Strategic Communication: Views on how practitioners enact discursive strategies.

Glen Michael Alessi University of Modena and Reggio Emilia - ITALY Strategic Communication: Views on how practioners enact discursive strategies. Strategic communication, as a field of study in professional and public spheres has been tagged as being a misunderstood, ambiguous, contested or neglected area of professional communication (Holltzhausen and Zerfass, 2015). Despite efforts to better define and give focus to its applications in a variety of professional contexts through conferences, academic journals such as The International Journal of Strategic Communication, online courses and monograph textbooks, each initiative appears to add to or create even further nuanced interpretations which avoid an overall unifying perspective. This study does not assume there is one exclusive top-down catagorisation of strategic communication, but wants to explore strategic communication as being sector and task specific to each practitioner, while at the same time sharing lexico-grammatical and interdiscursive strategies across disciplines. This study addresses practitioners in a variety of professional contexts to see if, how and which discursive strategies such as lexico-grammatical choices, thought to be integral to their notions of strategic communication, are realized through their discursive choices.