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Without doubt, communication management is an expanding and diversifying discipline and the demand for a strategic functioning is rising. Accumulation of knowledge can be seen as a major prerequisite for the development of its practice. The purpose of this paper is to examine the state of the art of, and trends in, communication management research in Germany and The Netherlands.

Following on from a Europe‐wide Delphi research project, this study focused on two countries – Germany and The Netherlands. The study was limited to PhD theses on communication management and compares the characteristics of the doctoral research of the two countries.

The range of disciplines that study aspects of communication management is enormous and most dissertations start almost from scratch, assuming that there is no relevant research that the project can take as a starting point. This fragmentation of research hinders the development of communication management as a theoretically sound and empirically grounded academic discipline.

By comparing the development and current trends in Germany and The Netherlands, the paper provides a context for transnational reflection of the relationship between research on communication management and the professional development of communication management as an occupational field.

The purpose of this article is to provide a new perspective on the relationship between communication management as a strategic process and corporate strategy.

This paper compares approaches of the prescriptive and the descriptive branch of strategy research and highlights how these seemingly contradictory strategy concepts are interrelated. It integrates decision‐making and interpretive perspectives on strategy in management and transfers those perspectives to strategy in communication management. Two areas of communication management, problem definition and the identification of stakeholders, serve as examples to illustrate the conceptual framework.

A conceptual model of strategic decision making in communication management is developed. Strategy in communication management is understood as deliberately creating decision‐making situations. Strategic decisions in communication management are part of both retrospective and prospective sensemaking processes in organizations.

This paper points to fruitful tensions between different strategy concepts and suggests ways to resolve this tension partly. It offers further insights into the role of strategy in communication management by providing a comprehensive view on strategies of communication management from the perspectives of strategy content and strategy process research.