Avoiding Wrong Turns in the Shrinking Global Village

With the global village growing smaller every year, more and more communication professionals are taking on assignments that span a wide range of countries and cultures. Cross-border responsibilities require that you constantly expand your horizons and learn about new places and people. At the same time, it can be more than a little daunting to get up to speed on each country’s business and social conventions—and when the two do and don’t mix.

Bird, Shelley. Communication World Bulletin (2005). Articles>Business Communication>International>Cultural Theory

Changing Nature and Uses of Media Literacy

The more that information and communication technologies become central to modern society, the more it is imperative to identify, and to manage the development of, the skills and abilities required to use them. Within both academic and policy discourses, the concept of media literacy is being extended from its traditional focus on print and audiovisual media to encompass the internet and other new media. Hence, even though the concept of literacy has itself long proved contentious, there is widespread speculation regarding supposedly new forms of literacy - variously termed computer literacy, internet literacy, cyber-literacy, and so forth.

Livingstone, Sonia. London School of Economics (2006). Articles>Communication>Theory

Communication, Culture and Surveys  

Interest in corporate culture has been on the increase ever since studies over a decade ago found a link between certain cultural aspects and successful business outcomes. Buthow can you measure the bottom-link impacts of culture in your own organization?

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2000). Articles>Business Communication>Cultural Theory>Surveys

Cultural Barriers to Internal Communication

Twenty years ago, I sat in the London offices of an American oil services company taking the conference brief for a CEO’s script. He was an oilman of the old school—no nonsense and pretty brutal in his management style. When his personal assistant came in with the coffee, she all but threw it over the guy and left the room with her nose in the air. “The natives are revolting,” he explained. “I made some redundancies this morning: everyone who arrived more than five minutes late.” It was my first experience of culture shock. For the Texan it was the most natural behavior; for the Brits, he represented a form of barbarism not seen since the Dark Ages. So how does a multinational firm communicate to audiences who have fundamentally different cultural values?

Wright, Marc. Communication World Bulletin (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Cultural Theory

Examining the Scope of Channel Expansion: A Test of Channel Expansion Theory With New and Traditional Communication Media    

This article draws on channel expansion theory to explore the selection and use of communication media by organizational members. Channel expansion theory scholars posit that media richness perceptions are dependent on experiences with communication partners, the message topic, and the communication media utilized. This study tests channel expansion theory in the context of new and traditional communication media. Respondents (N = 269) completed questionnaires regarding their use and perceptions of face-to-face, telephone, e-mail, or instant-messaging interactions. Results indicate that experience with channel, topic, partner, and social influence are all significant predictors of richness perceptions, when controlling for age and media characteristics. Findings also suggest that the richness of a medium is not fixed and may be shaped by interpersonal factors, including one's relevant experiences.

D'Urso, Scott C. and Stephen A. Rains. Management Communication Quarterly (2008). Articles>Communication>Theory>Surveys

Expressive Practices: the Local Enactment of Culture in the Communication Classroom    

As students participate in corporate communication classes, they may, on occasion, use the term culture to make sense of their experiences. The authors use Mino's idea of a learning paradigm to shift the emphasis away from teaching traditional theories of culture and use student-centered experiences to teach culture as an expressive practice. Using instances drawn from their own classrooms, the authors show how students can recognize the value of understanding their role in creating culture each time they choose how to act, how to evaluate others' behavior, and whether to label what is going on as cultural.

Wolf, Karen, Trudy Milburn and Richard Wilkins. Business Communication Quarterly (2008). Articles>Education>Business Communication>Cultural Theory

Games: A Transactional Context  

Communication was not a theorized space until after World War II, it was just something we did. Both Claude Shannon’s seminal model of communication and Norbert Wiener’s model of feedback dealt with the technical transmission space for communication. From the beginning of communication theory, attention focused on technical aspects and broadcast models in which the recipient of the communication was presumed to be passive. All that was necessary was to use understandable codes (language, symbols, images) with which the recipient was familiar. Since those early days, a wealth of communication models have been developed that deal with various perspectives on communication including discourse models that seek to establish rapport; gratification models that attempt to sustain interest; innovation models that promote behavior change; and context models that seek to recognize and plan for the specific conditions in which a communication occurs. With these models the varieties of ways in which communication was received and interpreted came to the foreground, but the variables that influence any particular person’s interpretation remain daunting and undiscoverable in their totality.

Poggenpohl, Sharon. University of Alberta (2003). Articles>Communication>Theory>Games

How to Make our Ideas Clear

The action of thought is excited by the irritation of doubt, and ceases when belief is attained; so that the production of belief is the sole function of thought.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Marxists.org (1878). Articles>Communication>Theory

How We Communicate: A Grand Unified Theory of Communication with Heuristics for Designers  

Advances in electronic media and computer systems have created a dilemma for technical communicators. Who knows enough about writing, illustration, animation, music, video, and interactivity to design hypermedia? Are we doomed to design by committees of specialists? Are word-only writers obsolescent? Fortunately the mental and social processes that underlie communication are few, simple, and universal. These principles apply to all media: audible and visual, verbal and iconic, passive and interactive, artistic and functional. Authors who understand these principles can apply what they have learned about one medium to the design of others. This workshop reveals and demonstrates these universal principles of communication and shows how to apply them now.

Horton, William K. III. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Communication>Theory

A Mathematical Theory of Communication  

The article entitled 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication', published in 1948 by mathematician Claude E. Shannon, was one of the founding works of the field of information theory. Shannon's paper laid out the basic elements of any digital communication.

Shannon, Claude E. Bell System Technical Journal (1948). Articles>Communication>Theory>Minimalism

Resistance, Gender, and Bourdieu's Notion of Field

Recent conceptualizations of resistance have tended to privilege intentional and conscious acts of resistance and forms of resistance manifested within relations of power that researchers typically define as asymmetrical, such as the labor-management relation. The author argues that these tendencies lead us to overlook forms of resistance manifest in other relations of power that exist in organizations, as well as set ourselves up as arbitrators of what is to be considered 'effective' resistance. Using Bourdieu's concepts of capital and field, the author examines how we can read resistance both to the idea of sex discrimination and to patriarchal power relations from the accounts of female career police officers and offers a more perspectival, relativistic account of resistance.

Penny, Dick. Management Communication Quarterly (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Management>Theory

A Response To Patrick Moore's 'Questioning The Motives Of Technical Communication and Rhetoric: Steven Katz's 'Ethic Of Expediency''    

In my 1992 College English article 'The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust' [1], I looked at the implications of a Nazi memo whose sole purpose was to improve the efficiency of the gassing vans, in order to begin to try to understand and discuss the negative uses and ethical abuses to which technical communication, and deliberative rhetoric generally, could be taken by the powerful and unscrupulous. In 'Questioning the Motives of Technical Communication and Rhetoric: Steven Katz's 'Ethic of Expediency'' [2], Patrick Moore accuses me of ignoring alternate translations, citing out of context, and focusing on the negative meaning of words to make my case. The point at issue in these charges, I believe, is whether (and to what degree) Aristotle meant to base deliberative discourse on 'expediency.' I will take each of these charges up one at a time to explore them more thoroughly, discuss their interrelations, and then conclude with a few observations of my own.

Katz, Steven B. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2006). Articles>Business Communication>Ethics>Theory

Some Assembly Required: The Latourian Collective and the Banal Work of Technical and Professional Communication    

In this article, the author uses the critical vocabulary developed by Bruno Latour in his recent work Politics of Nature to offer an alternative way for technical and professional communicators to approach and articulate their work. Using the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters to explore Latour's vocabulary, the author argues that positioning technical and professional communication as more than transmitting and translating, but instead as the collecting of articulated propositions about the common world in service of the common good, thoroughly grounds its practice in rhetorical theory. Such a positioning also ascribes value to technical and professional communication without reinscribing the false dichotomy between science and politics.

Rivers, Nathaniel A. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2008). Articles>TC>Business Communication>Theory

Toward a Post-Techne-Or, Inventing Pedagogies for Professional Writing    

This article examines the concept of techne in relation to situatedness. Techne is conceived as techniques for situating bodies in contexts. Although many theorists and practitioners in technical communication are working from ecological and posthuman perspectives with regard to interface designs, this article argues for extending those perspectives to workplace and classroom situations. Starting from a Heideggerian reading of techne, the article moves toward the concept of post-techne, which remakes pedagogical techniques for writing and inventing in institutional contexts.

Hawk, Byron. Technical Communication Quarterly (2004). Articles>Education>Business Communication>Theory

What Is a Sign?

This is a most necessary question, since all reasoning is an interpretation of signs of some kind. But it is also a very difficult question, calling for deep reflection.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Marxists.org (1894). Articles>Communication>Theory

A Critique of Hall’s Contexting Model: A Meta-Analysis of Literature on Intercultural Business and Technical Communication    

Edward Hall’s model of low-context and high-context cultures is one of the dominant theoretical frameworks for interpreting intercultural communication. This article reports a meta-analysis of 224 articles in business and technical communication journals between 1990 and 2006 and addresses two primary issues: (a) the degree to which contexting is embedded in intercultural communication theory and (b) the degree to which the contexting model has been empirically validated. Contexting is the most cited theoretical framework in articles about intercultural communication in business and technical communication journals and in intercultural communication textbooks. An extensive set of contexting propositions has emerged in the literature; however, few of these propositions have been examined empirically. Furthermore, those propositions tested most frequently have failed to support many contexting propositions, particularly those related to directness. This article provides several recommendations for those researchers who seek to address this popular and appealing yet unsubstantiated and underdeveloped communication theory.

Cardon, Peter W. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2008). Articles>Communication>Theory>Cultural Theory

The Sociological Turn in Information Science    

This paper explores the history of `the social' in information science. It traces the influence of social scientific thinking on the development of the field's intellectual base. The continuing appropriation of both theoretical and methodological insights from domains such as social studies of science, science and technology studies, and socio-technical systems is discussed.

Cronin, Blaise. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Scientific Communication>Research>Cultural Theory

An Exploratory Study of the Relationships Between Theory X/Y Assumptions and Superior Communicator Style    

The present study explored the possibility that McGregor's (1960) Theory X/Y assumptions serve as cognitive determinants of superior communicator style, a multidimensional set of style variables that can have considerable effects on subordinate well-being and organizational viability. A total of 279 superiors completed an online survey that measured Theory X/Y orientation and superior communicator style. Correlational tests revealed that Theory X assumptions were positively related to the Dominant and Impression Leaving styles. In contrast, Theory Y assumptions were negatively related to the Anxious style, and positively related to the Supportive, Impression Leaving, and Nonverbally Expressive styles. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential psychological effects of each style profile as well as the implications of the findings for screening job applicants.

Sager, Kevin L. Management Communication Quarterly (2008). Articles>Communication>Theory

Does Technology Enable or Determine Communication?

Communication technologies, especially those that are participatory, clearly do both, determine and enable communication. They determine communication by function of display possibilities, editing capabilities, information-chunk size allowances, access affordances, cost implications, communicative capabilities (one-to-one, one-to-many, etc.). Clearly, however, these communication technologies enable communication that otherwise would not be possible.

Brown, Konstanze Alex. Konjektures (2009). Articles>Technology>Communication>Theory