Comunicação corporativa: à procura de um modelo para a investigação

Comunicação realizada com o apoio do Programa de Estímulo à Internacionalização do Corpo Docente ESCSWolton(2020) asks in a quite clear way and not only in connection to much of what has been happening in our recent times, from the need of a better approach to public communication campaigns during Covid-19 pandemic, to a lack of interest in communication research,why there seems to be an incapacity of intellectuals and political personalities to consider communication as the great revolution of the last century. Maybe we should go deeper and consider the specific area that deals specifically with the relationships between institutions and their publics or stakeholders and that has been perspectivated as promoting understanding and trust but seems to be constantly downplayed by the public actors; Corporate Communication(CC).During the XX century two big areas emerged in communication research: textual analysis (from psychoanalysis to semiotics) and the content analysis paradigm (understood here as exclusively a quantitative endeavor). Nowadays the quantitative arena seems to be gaining influence, again, not anymore due to the mass media reception studies but to the “interactions” quantifications of our social media way of life.This article will try to defend the need for a new approach when dealing with CC research that normally has, as its main objects texts, but also conversations, the quantification of social media interactions but so many times studies of the reception of messages sent in different supports, not to speak about the different approaches to both recollect and analyze the data; from questionnaires to participant observation or from interviews to content analysis of the manifest messages on the mass media. Another important characteristic to take in account is the duration of the processes under analysis as it’s not uncommon to deal with the need to monotorise and analyze a communication plan all along a year and, not just, as we were used to, for instances in semiotics, to deal with corpus constructed according to synchronic cuts.As in so many other areas in the behaviourial sciences, it will be defended the need for a better understanding of the Mixed Method paradigm and its constraints when working in CC.Maybe the health sciences might emerge as the most relevant example - when dealing with objects that are complex the research methods must be able to account for that complexity, moreover, they must be able to answer complex research questions -of the development of a new way to do scientific research beyond the QUAN/QUAL contest in CCN/