Profile: Communication

The Department of Communication develops research-based continuing education programmes that enable students to earn qualifications for demanding assignments in specific segments of the communication field. The department’s guiding principle is that it is increasingly imperative for organizations and individuals today to cast their concerns in forms that are compatible with mass media. Otherwise their interests will not go far in a knowledge-based communication society.

Furthermore, the European dimension of modern society’s communication projects at the intersection of government, business, science and culture poses new challenges to an innovative culture of communication in organizations. Modern information and communication technologies make these challenges all the more pressing. Teaching and research in the Department of Communication are therefore centred on approaches, concepts and instruments for meeting and overcoming these complex challenges.

Research

The Department of Communication has established its first research focus in the area of corporate communications. As day-to-day working life becomes increasingly technical, and cultures become increasingly heterogeneous both within businesses and organizations and in their surroundings, conditions in the globalized knowledge society have undergone a fundamental change, with critical consequences for the communications of successful corporations and organizations. Furthermore, the availability of a wide variety of information and communication technologies has favoured an appreciable shift in private communication behaviour and in the culture of individual communication, which must be taken into account in developing research-based concepts of corporate communications.

These changes in the private sphere are also important for the study of the role of mass communication in addressing the challenge of lifelong learning, another research focus of the Department of Communication. Lifelong learning implies a mixing, in ever-changing proportions, of our professional, personal and educational lives, and this also affects the ways in which learning is communicated. The lifelong learning paradigm itself must be communicated to, and brought to life in, the day-to-day practice of individuals and institutions.

Such timely questions and topics, which directly connect with current continuing education research, will be addressed by the Department of Communication’s research programme beginning in the second half of 2010.