Culture, Identity and Image Consultancy: Crossing Boundaries between Management, Advertising, Public Relations and Design Majken Schultz and Lars Ervolder Copenhagen Business School, Department of Intercultural Communication and Management ABSTRACT This paper explores how dierent types of professional ®rms develop new services that integrate the concepts of corporate culture, identity and image. The paper is based on a survey study of 93 professional ®rms in Denmark. It shows how professional ®rms in management, public relations, advertising and corporate design perceive and apply integrated services, such as integrated com- munication, corporate communication and vision management. The study demonstrates that the development of integrated frameworks requires that professional ®rms include new forms of professional skills and challenge the notion of what their own business is about. It also shows that a smaller number of the professional ®rms have developed services which integrate corporate culture, identity and image in such new and holistic ways as to point to the emergence of a new professional ®eld. INTRODUCTION It has been argued that one of the major challenges facing post-industrial organiza- tions stems from the breakdown of bound- aries between internal and external aspects of organizations (Cheney & Christensen, forthcoming; Dowling, 1986; Dowling, 1993; Fombrun, 1996; Olins, 1997; Hatch & Schultz, 1996). Organizations were formerly able to dis- connect their internal functioning from their external relationships because contacts between insiders and outsiders were few. Top executives, and marketing, purchas- ing, PR and strategic planning departments handled external relations, while middle and lower level managers, HRM, engi- neering, production and accounting depart- ments attended to internal issues. Now, however, the increasing interactions between `insiders' and `outsiders' through networking, alliances and new service- driven organizational forms make it harder to maintain the distinction between inter- nal and external corporate behavior (Hamel & Prahalad, 1994; Barney, 1986). Simultaneously, the media-driven trans- parency of company behavior makes it harder for companies to conceal discrepan- cies between external claims and internal practices (Schmitt & Simonson, 1997; Ind 1997; Barich & Kotler, 1991). Where organizations were formerly often able to dierentiate internal values and practices from those presented to the outside, the increased transparency raises issues of con- sistency and credibility, which have been labelled `honesty gaps' (Entine, 1994) or promise/performance gaps (Greyser, 1998). Companies that use marketing slogans with no internal reference are seriously at risk of losing legitimacy, as is found, for example, when companies claim special values in ethics, green awareness or social responsibility without actually practising what they preach. In this paper, we explore how such Corporate Reputation Review Volume 2 Number 1 Corporate Reputation Review, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1998, pp. 29±50 # Henry Stewart Publications, 1358±1988 Page 29