Guest Editorial
Future Directions for Issues Management*
Steven L. Wartick
University of Northern Iowa
Pursey P.M.A.R. Heugens
Concordia University, Canada
ABSTRACT
Issues management as a corporate activity lies at
the heart of reputation management, public
affairs, and corporate communication. Yet its
dual position as a professional field and a topic
of scientific study is highly fragile. From the
practitioner side, the legitimacy of issues man-
agement is under constant attack by both stake-
holder groups and skeptic public affairs officials.
From the academic side, the community of
researchers with an interest in issues manage-
ment is frighteningly small and widely dispersed
over business and journalism schools on several
continents. To make the case for the preserva-
tion of issues management as a significant man-
agerial task, this paper proposes three future
directions for research and practice: (1) infusing
orthodox issues life cycle research with theories
from other social sciences; (2) seeking cross-fer-
tilization with research in the stakeholder man-
agement tradition; and (3) integrating issues
management research more strongly with the
burgeoning literature on the management of cor-
porate reputation.
AIMS OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE
Welcome to this Corporate Reputation
Review special issue on issues management!
The issue contains six articles covering a
wide variety of conceptual approaches to
the study of issues and their management
– ranging from agenda-setting frame-
works through stakeholder theory to dis-
course analysis.
1
We believe that this
collection of articles will be of profound
interest to scholars already working in the
area of issues management, and we hope
that it will inspire others to join us in the
study of this exciting topic. At the same
time, we are confident that the work
reported here will also appeal to the criti-
cal practitioner, as the articles suggest new
ways of analyzing and addressing social
issues.
Before we proceed by introducing the
contents of this special issue, however, we
will reveal just a little of how this project
came about and restate our initial goals for
this venture. We first discussed the idea of
a special issue on issues management
amongst ourselves when we attended a
small conference on Public Affairs and
Issues Management in the state of Maine,
in the spring of 2001.
2
No one could have
watched our fellow attendees present and
discuss their work without being captured
————————————
* A previous version of this paper has been pre-
sented at the 13th annual meeting of the Interna-
tional Association for Business and Society, June
27 – 30, 2002, Victoria, BC, Canada. We thank
our session participants for the valuable discussion
afterwards. This paper has also benefited from a
conversation on the future of issues management
between Bryan Husted and the second author at
the 2002 Academy of Management Meeting in
Denver, Colorado, USA. The usual disclaimers
apply.
Corporate Reputation Review Volume 6 Number 1
Corporate Reputation Review,
Vol. 6, No. 1, 2003, pp. 7–18
# Henry Stewart Publications,
1363–3589
Page 7

by the obvious vibrancy and enthusiasm of
the international issues management com-
munity. At the same time, everyone who
was present at this meeting also must have
felt alarmed by the fragility of this group,
due to its sheer lack of critical mass.
As we were reflecting on our joint
experiences after the first day of the confer-
ence, we realized that a successful special
issue on issues management would have to
meet at least three goals. First, we wanted
to show just how vibrant the issues man-
agement community really is by reporting
some of its most innovative and refreshing
research findings. Secondly, because the
inner circle of issues management research-
ers is so small, we were very eager to
involve new people in the dialogue and
make new voices heard. Thirdly, for rea-
sons which we will explain below, we
deemed it expedient to draw up some pre-
liminary sketches for the future of issues
management practice and research in this
editorial essay.
BEYOND ADOLESCENCE . . .
Before discussing some of the challenges
facing the issues management field today, it
is important to recognize that the interna-
tional issues management community –
both the professional and academic sides of
it – can look back on some remarkable
accomplishments. The phrase ‘issue man-
agement’ was only coined by Howard
Chase, a veteran public affairs practitioner,
in April of 1976. But interestingly enough,
the term was already widely adopted in
both the business world and in academic
circles in the first decade thereafter. Impor-
tant books published in those first ten years
that already fully embraced the issues man-
agement logic include, for example, Man-
agement Response to Public Issues (Buchholz,
Evans, and Wagley, 1985), Social Change
and Corporate Strategy (Gollner, 1983),
Managing Public Relations (Grunig and
Hunt, 1984), Managing External Issues
(Stanley, 1985), and Issues Management
(Heath and Nelson, 1986).
This almost instantaneous adoption at
least suggests that Chase’s term did not
really describe a completely new phenom-
enon, but rather provided a catchword for
a preexisting yet dormant trend in the cor-
porate world. The public affairs field had
quietly been professionalizing for decades,
but a new term like issues management
finally provided public affairs professionals
with a label they could use to describe and
legitimize their activities. Now, less than
thirty years after its inception, issues man-
agement has evolved into a widely adopted
and endorsed corporate activity as well as a
legitimate object of academic study. Few
social phenomena can claim to have
accomplished so much in so little time.
Below we will discuss some of these major
professional and scholarly accomplishments
in more detail.
Professional Accomplishments
Adoption by major corporations
One of the ‘vital signs’ for any manage-
ment function is the extent to which lead-
ing corporations have embraced that
function and have appointed individuals in
their hierarchies for actively managing it.
According to this criterion, issues manage-
ment is as alive and kicking today as any
other imaginable organizational task. Table
1 shows a listing of corporations that pre-
sently have issues managers on their pay-
rolls – and it should be kept in mind that
this listing is meant as an illustration only
and is by no means exhaustive.
Widespread adoption
Another buoyancy indicator for a specific
managerial function is the proportion of
companies that have chosen to actively
embrace it, expressed as a percentage of the
wider population of relevant business orga-
nizations. A 1999 study by the Foundation
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Guest Editorial