Chapter 4: �Visualize a Triangle.� What�s Professional About Professional Communication?

Research into occupational rhetoric has promoted professional communication as an aspirational discourse by conflating occupational and professional forms and activities. As such, professional communication has become a general term that encircles most forms of workplace, business, technical, or organizational communication. Yet, historically, the professions have played an important role in mediating the regulatory and capitalist forces of government and business. Here, professional discourse is not an aggregate or aspirational form of workplace communication but a separate field motivated to promote cognitive concepts associated with health, justice, science, and knowledge and to constrain the excesses of capitalist and regulatory discourses. Conflating professional discourse with business, regulatory, or other forms of workplace communication obscures the conditions, ethics, and intentions that motivate each sector and the real and important tensions between these sectors. Examining professional discourse as a function rather than an occupational status opens up situational research that could investigate specific professional activities within competing discourses. Such moments and spaces could show where and how discourses are deployed as a correction to capitalist or regulatory over-reach. Such a project could investigate how rhetorical agents modulate discourses while retaining and deploying legitimacy, credibility, and the ability to enact social and economic power.