ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how communication affects zones of meaning that support marketplace activities, such as buying and selling, and takes stands on issues that affect policy relationships between company managements and their external stakeholders. It explains how messages are used to influence stakeholder views of a company, its persona, its products or services. Companies try to impose themselves on their environments, rather than merely adapt to them. They attempt to shape their environment by their presence in it, by what they do and say. To assert themselves onto their environments, companies spend billions of dollars on product and service advertising, corporate identity campaigns, glossy annual reports, lobbying, and issue advertising. Relationships are everything. They are enacted by what employees do and say on behalf of their companies. Based on this principle, this section examines a range of means by which relationships are enacted, starting with what employees do.
