Measuring What Matters: Using Quantitative Research, Analytics and Big Data in Corporate Communications

Introduction

The proposed special issue seeks to promote research that examines communication phenomena at scale, tests causal relationships, measures the prevalence and impact of communication strategies, and generates findings that are replicable across organizational and national contexts. By bringing together studies that employ quantitative surveys, experiments, computational text analysis, longitudinal datasets and network analysis our issue aims to strengthen methodological diversity in the field while fostering greater integration between academic inquiry and the rich data resources increasingly available in professional practice. On this basis, the special issue seeks to build a more cumulative, evidence-based understanding of corporate communications and its effects on organizations and stakeholders.

Corporate communications research has built much of its impact traditionally through qualitative and interpretive traditions. This work has shaped how we understand, among others legitimacy, meaning-making, and stakeholder sense-making, and the field’s recent articles reflect its continued vitality, including work that the determinants of practitioners' acceptance of artificial intelligence in corporate communications (Kelm and Johan, 2025). What this tradition gives us less information on, are questions of scale, prevalence, and cause. We rarely know how widespread a pattern documented in a single setting actually is across firms, sectors, or countries. We rarely test whether a communication strategy produces a stakeholder outcome rather than merely co-occurring with it. And because qualitative findings are difficult to generalize, compare or ‘pool’ across studies, the field accumulates insights much more slowly than other fields in business management and marketing. Indeed, adjacent disciplines have moved further on this front. Management scholarship has shown how topic modelling and large-scale text analysis can render new constructs and build theory from textual data rather than reducing it to a black box (Hannigan et al., 2019), and communication methodologists have begun mapping where computational text analysis succeeds and where its validity remains uncertain (Baden et al., 2022). Corporate communications, by comparison, has been slower to take up these methods at scale, even as the raw material for doing so has multiplied.

That raw material increasingly comes from practice. Organisations and their advisers now generate vast quantities of data about exactly the questions our field cares about: media monitoring and social listening platforms track user sentiment and share of voice in real time; brand tracking and reputation indices follow stakeholder perceptions longitudinally; employee engagement and internal communications analytics capture workforce response at scale, including during the disruptive episodes the field has long studied qualitatively (Park et al., 2025); and social, web, and behavioural trace data offer granular evidence of how stakeholders actually respond to corporate messaging (Zhao et al., 2024). Much of this practitioner-generated data rarely reaches academic journals, and much of the computational toolkit now standard in marketing, strategy, and information systems remains underused in our own field. This special issue makes the case that quantitative, computational, and practitioner-sourced data are not a narrower or more reductive way of studying corporate communications but a necessary complement to interpretive work, able to answer questions interpretive designs are not built to answer.

List of Topic Areas

• Survey-based and experimental studies in corporate communications research
• The use of big data in corporate communications
• Measurement and scale development for core corporate communication constructs
• Text analysis approaches such as NLP, sentiment analysis or topic modelling, applied to corporate communication
• Large-scale content analysis of annual reports, for example of CSR and ESG disclosures or press releases
• Longitudinal and panel data studies tracking communication effects over time
• Network analysis of information flow
• Cross-national and comparative quantitative studies of corporate communication practice
• The use of practitioner and commercially generated data such as media monitoring and listening data, employee engagement analytics or market research results in corporate communications

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccij?_gl

Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/ccij 

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key Deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 31/12/2026

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31/03/2027