The purpose of this paper is to outline a conceptual framework for the institutional preconditions for media work and how organizations establish these conditions.

The work concurs with the stream of scholars who use social theory as their starting‐point to understand and make sense of public relations as a societal phenomenon. Based on earlier empirical analysis and theoretical arguments this paper supports the notion of corporate media work as being much more complex and extensive than was earlier recognized. Vital to this is mediatization, a concept describing how media are transformed from being a mediator between institutions to becoming an institution in themselves.

The paper outlines three different ideal types of strategies of corporate media work: providing, promoting, and co‐opting, resting on different aims and functions.

Organizational media work redefines, reshapes and structures the economic, political and social positions of organizations. Therefore scholars will be helped by a more developed framework to categorize and understand corporate media work in a mediatized society.