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Meet the Newly Elected ABC Board Members
The votes have been cast; the ballots have been counted. Marsha Bayless, Chair of the 2007 Nominating Committee, has audited the results. Listed below are the newly elected members to the ABC Board of Directors.
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Second Vice President |
Geraldine E. Hynes
Sam Houston State University
I am dedicated to excellence in business communication education, research, and practice. An expanded leadership role in ABC would allow me to continue serving our membership and promoting the value of business communication to society. The following summary demonstrates how my professional record aligns with ABC’s mission and values.
Educator
The undergraduate and graduate courses I have taught include business communication, professional speaking, managerial communication, interpersonal communication, management skills, and research report writing. For the past decade I also have taught a graduate managerial communication course online.
Currently I am an Associate Professor in the College of Business Administration at Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas, USA. Previously I held faculty positions in the College of Business Administration, University of Missouri-St. Louis, and the Community College Districts of St. Louis and Belleville, Illinois. My academic career began in Australia, where for three years I was a Lecturer at the University of New England and at the College of Advanced Education in Armidale, N.S.W.
My academic credentials are interdisciplinary. I earned a B.A. in English and Speech Education from the University of Illinois-Chicago, an M.A. in Speech Communication from the University of Illinois-Urbana, and a Ph.D. in Adult Education from St. Louis University.
Scholar and Researcher
My research interests focus on teaching and learning, workplace communication, intercultural business communication, and technology. Twenty-four articles have been published, most notably in the Business Communication Quarterly, Journal of Education for Business, Journal of Business and Economic Perspectives, Academy of Educational Leadership Journal, Journal of International Business Research, and Journal of Commercial Banking and Finance.
Other intellectual contributions include books and textbook supplements published by McGraw-Hill and Prentice Hall. My textbook, Managerial Communication: Strategies and Applications, has been adopted by over 60 colleges and universities in North America, the UK-Europe, Asia and the Pacific, where a Chinese translation is available.
Practitioner
Sharing the results of my research and experience with business professionals is important to me. I offer employee training, coaching, and consulting both as an independent contractor and as a representative of my university. Clients include nonprofits and government agencies (municipal, state, and federal) as well as corporations and small businesses. For six years I served on the Board of Directors of the Association of Professional Communication Consultants.
ABC Member
In summary, ABC is my home. Since my first ABC presentation in 1995, I haven’t missed an annual international convention. Overall I have presented 33 conference papers, conducted numerous workshops, and published 15 papers in refereed conference Proceedings.
Currently I serve on ABC’s Board of Directors, the Teaching Committee, and Business Practices Committee. I was Program Chair for the 2006 Annual International Convention in San Antonio, Texas, USA. I am also active in the ABC-Southwestern US Region. In March 2008 I was deeply honored to receive the ABC-SWUS Outstanding Teacher Award.
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| Carribbean, Central and South American Regional Vice President |
Camille Villafañe
University of Puerto Rico
Camille Villafañe is an Assistant Professor in the School of Business Administration at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. She teaches courses on business communication and intercultural communication at the undergraduate and graduate levels and serves on the Editorial Board for Forum Empresarial, a peer reviewed academic journal.
Dr. Villafañe holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Puerto Rico. Her masters and doctoral degrees are from Arizona State University. Her research interests focuses on business and intercultural communication, language teaching and virtual technologies, and development of language and communicative competencies. At present, she is doing research on the business communication curriculum from a comparative, historical, cultural, and interdisciplinary perspective. Her research seeks to provide a solid foundation for the development of curricular innovations attuned to the rapid changes of a globalized economy.
At the faculty level, Dr. Villafane has been actively involved in the revision of the bacallaureate program and business communication as an academic discipline. She is also coordinating a novel project geared at the integration of information competencies in the curriculum. She is especially interested in integrating those competencies in business communication courses.
Ms. Villafañe regularly attends and presents papers in conferences and other academic and professional activities related to the business communication field. She also serves as a resource for public and private institutions, including the Government of Puerto Rico and at the Center for International Business, Education, and Research (CIBER) at Florida International University.
As ABC vice president of the Caribbean, Central, and South America, Dr. Villafañe will promote the Association’s goals in the region. She will also seek to increase its membership and to promote an ongoing dialog among members on practical and theoretical issues concerning business communication as a discipline and its past, present and potential contributions to the business administration field.
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| European Regional Vice President |
Geert Jacobs
Ghent University
Geert Jacobs teaches business communication at the Department of Language and Communicationat Ghent University (Belgium). He has recently co-authored a textbook for undergraduate students
of Business English and he has supervised several on-line learning projects. Since 2002 he’s been co-responsible for Ghent University’s highly successful postgraduate programme in Multilingual Business Communication.
Geert received a PhD in Linguistics in 1997 from the University of Antwerp, where he wrote a dissertation on the metapragmatics of press releases. His research focuses on the study of professional and institutional discourse, with a special interest in news production processes and PR. He has recently founded the international NewsTalk&Text research group (NT&T) to promote
and pool further efforts in this area. Geert has published research articles in a wide range of international, peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Pragmatics, Text, Public Relations Review, Document Design, Pragmatics and the Journal of Sociolinguistics. In addition, he has co-edited volumes on the Pragmatics of Crisis (2002), Language, Communication and the Economy (2005), Discourse in Organizations (2006) and the Discourse of News Management (2008).
Geert has presented at several ABC conventions. At the ABC Europe convention in Istanbul last May, he convened a panel called “Bridging the gap” with discursive perspectives on the PR and the popularization of science, technology, social work and the arts. Together with Luuk Van Waes and Liesbeth Opdenacker he received ABC’s Outstanding Article Award of the year 2005 in the Business Communication Quarterly.
Geert has co-organized four international conferences in the field of business communication and text studies. In addition, he has presented business and academic lectures in more than a dozen different countries, he has served as guest reviewer for a number of international peer-reviewed journals and book series as well as for various grants in the field of communication, and he has been involved in the supervision and evaluation of various PhDs both in Belgium and abroad.
Geert’s goal as a Vice President for Europe is to further strengthen the position in Europe of business communication as an emerging academic field in general and of ABC as one of its pioneering organizations in particular. At the same time, he aims at further opening up opportunities for dialogue between Europe and America as well as the other areas in the ABC community. Finally, given his own background in professional and institutional discourse studies, he will be trying to find new ways to promote text-based and language-oriented empirical research in the broad field of business communication.
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| Southeastern U.S. Regional Vice President |
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William C. Sharbrough
The Citadel
William C. Sharbrough, Ph.D. (Louisiana State University) is an Associate Professor of Business Administration and head of the Management & Marketing Division of The Citadel School of Business Administration in Charleston, SC, where he teaches a variety of management and communication courses at both the undergraduate and MBA levels. He is responsible for approximately 20 faculty (full and part time). He served as Assistant to the Dean for Undergraduate Studies from 1993-1997, and has also been on the adjunct faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School. His current research interests are in the areas of communication in leadership and teams
William has been a member of ABC since 1977, and currently serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Business Communication and a member of the Student Paper Competition committee. He served as Publicity Chair for the international meeting in 1982. At the association-wide level, he served on the Publications Board from 1990-3 and as Chair of the Publications Board in 1991. On the regional level, William has participated in both the Southeast US region where he works, and the Southwest US region that is his academic home. He was the program chair for the 1999 ABC-SEUS Conference, and was ABC-SWUS president in 2002-3 after serving in various roles in that organization's leadership. He was awarded as an “Outstanding Scholar” by ABC-SWUS in 2000.
William’s latest publication is a coauthored article, “Motivating Language in Industry: Its Impact on Job Satisfaction and Perceived Supervisor Effectiveness,” published in The Journal of Business Communication, October 2006, William has also published articles on communication and management issues in a variety of journals including The Business Communication Quarterly/ABCA Bulletin, Journal of Education for Business, and Journal of Systems Management. During his career, he has presented over 35 papers and presentations before academic meetings. He received the first Bpi/Irwin Distinguished Paper Award at the Southwest Regional Meeting of the ABCA in 1983. He has written cases in management texts and chapters in several communication texts William has produced annotations for an annotated text and video guides for the same text. Currently, he has two research projects underway and hopes to have them ready for presentation soon.
On campus, he serves as advisor to several student organizations and as The Citadel’s NCAA Faculty Athletics Representative. He is an active speaker/consultant in the Charleston community and volunteers with the Boy Scouts of America as a trainer of adult leaders.
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| Directors at Large |
Jean Bush-Bacelis
Eastern Michigan University
Jean Bush-Bacelis (Ph.D. Wayne State University), a Professor in the Department of Management at Eastern Michigan University (EMU), has also taught at the University of Michigan and Washtenaw Community College. She was hired specifically to teach business communication, beginning in 1981.
ABC: A 24-year member of ABC, she attended her first convention in Chicago in 1983 and realized ABC was (and is) the field’s premier professional and scholarly organization. She watched it grow in numbers and in depth and breadth to represent the field’s scholarly diversity and today’s global business focus. She co-chairs the ABC International Issues committee, and has served two terms on ABC’s Teaching Committee.
Service: Successfully chairing committees at department, college and university levels at EMU, Bush-Bacelis has been recognized for excellence as an active leader. She is conscientious, thorough, goal oriented and well organized. Her consistent service record would fit ABC well. As course coordinator, she achieved consensus on uniform learning outcomes for all business communication classes. She recently completed a thorough assessment report that included a literature review, input from various stakeholders, and benchmarking with other institutions. This led to a revision in the master syllabus and an enhancement in overall effectiveness.
Teaching: The 11 different undergraduate and graduate courses she has taught at EMU include business-, international/intercultural- and managerial communication; organizational behavior, international management and managerial skills. She helped develop three unique degrees: a joint BBA/BA in International Business, a degree in Language and International Trade and an online Integrated Marketing Communication master’s degree. Partially for her use of Academic Service-Learning in all classes, she won EMU’s 2005 Alumni Award for Teaching Excellence.
International: The first faculty member to teach in EMU’s successful MSHROD in Tianjin China, Bush-Bacelis also lived and taught in Portugal and lived in Spain. She travels often, most recently to ABC’s Istanbul Convention. With the international acquaintances she met, she expects to create joint teaching and research projects. In 2002 at ABC’s Latin America conference in PR, she presented papers in both English and Spanish.
Research: Current research and consulting interests include intercultural management, expatriation and repatriation, learning measurement and outdoor education. Bush-Bacelis has published articles and given numerous presentations in a wide variety of subject areas, with most directly related to business communication. At the 2006 ABC San Antonio conference, for example, she presented papers on assessing an online course and on incorporating live oral presentations into online courses.
Program Development: Her wide interests in business communication have led to university faculty fellowships in eLearning, academic advising, and academic service-learning. Currently, she participates in a seminar on the scholarship of learning and teaching. She has developed new courses and revised others, including international business communication and managerial communication (both in person and online).
ABC’s Future: She would bring to ABC’s Board enthusiasm, energy and an ability to ask questions and pull together interdisciplinary ideas. Her fresh perspective would reflect our membership’s diversity. She would work to have ABC continue to strengthen in breadth and depth and seek joint activities with other professional organizations, and to increase attendance at conferences in international locations, to promote student projects across borders and facilitate research efforts among members.
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Janis Forman
Anderson School of Management at UCLA
Professor Janis Forman is the founder and director of the Management Communication Program at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. In this capacity, she teaches communication strategy and practices in the full-time and executive MBA programs and trains a staff who teach communications across the curriculum. She has been teaching corporate communication for the last decade as a faculty advisor for more than a hundred MBA "Living Cases," which are extended international strategic studies for multi-national companies, such as Microsoft, Hughes, Nestle, Coca-Cola, and Disney, and for start-up firms in Austria, Australia, Chile, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Spain, New Zealand, and the United States. The Fully-Employed MBA Program and the Global Access Program (GAP) in which she teaches business planning and investor communications was ranked first in the United States by Business Week in 2007.
She was named the outstanding researcher in 1995 by the Association for Business Communication. The award is based on her entire publication record and its pivotal role in extending research in her discipline and in educating managers. She is the recipient of numerous awards for research, including fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Center for International Business Education and Research, the Council of Public Relations Firms, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Her book, The Power of Corporate Communication, written with Professor Paul Argenti of the Tuck School, won the Distinguished Publication Award for 2003 from the Association for Business Communication. Dr. Forman has published three other books, including The Random House Guide to Business Writing, and numerous articles in publications such as The Journal of Business Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, The Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Corporate Reputation Review, and Strategy & Business. She is a frequent presenter at international research and business forums and in on the editorial board of Business Communication Quarterly.
Her current research focuses on data-based storytelling (work in progress) and on the role of storytelling and translation in producing effective strategic communications ("More than Survival: The Discipline of Business Communication and the Uses of Translation," The Journal of Business Communication, 1998; "When Stories Create an Organization's Future," Strategy & Business, 1999; “Leaders as Storytellers: Finding Waldo,” Business Communication Quarterly, 2007); on instruction in strategic communication (“Multiple Roles in Responding to Strategic Communications,” BCQ, 2004); and on Web-based communication and entreprenerial firms (work in progress).
She is the faculty director for the Executive Education Program on Advanced Strategic Management for European-based corporate communication professionals and has consulted to a wide variety of organizations, including Cap Gemini/Ernst & Young, Hughes, Invesco, Knapp Communications, Colony Capital, MTA, and BBDO.. She has been a visiting professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of California at San Diego’s Rady School of Business, and the University of Lugano.
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Cynthia L. King
Naval Postgraduate School
Dr. Cynthia L. King is Assistant Professor of Management Communication and Associate Director of the Center for Defense Management Reform at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California. Prior to coming to NPS, Cindy taught as a lecturer at University of Washington, in both the Department of Technical Communication (College of Engineering) and the Department of Speech Communication (College of Arts and Sciences). In 1995, Cindy won the Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Engineering based on the recommendations from academic peers and students. She currently teaches Communication for Managers for MBA students at NPS. Other courses she has taught include Theoretical Dimensions of Technical Communication, Interpersonal Communication, Interviewing, Introduction to Public Speaking, Publication Project Management, Scientific and Technical Communication, The Computer and Technical Communication, and Speech, the Individual, and Society.
Cindy has been very active in the Association for Business Communication since becoming a member in 1998. In addition to presenting her work, she served in various capacities in ABC’s Consulting SIG, Association for Professional Communication Consultants. As a board member for APCC for four years, she served as the Online Forum Coordinator, Web Manager, and Director at Large. For her work on the APCC board, she was honored to receive the APCC President’s Service award in 2005. Recently she formed the ABC Rhetoric Special Interest Group, which held its first official meeting at the ABC Annual Convention in 2006. Because of the SIG’s outreach to other academic communities, there were seven business communication rhetoric papers presented at the 2007 conference by scholars who had never before attended ABC. Additionally, she was invited to be a member of the ABC research committee, beginning in AY 2007/2008.
Her own research focuses on rhetorical criticism and discourse analysis of spoken and written texts, with an emphasis on the relationship between language and meaning in organizational contexts. Her interests include communication and its relationship to organizational strategy, organizational culture, and public policy reform. Her recent work appears in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication and Public Administration Review.
In addition to her academic career, Cindy worked extensively in the high tech industry in Seattle, where she held executive positions in operations and sales management. These firms specialized in content management and web systems design, serving clients such as Microsoft Corporation, Lexis Nexis, Visio, Corbis Corporation, and others. Cindy began her career as a Czech/Slovak linguist in the United States Air Force. She worked in intelligence collection, transcription, and analysis, coordinating closely with the National Security Agency. Upon completion of her service, Cindy was awarded the Air Force Achievement medal.
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