Business and Professional Communication Quarterly最新文献

{"title":"The Language of Optimism in Corporate Sustainability Reports: A Computerized Content Analysis","authors":"A. Laskin, Natalya Mikhailovna Nesova","doi":"10.1177/23294906211065507","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23294906211065507","url":null,"abstract":"The discussion of sustainability reporting rarely addresses the inherent paradox within this concept—tremendous costs associated with sustainability efforts and lack of direct return on these investments. This study contributes to the discussion on sustainability by studying this paradox from the linguistic standpoint in order to answer a simple question: Why are sustainability reports produced? The study’s main contribution is evaluation of the place of sustainability reporting in the corporate communication genre: whether sustainability reporting is a vehicle of fair and objective sustainability disclosure or whether sustainability reporting belongs with marketing and promotional communication.","PeriodicalId":46217,"journal":{"name":"Business and Professional Communication Quarterly","volume":"85 1","pages":"80 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48944469","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Promoting Accessibility in the Zoom Era","authors":"M. Knight","doi":"10.1177/23294906211060072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23294906211060072","url":null,"abstract":"The pandemic has disrupted work all over the world, as has been much discussed. Knowledge workers could move to online or virtual offices, while many service workers lost their jobs, were furloughed, or were considered essential and had to keep working despite fears of what close contact with others might mean. While it would be fair to say that everyone in the world has felt the impacts of the pandemic to some degree, and some more so than others (such as working parents who have also had to provide at-home schooling in addition to their paying jobs), people with disabilities have been especially affected. One reason is the increased risk or poor outcomes as a result of COVID-19 for people with disabilities, some of whom may have additional comorbidities. Another factor is lack of access to routine health care. Lockdowns can be especially difficult for those who rely on assistive technology, as access to reliable internet service is hardly universal. Some mitigating measures—such as masks and social distancing—can be especially burdensome for people with disabilities, including those who are hard of hearing and those with service dogs (Shakespeare et al., 2021). People with disabilities have long faced lower rates of employment and have been paid considerably less than nondisabled workers (Altiraifi, 2019). In the United States, the number of employed working-age people with disabilities fell by 20% between March and April 2020, while the number of employed working-age people without disabilities decreased by 14% (Kessler Foundation, 2020). Despite all the barriers presented to people with disabilities during the pandemic, there have also been significant opportunities to enhance access and participation. Virtual offices mean that people who have mobility concerns can work safely at home. Remote work can protect those who are immunocompromised. Zoom meetings can lead to greater inclusion, since the gallery view equalizes the screen and allows participants to filter sensory input such as volume and brightness. Another remarkable feature of Zoom is “live transcript,” whereby subtitles appear on the screen, helping both those who are deaf and hard of hearing, as well as those who comprehend written text with greater ease than spoken discourse; an added benefit is the preservation of a transcript for those who cannot attend. However, we need to ensure that those of us who teach and practice business and professional communication are aware of all","PeriodicalId":46217,"journal":{"name":"Business and Professional Communication Quarterly","volume":"84 1","pages":"291 - 293"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46414451","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Follow the Leader? The Impact of Leader Rapport Management on Social Loafing","authors":"C. Lam, Kim Sydow Campbell","doi":"10.1177/23294906211020427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23294906211020427","url":null,"abstract":"To prepare students for the workforce, instructors of business, technical, and professional communication must incorporate team projects in their curriculum. However, both instructors and students have negative perceptions of team projects due to a variety of factors including team dysfunctions like social loafing. No prior study has examined the relationship between leader rapport management (LRM) and social loafing. LRM refers to the use of linguistic strategies to manage relationships between leaders and members. Therefore, we built and tested a model that examines the relationship between LRM and social loafing that is mediated by leader-member exchange and communication quality.","PeriodicalId":46217,"journal":{"name":"Business and Professional Communication Quarterly","volume":"84 1","pages":"181 - 204"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/23294906211020427","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42743591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Rhetoric of Sustainability: Origins and Practices","authors":"M. Knight","doi":"10.1177/23294906211038039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23294906211038039","url":null,"abstract":"Institutions of all types—whether corporations, nonprofit organizations, or government entities—have increasingly been urged to address issues of sustainability, in order to assure stakeholders that they were being socially responsible. As a result, there has been a significant amount of research devoted to this subject in both academic journals in diverse fields and the popular press, the latter including venues such as Business Week, Forbes, and Fortune. The whole notion of sustainability has come to be seen as a part of corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this issue, we present the first in a series of feature topics devoted to the rhetoric of sustainability, following a call for papers by the Business Practices Committee of the Association for Business Communication (ABC). While some scholars have focused on particular CSR rhetorical strategies—for example, those intended to express moral, cognitive, and pragmatic legitimacy (Marais, 2012)—our first article traces the trope of sustainability over the past half century. Sustainability as a linguistic concept appears to continue signifying conservation of natural resources, even as CSR now includes adaptation to social, economic, and political environments. The author argues that these adaptive management practices are largely absent from business and professional communication pedagogy and calls for scholars and practitioners to recognize the discursive evolution of sustainability. Thus, this article sets the stage for others on the rhetoric of sustainability and the attention to historical context provides a roadmap for future studies. Our second article in this feature topic describes an observational case study of a contested environmental preservation project conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The author follows the resource manager for this project and his efforts to construct persuasive messages to community members to motivate their support for preserving a recreational use area, including his own self-reflections on the process and transcribed interviews with community members. Without community buy-in, the area would be closed, and so the resource manger employed the Aristotelian concepts of ethos, credibility, and character development to align the Corps values of sustainability with those of the community whose access was at risk (Aristotle, ca. 367-323 B.C.E./2019). The author’s conclusions suggest insights","PeriodicalId":46217,"journal":{"name":"Business and Professional Communication Quarterly","volume":"84 1","pages":"179 - 180"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47385207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Writing Apprehension in the Online Classroom: The Limits of Instructor Behaviors","authors":"Jorge Gaytan, Stephanie Kelly, Wiley S. Brown","doi":"10.1177/23294906211041088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23294906211041088","url":null,"abstract":"In response to COVID-19, educational stakeholders are transferring traditional, face-to-face instruction to the online learning environment. The purpose of this study was to determine if business instructors’ use of immediate behaviors and clarity, which have been found to help business students overcome their writing apprehension in the face-to-face learning environment, can also be used to help business students to overcome their writing apprehension in an online learning environment. Findings indicated that instructor immediate behaviors and clarity are not interventions for writing apprehension in the online learning environment. The instructional strategies business instructors rely on in the face-to-face classroom did not have the same meaning or effect on the online classroom.","PeriodicalId":46217,"journal":{"name":"Business and Professional Communication Quarterly","volume":"85 1","pages":"376 - 394"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42789665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Ecolinguistic Discourse Approach to Teaching Environmental Sustainability: Analyzing Chief Executive Officer Letters to Shareholders","authors":"Judith Ainsworth","doi":"10.1177/23294906211025498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23294906211025498","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues for using discourse analysis in business and management curricula to increase language awareness. To that end, an ecolinguistic discourse analysis approach (Stibbe, 2015a) for teaching sustainability is proposed. The article first explores sustainability discourse in two chief executive officer letters to shareholders followed by a classroom implementation enabling students to practise discourse analytical skills. Students examined vocabulary, hedging, modals, abstract and concrete representation, and social actors. Linguistic features were interpreted to reveal communicators’ underlying ideologies. This systematic analytical approach allows students to reflect on communication processes and how these processes can be used strategically when communicating in organizational contexts.","PeriodicalId":46217,"journal":{"name":"Business and Professional Communication Quarterly","volume":"84 1","pages":"386 - 408"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48634018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Corporate Sustainability” or “Corporate Social Responsibility”? A Comparative Study of Spanish and Latin American Companies’ Websites","authors":"Pilar Pérez Cañizares","doi":"10.1177/23294906211023799","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23294906211023799","url":null,"abstract":"This study aims to compare how leading companies in Spain and in Spanish-speaking Latin America communicate corporate social responsibility or sustainability on their web pages. For this purpose, the pages of 68 companies were examined to establish the accessibility of such topics and to trace how their prominence and wording had evolved over time. The results show a trend toward greater uniformity in both Spain and Latin America, with corporate social responsibility/sustainability discourse gaining in prominence and “responsibility”-related terms being gradually replaced by those related to “sustainability.” Various cases hint that changes in terminology may be unrelated to any clear distinction between both terms.","PeriodicalId":46217,"journal":{"name":"Business and Professional Communication Quarterly","volume":"84 1","pages":"361 - 385"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/23294906211023799","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47779095","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching Workplace Genre Ecologies and Pedagogical Goals Through Résumés and Cover Letters","authors":"Sara Doan","doi":"10.1177/23294906211031810","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23294906211031810","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines how and why 20 instructors (17 tenure-line and 3 nontenure-line) in introductory service courses enact their pedagogical values and address current concerns (e.g., personal branding, LinkedIn, and applicant tracking systems) when teaching résumés and cover letters. Research methods included a demographics survey, qualitative interviews, and critical discourse analysis of assignment sheets and deidentified student examples. Results provide an opportunity to renegotiate gaps between Business and Professional Communication’s research and pedagogical methods, shifting from overemphasizing formatting and checklists and toward understanding job applications as workplace genre ecologies to encourage deeper learning.","PeriodicalId":46217,"journal":{"name":"Business and Professional Communication Quarterly","volume":"84 1","pages":"294 - 317"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/23294906211031810","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43371171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“This Happens in the Real World?”: Perceptions of Student-Developed Workplace Case Studies","authors":"P. Gettings, Andrea L. Meluch","doi":"10.1177/23294906211023781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23294906211023781","url":null,"abstract":"This study examined student perceptions of an online case study development experience where students wrote their own case studies about workplace communication processes and created accompanying pedagogical materials. Students then shared their cases in small groups and engaged in dialogue. Students from organizational communication classes at four universities completed preevaluations (n = 77) and postevaluations (n = 67), providing quantitative and qualitative data. Analyses suggested that students perceived that the experience enhanced their understanding of course materials, aided them in connecting course materials to the real world, and enabled them to reflect on their own and their classmates’ organizational experiences.","PeriodicalId":46217,"journal":{"name":"Business and Professional Communication Quarterly","volume":"84 1","pages":"318 - 338"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/23294906211023781","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46376360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Instructor Evaluation of Business Student Writing: Does Language Play a Role?","authors":"Kim McDonough, Pakize Uludag, Heike Neumann","doi":"10.1177/23294906211012398","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23294906211012398","url":null,"abstract":"Because few studies of disciplinary business writing have examined whether language features play a role in instructor assessment of student writing, this study explored the relationship between student language use and instructor essay scores. Undergraduate business students wrote a case study critique as part of their final exam, and their critiques were evaluated by their instructors for theory integration and essay structure. Student language use was analyzed in terms of error rate, lexical sophistication, lexical diversity, and phrasal complexity. Whereas lexical sophistication positively predicted instructor scores, error rate was a negative predictor of their assessment of business student writing.","PeriodicalId":46217,"journal":{"name":"Business and Professional Communication Quarterly","volume":"84 1","pages":"116 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/23294906211012398","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48216503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}