Teaching abroad                                    
Are you thinking about teaching abroad? Read the first-hand accounts of 19 globetrotting teachers who share their accounts of teaching in Japan, Kosovo, Nicaragua, Turkey, Ukraine, and other international settings. You'll find their stories in the June 2007 and September 2007 "Focus on Teaching" column in Business Communication Quarterly.

New teaching ideas                                     
Would you like to start the new academic year with some new teaching ideas? Check the September 2007 issue of Business Communication Quarterly for “Favorite Assignment” descriptions by five ABC members. You’ll learn about Marie Flatley’s method of teaching virtual presentations, Leon Kenman’s exercises for improving style and tone, Linda Mahin’s group assignment based on corporate philanthropy, Elizabeth Pierce’s team-based proposal assignment, and Gretchen Vik’s strategies for teaching accounting communication.

Technically speaking...and writing

How do graduate business students learn to write about technical topics clearly and effectively? Most graduate business programs, understandably, focus on technical analysis and problem solving. However, management communication courses must also teach these students to write about these technical matters, a very challenging prospect. Daphne Jameson presents six key guidelines for teaching students to write clearly about technical topics, using financial and other technical business documents as examples. Find out more in her Focus on Teaching article, "Teaching Graduate Business Students to Write Clearly about Technical Topics." (March, 2006 Business Communication Quarterly).

Teaching across borders

Imagine teaching your business communication course, but doing it in complete partnership with another professor. Not a team-taught course, but with a professor at a different university, in a different country, with a full class of students. Just like you. This is what Doreen Starke-Meyerring and Deborah Andrews did, in a pilot collaboration project, as their way to teach business communication in a new way. This collaboration reflects recent changes in business communication curricula, but more importantly, the authors share their experience as a model for future collaboration. They describe their pedagogy development and implementation, focusing on team interaction, technology use, and classroom context. They conclude with recommendations for faculty interested in similar partnerships. Discover the full partnership in "Building a shared virtual learning culture." (March 2006, Business Communication Quarterly)

Corporate visual identity                          
Corporate Visual Identify (CVI)--the strategic use of corporate name, logo, color, font, and slogans--has become a critical way for organizations to promote a readily identifiable brand and image. Does, though, the use of CVI differ between service and manufacturing organizations and profit-making and nonprofit organizations? Annette van den Bosch, Menno de Jong, and Wim Elving use a survey and statistical analysis to compare the reaction of employees to their organization’s CVI. Their study finds significant differences in the employee perception between profit-making and nonprofit organizations. (April 2006, Journal of Business Communication)

What language for bilingual meetings?
How does using a first or second language affect turn-taking behaviors in business meetings and conversations? Bertha Du-Babcock builds on her previous research to examine how culture and language affect discussion patterns in business settings. In her study, observations of eight out of ten groups confirmed that in meetings conducted in Cantonese, participants engaged in a spiral or circular and interactive communication behavior pattern; when English was the medium of communication, participant discussion followed a linear or sequential discussion pattern. Du-Babcock’s analysis also provides insight into how specific context may affect cultural tendencies in conversational turn-taking. Her study has important implications for international managerial communication. (January 2006 Journal of Business Communication)

Project Team Evaluation
How reliable are peer ratings of team members? What should managers (and instructors) know before making performance judgments based on those ratings? Gary L. May and Lisa E. Gueldenzoph report on the impact of social style on peer evaluation ratings in project teams. Their study found a statistically significant difference in peer evaluation scores between team members with the same social style and those who had the opposite style. This difference should be cause for concern for both managers and instructors who make performance judgments based on peer evaluations. The authors discuss ways in which training may lessen the effect of rater bias. (January 2006 Journal of Business Communication)

Crisis Communication                             

How do institutions communicate crisis information? How should they? In his article, “The Crisis Posting: Scenarios for Class Discussion and Creation,” John F. Jebb explains a newly developing genre, online crisis communication, and illustrates how institutions use their Websites to respond publicly to crises, scandals, and controversial decision. Jebb presents examples of crisis postings (many involving colleges sports teams), explains how the genre fits into business communication, and then details why and how he teaches the genre to his students. (December 2005 Business Communication Quarterly)

“You’re Hired!”                                        

Learning how to get ahead in business by watching NBC’s The Apprentice is taken to the next level by Katherine Kinnick and Sabrena Parton in their article “Workplace Communication: What The Apprentice Teaches About Communication Skills.” While you can't learn emergency surgery from ER, experts suggest that you can learn business skills from the hit series featuring Donald Trump. Kinnick and Parton examine all 15 episodes of the first season of The Apprentice, discovering the importance of persuasive skills compared to the appearance of leadership and interpersonal skills. Kinnick and Parton also found interesting differences in how men and women are evaluated by their peers and their superiors. The authors illustrate the value this program has in the classroom for developing more effective business communicators. (December 2005 Business Communication Quarterly)

Self-directed career planning

Universities are continually looking to strengthen their ability to help students get jobs upon graduation. Doing this without adding time demands on professors or financial cost to the school seems impossible at first glance. Yet this is exactly what Gary May, of Clayton College & State University, did in his model for a self-directed career planning lab built into a managerial communications course. Learn about the program developed by May, including examples and evaluations.  Read more in "Incorporating a Career Planning Lab Into a Managerial Communications Course," in the September 2005 Business Communication Quarterly.

Improving the teaching of visual rhetoric

Students entering the business workforce are also entering a world of multimodal communication that includes an increasing amount of visual communication. At the same time, few business curricula include a substantive amount of visual rhetoric education, potentially leaving students ill-equipped for the workplace they will encounter. Eva R. Brumburger of Virginia Tech explores effective ways to incorporate multimodal, especially visual, communication into the business communication curricula in a variety of ways. In "Visual Rhetoric in the Curriculum: Pedagogy for a Multimodal Workforce," you'll learn how to improve your current courses and assignments by incorporating visual rhetoric. (September 2005, Business Communication Quarterly)

Challenge of collaboration

Three articles in the January 2004 Journal of Business Communication 41(1) provide insight into the challenges of writing collaboratively across academic and professional disciplines. In "Opening the Aperture: Research and Theory on Collaborative Writing," Janis Forman argues that business communication scholars are perfectly situated to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaborations (27-36). Jason Palmieri's case study, "When Discourses Collide: A Case Study of Interprofessional Collaborative Writing in a Medically Oriented Law Firm," shows that nurse consultants and attorneys encounter discursive and epistemological conflicts when engaged in collaborative writing (37-65). And Paul Lowry, Aaron Curtis, and Michelle Lowry argue that collaborative writing teams could benefit from using consistent nomenclature and taxonomy when participating in collaborative writing. See "Building a Taxonomy and Nomenclature of Collaborative Writing to Improve Interdisciplinary Research and Practice" (67-99).

New communication technologies

New research by Jeanine Turner, Robert Thomas, and Lamar Reinsch supports the assertion that perceived attributes of new medical communication technology significantly affect patients’ willingness to try the technology. For more details read "Willingness to Try a New Communication Technology," Journal of Business Communication 41(1) 5-26. January 2004

Business managers learn from sports

Court sense is as important for business managers as it is for tennis and basketball players. Like tennis players, managers have to make decisions and execute even when they are tired; adjust rapidly to uncertainty (the ball drops and spins in different locations and no volley is the same); need quick reflexes and good instincts to survive; must reflect actively during change-overs to redirect strategies in the next game. More about basketball and other business lessons in sports. To learn more, read Evan H. Offstein and Christopher P. Neck, “From ‘acing the test’ to ‘touching base’” The sports metaphor in the classroom." Business Communication Quarterly 66(4) 23-35. December 2003.

Corporate apologies

Being a socially responsible corporation means you sometimes have to say you’re sorry. Some executives, PR professionals, lawyers, and scholars discourage companies from apologizing for fear of lawsuits from consumers. But a review of formal (black letter) and common law indicates that apologies generally do not constitute evidence of guilt and that, in fact, they sometimes have positive consequences for the apologist.  For more information, read
Ameeta Patel,  Lamar Reinsch, “Companies Can Apologize: Corporate Apologies and Legal Liability." Business Communication Quarterly 66(1), 9-25, March 2003.

Going cosmopolitan

Do you believe that some styles of communicating are more effective than other styles in an organizational environment? According to Diane Grimes and Orlando Richard, organizational members who enact a “cosmopolitan” communication style are more likely to be creative, culturally sensitive and posses a group orientation than members whose communication tends to be more egocentric. For more information about this important matter, see Grimes, D.S., & Richard, O.C. (2003), Could communication form impact organizations’ experience with diversity? Journal of Business Communication, 40, 7-27, January 2003.

Intercultural negotiations examined

In an intriguing research study, Vivian Sheer and Ling Chen examine the extent to which Chinese and Western international business negotiators note the influence of cultural and professional preferences on the process and outcomes of their interactions. The results of the investigation showed some rather significant differences between Chinese and Western negotiators’ expectations and strategies. For instance, Westerns expressed more emphasis on adaptation than did Chinese negotiators. Consult Sheer, V.C., & Chen, L (2003), Successful Sino-Western business negotiation: Participants’ accounts of national and professional cultures. Journal of Business Communication, 40, 50-85, January 2003.

Virtual teams

Can virtual teamwork lead to more international business travel? In her study, Christine Uber Grosse asked business graduate students and global executives about their experiences on intercultural teams that conducted their work mostly through information technology. Respondents felt that teams who met face-to-face at the beginning of a project used that technology more effectively and efficiently than those who worked only virtually. The costs of travel were in some ways balanced by greater productivity in the technological collaboration. To learn more about intercultural teams and virtual teamwork see Christine Uber Grosse, “Managing Communication within Virtual Intercultural Teams,”Business Communication Quarterly, 65 (4), 22-38, December 2002.

Sounding professional

What we think it takes to sound professional may be all wrong. Just as we form a first impression of someone we meet, we form a mental image of the personality of a document’s writer based on the voice we hear in the first paragraph. We ask less about what the writer is saying and more about who the writer is. Applying Walker Gibson’s categories—tough talker, sweet talker, stuffy talker—Diana Saluri Russo developed an exercise for helping writer’s achieve a professional voice. One hint: their customers often recoil at the assumed intimacy in sweet-talking messages favored by US corporations. To test how you sound to a reader, read Russo’s discussion in “Talking Back with Walker Gibson: Helping Students Gauge Tone,” Business Communication Quarterly, 65(4), 114-122, December 2002..

Readability and corporate discourse
If you believe that cultural factors play an important role in the way we read and understand written corporate discourse, then you are correct. John Courtis and Salleh Hassan report that bilingual readability affects the impressions formed and understanding of important corporate discourse, such as annual reports. These researchers found that written narrative and reader language interacted to affect readersÍ reaction to a selected sample of corporate annual reports. To learn more about this important topic, read Courtis, J.K., and Hassan, S., "Reading Ease of Bilingual Annual Reports" Journal of Business Communication, Volume 39, October 2002.

What do communication audits accomplish?
The role of the communication audit as one means to improve organizational performance is well documented. Yet, we know little about the actual impact that audits have on organizations. In a fascinating research design, Owen Hargie, Dennis Tourish and Noel Wilson discovered that effective audits can reduce uncertainty, increase trust, and help facilitate important management objectives. Read more about this critical issue in Hargie, O., Tourish, D., & Wilson, N., "Communication Audits and the Effects of Increased Information: A Follow-up Study" Journal of Business Communication, Volume 39, October 2002.

Gender matters
Most practitioners and scholars acknowledge that employment interviewing tends to be a highly ritualized and rule-govenered form of business communication discourse. Yet, Amber Kinser argues that the script expected of and often performed by women in this critical form of business communication is inherently biased toward male-dominated norms of behavior. By adhering to the more male-oriented script women tend to undermine their own worth and credibility in the workplace. To learn more about this important issue, see Kinser, Amber E., "Gendered Performances in Employment Interviewing: Interpreting and Designing Communication Research." Journal of Business Communication, Volume 39, April 2002.

Ethnic identity and crisis communication
According to Laura Arpan's recent study, cultural and ethnicity matter in today's business communication climate. In a fascinating research design, which considered a number of variables including communicator ethnicity and crisis conditions, Laura found that the extent to which respondents accepted particular crisis responses was significantly affected by the respondent's perception of the spokesperson's ethnicity. To read more, see Arpan, Laura M., "When in Rome? The Effects of Spokesperson Ethnicity and Audience Evaluation of Crisis Communication." Journal of Business Communication, Volume 39, July 2002.

Listening to silence
In a series of focus groups, Rika Houston investigated the role of silent languages–that is, deeply embedded cultural values–in interactions between Vietnamese patients and health care professionals in Southern California. A few findings and recommendations:

• Result: Dualistic health behaviors that combine traditional Vietnamese health practices with Western biomedical treatment.
  
  Recommendation: Encourage professionals to learn about different cultural health beliefs and modify treatment strategies to incorporate harmless traditional practices
  
  
• Result: Time sense that values people and tasks rather than preset schedules
  
  Recommendation: Modify clinic schedules to include "walk in" days
  
  
• Result: Heavy involvement of family members in all phases of physician/patient exchange
  
  Recommendation: Modify clinic policies and interactions to include family members in decision making
  
  To read more about this study, see H. Rika Houston, "Health Care and the Silent Language of Vietnamese Immigrant Consumers," Business Communication Quarterly, Volume 65, March 2002