Strategic communication is an emerging area of study in the communication and management social sciences. Recent academic conversations around this topic have appeared in publications such as the International Journal of Strategic Communication, which was established in 2007, and The Routledge Handbook of Strategic Communication, which will be published this year. Likewise, the discursive turn in the management literature has also begun to focus on organizational strategy (Balogun, Jacobs, Jarzabkowski, Mantere, & Vaara, 2014). As conceptualized in this special issue, strategic communication sits at the intersection of management strategy and communication, and it is our belief that this intersection is relatively undeveloped in the academic literature. To date, the management strategy literature persistently points to the significance of communication but has only begun to theorize it (see, eg, the special issue in Journal of Management Studies,“Strategy as Discourse: Its Significance, Challenges, and Future Directions,” 2014). Likewise, the communication literature infrequently incorporates theory from the strategy literature (see, eg, The Sage Handbook of Organizational Communication: Advances in Theory, Research, and Methods, 2014).

Interestingly, both strategy and modern communication scholarship are relatively new in the social sciences. Business strategic planning, strategy formulation, and strategy implementation took root during the 1960s and 1970s with the work of scholars such as Chandler (1962), Ansoff (1965), Drucker (1969), and Mintzberg (1973). Modern communication frameworks are also relatively young (for reviews, see Du-Babcock, 2014; Knight, 1999; Nickerson, 2014; Rogers, 2014; Tompkins & Wanca-Thibault, 2001). Therefore, it is no surprise that much scholarship has yet to emerge as we envision the intersection of these two topics.