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We have probably all heard the story of the person who supposedly put a wet dog into the microwave oven to let it dry or the story of the person who drank coffee from a plastic cup and got severely burned, or the one in which a jogger stumbles and falls in the too long shoe laces of his / her sneakers. Whether or not stories like these are urban legends is hard to determine with any certainty. But judging from the ever increasing volume of the instruction manuals accompanying, for instance, our household appliances and other end user products there could be some truth to them.

This article deals with communication policies within the public sector. It takes its point of departure within the overall framework of corporate communication and hence exclusively sees communication policies from that perspective. Communication policies are seen as means of corporate communication. As means of corporate communication they feature what we have labelled 'mediational properties' within an organization. As such they – from a communicative point of view – constitute the interface between the strategic and the operational levels of communication management. As policies they should support decision making processes when it comes to ensuring that any instance of communication is in line with the mission, vision and values of an organisation. And they should offer a defi nite course of communicative action contingent on situational factors. The contextual background of the article is the re-structuring of the Danish regional political landscape, which is to have taken place by January 1st 2007. Communicating the mission, vision and values of the new municipalities is seen as an essential part of re-configurating and maintaining political legitimacy in the transaction period and beyond. The empirical part of the article deals with an extensive corpus analysis of a broad selection of authentic communication policies stemming from Danish municipalities. The analytical framework applied gives rise to a number of new observations regarding the generic heterogeneity of communication policies. The analysis also delivers new input to the theoretical discussion of the status of communication policies within a corporate communication framework in general and within a current Danish municipality setting in particular.

"This collection elaborates an innovative analytical framework for knowledge communication, bringing together insights from a range of professional settings to highlight how a cross-disciplinary approach can promote a new view of knowledge that emphasizes constructivist and cognitivist perspectives. The volume seeks to draw connections between different disciplines' traditionally disparate studies of knowledge communication, defined here as the communication of domain knowledge between experts of the same discipline, experts of different disciplines, or non-experts with an interest in developing expert knowledge. Featuring work from scholars across linguistics, corporate communication, and sociology on diverse professional environments, chapters focus on one of three central aspects in the communication of expert knowledge: the textual carrier of the interaction, the roles and relationships between parties in these interactions, and the contexts in which the texts and communication occur. Taken together, the collection elucidates the value of an approach that supposes that expertise is co-created in interaction under the conditions of human cognitive systems, and that knowledge asymmetries can offer both challenges and opportunities to better understand and generate new forms of communication and specialized knowledge. This book will be of interest to scholars interested in language and communication, professional communication, organizational communication, and sociology of knowledge"--