we seek to increase the validity of our findings by corroborating and converging our findings.

To move the field forward, we are committed to connecting methodological innovations with strategic communication research. Following a computational social science perspective, our interests lie in various computational methods and approaches concerning automated large-scale data collection, text and sentiment analysis, and network analysis of corporate and organizational communication. By using machine learning and AI models, we classify, extract, and analyze relevant information of strategic communication to identify complex social patterns related to the role and impact of organizations in society.