Craig Carroll

Craig E. Carroll (Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin) is Lecturer of Management in the Department of Strategy and Environment.

Dr. Carroll is also the founder and executive director of the Observatory on Corporate Reputation® (OCR) and the creator of Narrative Shield, an AI platform for identifying and rectifying narrative contradiction. Predicated on the belief that organizations and their stakeholders accomplish more together than organizations can accomplish on their own, OCR conducts peer-to-peer knowledge-exchange forums for corporate affairs executives from the world’s leading companies. OCR hosts the Senior Corporate Affairs Summit, an annual, one-day, by-invitation-only, off-the-record gathering where senior leaders learn from one another and examine time-sensitive matters affecting their roles and organizations.

Dr. Carroll has published three major research compendiums on corporate reputation: Corporate Reputation and the News Media (Routledge, 2010), The Handbook of Communication and Corporate Reputation (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), and The SAGE Encyclopedia of Corporate Reputation (SAGE Publications, 2016). He is currently co-editing, with Nell Huang-Horowitz, The New Handbook of Communication and Corporate Reputation. With Professor Roderick P. Hart of The University of Texas at Austin, he is the co-author of DICTION, a computer-assisted text-analysis program that evaluates texts for rhetorical characteristics and influence strategies.

Dr. Carroll’s teaching, research, and public engagement focus on the roles of strategy, communication, and media in organizational and social change. His work examines corporate reputation, corporate affairs, agenda setting, organizational legitimacy, institutional authority, narrative governance, and the responsibilities of organizations operating under heightened scrutiny. His current research also considers the effects of generative artificial intelligence on corporate communication and organizational decision-making. His research and commentary have appeared in the Journal of Business Ethics, the Journal of Business Research, and the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance.

Dr. Carroll has received several research, teaching, and mentoring awards, including PR News’ Educator of the Year, the Andrew W. Mellon Excellence in Mentoring Award from the University of Southern California, and the Pioneer in New Media Award from the Society for New Communications Research. He is a former chair of the Public Relations Division of the International Communication Association.

With Rowena Olegario of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Corporate Reputation, Dr. Carroll co-edited the special forum “Pathways to Corporate Accountability: Corporate Reputation and Its Alternatives” in the Journal of Business Ethics. He serves on the Future Trends Forum of Fundación Innovación Bankinter in Madrid and on the International Advisory Board of FERPILab, an initiative of the Italian Federation of Public Relations (FERPI). He also serves on the editorial boards of leading scholarly journals in corporate communication, corporate affairs, and corporate reputation.

Dr. Carroll co-hosts Communication Breakdown with Steve Dowling, former vice president of communications at Apple. The weekly podcast examines consequential corporate communication failures, contested organizational decisions, and emerging questions of institutional governance and accountability.