With the globalization of the world economy, it is imperative that managers, both present and future, be sensitive to differences in intercultural business communication. In particular, the context of global electronic commerce leads to an increasing use of email in negotiating deals, which to this point has been carried out almost exclusively via face-to-face (FTF) or other high-feedback media (e.g., telephone) but not of non-FTF media. This study, involving 20 participants, uses speech act theory and psycholinguistic analysis to explore the effects of culture on non-FTF communication.

Rapid advancement in communication technology has brought with it a host of relevant questions. This paper looks at some interactions of culture, communication, behaviors, and multimedia technology.

Managing Information Systems (IS) is increasingly complex, as multiple stakeholders try to communicate, act, and interact for social and business gain. Understanding and managing these complex stakeholder relations and the contingencies of successful communication among culturally diverse stakeholder groups are some of the major challenges for professional communicators in the third millennium. Such challenges have important implications for communication between user and developer groups as training and education of the users becomes more complex. In an effort to connect information system practice with communication theory, this special issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication looks at information systems as social constructs of an information society

Research in computer-mediated communication has usually emphasized the cognitive over the social aspects of communication, the medium over the message, and the product of communication over the process. In contrast, this paper emphasizes three constructs of the communication process: goal-based communication strategies, message form and medium. We seek to balance cognitive and social communication strategies and to combine new and old measures of the message form (organization, formality and size). A field study in an academic institution examined the content of text-based communication delivered by letter, memo, fax and e-mail. As expected, people preferred certain message and medium attributes for certain strategies. These findings are further investigated using open-ended interviews. We conclude with examples of practical implications on designing and implementing computer-mediated communication.

This paper explores the problems that occur in implementing a major organizational change initiative where various employee groups have different interpretations of the purpose of the initiative and tactics intended to achieve it. In this paper, the author employs two concepts: technology frames and the order of change magnitude surrounding technology change. By understanding the meanings that various stakeholder groups attach to the same communications about the change initiative, we may better understand the characteristic ways in which they interpret both the objectives of the change initiative and how it can be implemented. By using these concepts to explain various stakeholders' conflicting interpretations of the information that they have received about the change initiative, this paper shows how they perceive differently what events constitute progress toward achieving the initiative's objectives.

The study used quantitative and qualitative measures to determine differences in learning outcomes between two sections of an advanced technical writing course taught by the same instructor. The instructor used traditional textbook methods in one and technology-enhanced methods in the other. The findings upheld those of previous studies in that students in the experimental group rated both the course and their learning higher than that of their counterparts in the control group. Although fewer significant differences than expected resulted from the many measures taken, substantive positive differences in the writing submitted by students in the experimental group did occur. In order for such changes in performance to emerge as statistically significant differences, evaluation criteria for technical communication students may need to change.

This index covers all technical items - papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. - that appeared in this periodical during the year, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in this year. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the co-authors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication abbreviation, year, month, and inclusive pagination. The Subject Index contains entries describing the item under all appropriate subject headings, plus the first author's name, the publication abbreviation, month, and year, and inclusive pages. Note that the item title is found only under the primary entry in the Author Index.

At first glance, there seems to be very little in common between professional communication and a nineteenth-century detective story. However, there is a strong link between Poe's "The Purloined Letter" (E.A. Poe, 1975) and the successful practices of today's professional communicators, particularly technical writers and editors. In the story, Poe's writing methodology and his main character's investigative advice both offer useful guidelines for successful professional communication. "The Purloined Letter" is a formulaic detective story about Dupin, a witty detective who solves the case of a stolen letter, a case previously unsolved by the French police. Dupin uses intimate knowledge of human logic and reasoning to find the stolen letter. His method is contrasted with that of the French police who had spent months unsuccessfully searching for it. Dupin's means of finding the letter is a series of significant courses of action that can be applied to effective professional communication strategies. The article summarizes Dupin's advice and how it can be applied to effective technical communication today.

Patrick Dean graduated from the University of Waterloo (in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) with an honors B.A. in Rhetoric and Professional Writing and has spent the past four and a half years working in the software industry as a technical writer. He is currently a Senior Technical Writer for the Bulldog Group, Inc., in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. During our interview, Patrick had a few words to say about his recent moonlighting: “A year ago my wife and I bought a 100-year-old house in Toronto, and since then I’ve spent precisely every free second either working on the house, or reading about how to work on the house.”

We are pleased to bring you this joint issue of Technical communication and IEEE transactions on professional communication on communication in cross-functional teams. This special issue is a result of a collaborative effort between two leading organizations in the field of technical communication—the Society for Technical Communication and the IEEE Professional Communication Society. The topic of the special issue seems particularly appropriate given the nature of this joint venture.

Recent years have seen increased attention to the examination of the genres that people use in professional communication. C. Berkenkotter and T.N. Huckin's book "Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication" (1995) is an important contribution to this discussion. Their view of genre has important implications for the teaching of professional writing. Their view gives us an insight into the ways in which people both acquire and use genre knowledge as they participate in the knowledge-producing activities of their field or profession. It shows us how important the process of genre acquisition is in the learning of disciplinary genre knowledge. Linguistic knowledge is necessary for effective communication, but it is not sufficient for writers to achieve their goals. Just as important, writers need to understand the underlying views, assumptions and aims of a field. They need control of the rhetoric through which they are expressed. They also need to understand the history, knowledge and expectations of their particular area, and to locate their writing clearly within the context of this work. The notion of genre can provide students with the tools for both recognizing and adapting to the changing genre landscapes that their professional lives will travel across. While we cannot hope to predict all of our students' possible future genre needs, we can help them ask questions of texts, of contexts, and of themselves, so they can produce and understand the kinds of texts which they need to control in their professional lives.

Traditionally, many American technical communicators have tended to view translation as a "one-way" system in which they create English-language source text that is converted into another language. This singular perspective of translation can be seen in professional communication literature that tends to focus on how to better "write for translation" rather than exploring other ways in which technical communicators might be able to make use of translators or the translation process. While English is a key language used in international technical and scientific discourse, it is not the only language being used. Speakers of languages other than English are increasingly contributing to various scientific and technical fields. As a result of this factor, technical communicators should begin rethinking ways in which they view and use translation if they wish to remain effective communicators in the new global marketplace.

How well do you understand copyright law? How about the doctrine of fair use? If a recent study reported in the Business Communication Quarterly is any indication, IEEE members may not have a very solid understanding of either. J.V. Arn, R. Gatlin, and W. Kordsmeier reported the results of a questionnaire survey of the membership of the Association for Business Communication (ABC) (see Bus. Commun. Quart., vol.61, no.4, p.32-9, 1998). The survey was designed to test the understanding of ABC members of various parts of copyright law including the sections cited in the fair use guidelines for educational multimedia. In their brief description of fair use, the authors explain: "fair use is a possible defense to copyright infringement in an educational or nonprofit environment but not in a commercial application" (p. 36). This difference has long been recognized in differing fees for use. Nonprofit institutions who publish newsletters, monographs, and books routinely pay nominal fees to use copyrighted materials, but what about more limited uses such as in the classroom or in a presentation at a professional meeting? Defining multimedia as "a single, computer-controlled product that integrates text, audio, graphic, still image, and moving pictures", J.V. Arn et al., note that such a "variety of sources requires the producer to understand a wide variety of legal constraints" (p. 33). Their study showed that ABC members often underestimated their rights to use copyrighted material.

Beginning Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) students often have difficulty learning the genre of lab report writing. This difficulty can be alleviated through genre theory strategies and research, which writing center consultants, for example, can use to focus on the specific form and content of engineering writing, which then can be taught to students in a writing center environment. Genre theory provides a means (1) for humanities writing center consultants to learn specific characteristics about engineering writing, (2) for interdisciplinary collaboration between writing professionals and engineers to take place, and (3) for students to have increased opportunities to learn the discourse of their field. All of these benefits are enhanced by discipline-specific writing programs that support and facilitate them. In addition, the collaboration provides a stimulating, fluid, creative environment in which to discuss engineering writing, an environment which reflects the changing needs of engineering education as a result of technological advancements. As technology continues to influence engineering education, prompting evolutions in both technical and communication skills and knowledge, genre theory and interdisciplinary collaboration will continue to gain importance as strategies for initiating students into the communication demands of their field. The discussion focuses on the integration of genre theory with writing instruction in the ECE Department at the University of South Carolina. This integration stimulated interaction among ECE faculty, composition and rhetoric faculty and students, and ECE students.

Some years before electronic mail and Web-based hypertext became important features of professional communication, Robert Pirsig observed that information has always had higher value if it was organized in small chunks that could be accessed and sequenced at random. The paper discusses dynamic and static communication in electronic media.

Professional communication has manifestations particular to the type of organization in which it originates. Cutting across organization type, however, is the universally employed inter/intraoffice memorandum. The criteria by which a memo author selects individuals for inclusion on the ancillary, or cc, list are rather nebulous. It is this conundrum that the author elaborates on. He suggests that in the main the author's choices will be influenced by a task component which asks who needs to be told the information in the memorandum, whom the author needs to tell that information to, and who is privileged to know that information, as well as by a socio-emotional component deriving from the interpersonal relations between the author and potential readers.

One of the most difficult tasks for any professional communicator is identifying and negotiating the political shoals in an organization. In his essay "What is universal pragmatics?" Habermas (1979) describes a broad, universal concept of pragmatics (the study of language use in a specific situation), one that is useful for analyzing how power affects organizational communication. By exploiting the sociological aspect of Habermas' universal pragmatics, communicators can use his theory to understand how power affects communication in the workplace. I briefly describe Habermas' theory, modify his theory to relate more specifically to communication in an organization, and provide a brief example illustrating the theory's usefulness.

Media choice is an important topic in the field of organizational communication. With a plethora of media choices (e.g., letter, e-mail, voice mail, telephone, face-to-face meetings), the question of how and why individuals choose which medium to use in what situation takes on additional importance. This concern is also shared in professional communication. I present a summary of a paper (Kinney and Watson) that tests the applicability of a prominent theory of media choice, media richness theory (MRT), to both traditional and new electronic forms of communication. I summarize the findings and present some implications for professional communication.

INSIGHTS about professional communication may come from odd and unexpected places. McCloud's Understanding Comics (hereafter UC) is a case in point. Despite the juvenile connotations evoked by any discussion of comic books, the theory of visual communication presented in UC arguably rivals the best of contemporary semiotics (that is, the study of how we make meaning out of gestures, words, paragraphs, pictures, and so on).

This index covers all technical items - papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. - that appeared in this periodical during the year, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in this year. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the co-authors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication abbreviation, year, month, and inclusive pagination. The Subject Index contains entries describing the item under all appropriate subject headings, plus the first author's name, the publication abbreviation, month, and year, and inclusive pages. Note that the item title is found only under the primary entry in the Author Index.

E-mail privacy in the workplace has emerged as one of the most complex ethical and legal issues confronting corporate communication in the electronic age. The paper discusses the array of legal and ethical concerns of e-mail privacy in the workplace. Building on the existing body of knowledge on the topic, the results of a research study are presented which explore the similarities and differences in e-mail usage and privacy perceptions among management level and administrative level employees. The survey, which polled 337 working professionals, confirmed the popular belief that companies are not effectively communicating their e-mail monitoring policies to their employees. Finally, recommendations are made to corporate communicators on how best to forge an e-mail communications policy that can reduce the risk of disputes, incidents, and lawsuits regarding e-mail privacy issues.

Case study research can make important contributions to the field of professional communication if the research is carried out with rigor. The paper discusses inaccurate uses of the term "case study" and then presents ideas for conducting more rigorous case studies. Advantages and disadvantages are described, as well as typical techniques, such as interviews, logs, and visual and verbal protocols.

Recently graduated engineers are apt to go to work in groups led by more seasoned engineers. When a new engineer gets a reporting assignment from the group leader, she is likely to assume that the group leader is her audience. That is a comfortable assumption, since the group leader speaks her language. But, it is false to assume that the immediate audience is the real audience. The new engineer's report may have to fit, for example, in a report where the aim is not technical analysis but economic justification. Writing for an unaccustomed purpose is a little like learning how to get along in a foreign culture. New engineers take pride in their work, and the familiar technical reporting format (background, problem, method, results, conclusions) lets them explain it in detail. They may feel chagrin when somebody up the line rewrites their results section and relegates the rest to an appendix or the wastebasket. It is wrenching to discover that in the corporate culture, everything but the results is looked on as BS. That is because engineers are logical people. When young, they expect the world to be logical too. And maybe it is, but its logic is not that of the linear mathematical demonstration. Organizations, like Newtonian flywheels, have inertia; the bigger they are, the more they resist changes in speed and direction. A large organization presents the same paradox as a government request for proposals: it says it wants innovative ideas, but then spells out in excruciating detail what it expects you to do.

When faced with the need to seek employment, technical communicators with expertise in proposal writing may want to extend their job-seeking horizons beyond the for-profit world and also consider nonprofit organizations as potential employers. The skills required of proposal writers and the situations in which they work are similar whether the writer is employed by a for-profit corporation or a nonprofit organization such as a private college or social service charity. In developing proposals, writers employed in either setting use similar proposal formats, rely on good interpersonal skills while working under deadline pressures, and work with teams of experts from a variety of fields. The article concludes with information on careers with nonprofit organizations, including typical salaries, benefits, and job titles.

The World Wide Web has exploded as a means of corporate communications. The paper examines the technologies employed in using the Web, including software and hardware concerns, and the uses to which the organization can employ the technology. A case study of how the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida developed and is using the Web provides additional illustration of the Web's potentials for internal and external communication. The paper concludes with a brief description of organizational and legal issues which have been spawned by use of the Web.

Westerners doing business with Koreans need to understand "nunch'i", a complex and subtle concept related to tact and subtlety of communication. In a high context culture such as that of Korea, nunch'i governs verbal and nonverbal communication to such an extent that westerners who are not familiar with its basic concepts can fall prey to serious miscommunication. The paper defines and describes nunch'i, providing illustrations of its proper usage in professional communication situations.

While Australia is positioning itself politically to capitalize on the strengths of its multiculturism and many ethnic identities, the nation is also vigorously addressing companion language needs to support workplace interaction, cooperation, collaboration and negotiation. The paper discusses the implementation of the genre approach in Australia. The approach is a new paradigm that emphasizes content, structure and sequence.

Computer mediated communication (CMC) via the Internet is fast becoming a significant communication medium for technical and professional communicators. Research emerging from a number of disciplines is beginning to articulate the numerous social and organizational factors involved in the use of CMC. A significant question for communicators to ask is how organizations, which traditionally prefer structured and accountable communication, can exist in the open ended and unregulated world of the Internet. A rhetorical analysis of the protest over Lotus MarketPlace illustrates the complexity of traditional corporate communication in the nonhierarchical and often highly emotive forum of the Internet. Organizations can interact within this complexity more successfully by changing their rhetorical strategies.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Corporations are changing; they are reinventing, rethinking, transforming, and reengineering themselves. And with change comes chaos, uncertainty, and renewal. For everyone involved, change represents either a threat to security or an opportunity to move forward. What are the forces at work in changing corporations? In the author's own research on corporate culture and on the forces affecting corporate communication, marketing, and advertising, five general categories of forces have emerged: a new sophistication in customers or audience; new media and technologies or communication tools; a more complex ethical environment; stronger economic factors; and new strategic alliances.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Examines the communication problems that can arise in policy-making situations requiring public input and assent when the ethical and cultural assumptions of technical people representing a government entity differ from those of the citizen participants. Technical people often operate from an "ethic of expediency" that values clear, precise technical data as the basis for decision-making, but when citizen participants hold sharply different cultural values and interests, they may perceive such communication as privileging the interests of government over their own. Drawing on Habermas's (1979) concept of the "ideal speech situation", the authors present a case study in which engineers representing a city government attempted to gain the assent of a minority community to a well drilling project. The study suggests that the engineers' communication, although presented in good faith, did not meet Habermas's "claims to validity" and was thus seen by community residents as ideologically distorted. Because they did not trust the communication, the residents could not enter into consensus building, and the project remains at impasse. The engineers' propensity to frame the situation as a technical space for rational decision-making, from which cultural concerns and political motives could be excluded, made them blind to reality as the citizen participants perceived it. Government representatives in such situations have an ethical obligation to observe cultural difference and to create a communicative context in which consensus building is possible.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Suggests that current theories about how even the simplest elements of graphical design function in professional communication do not adequately convey the complexity of the element's actual role in communication. By showing how producers of computer interfaces rely on the possibility of multiple interpretive trajectories in the use of any sign and how users of such signs respond in ways that are far from being totally predictable, we argue that it is best to think of the communication act not as a simple exchange of information between two minds (producer and user) but rather as a field of possibilities that requires flexibility and an experimental attitude from both the producer and the user. Examining theoretical developments in the history of physics and cognitive science, we contend that the dominant paradigms of understanding communication-the old cognitive (or computational) model and the social constructionist model as currently employed in the fields of composition and technical communication-fall short of accounting for even fairly straightforward exchanges of information. In place of the communication triangle that both of the old models rely upon, we offer a new model that uses the concept of "consensual domains" as the basis for a general theory of rhetoric. As a starting point for our investigation, we present the history of a still evolving sign-the trash-can icon in the user interface of the Macintosh operating system-from the perspective of a single (also still evolving) human user.

From the time that rhetoric first differentiated itself from philosophy there has been a widespread belief that the craft of rhetoric is, to a considerable extent, the art of deception with impunity. As early as Plato's Gorgias dialogue and as recently as a proposed rule from the Food and Drug Administration, one finds those who argue that even the skills of technical and scientific communication are, in effect, artful forms of misrepresentation. These critics indict not only those who sell and apologize-easy targets-but also those those avowed purpose is merely to make messages clearer. Can it be true that all forms of communication skill, even those that enhance clarity and precision, are merely elegant forms of lying? Does the word "rhetoric" deserve its tainted historical connotation? Or, even worse, is writing itself an inherently self-serving (i.e. misleading) way of adapting to one's environment?.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

There is a rising interest within the world community in what is occurring in professional communication in Russia, and in the social and market opportunities that will appear there in the future. We live in a world in which the pace of change is more rapid than at any time in our history. The most important aspect of this change is the fact that we are making a transition to a democratic society at the same time as we are in the process of establishing the principles of a market economy. Russia is a country with enormous reserves of raw materials, vast territories, and rich intellectual resources. And now, as Russia is experiencing a painful transition to a market economy, the nation's economic potential becomes more and more dependent on the sophistication of its infrastructure. That is the reason why the information technologies and professional communication have become key factors of social progress. The Russian centers of research and industry are widely dispersed geographically, in such cities as Vladivostok, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Ekaterinburg, Saint Petersburg and Moscow. The last three or four years have seen a sharp increase in the demands for business information, electronic mail and communications for far-flung business and financial operations.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Enormous changes that have taken place in the last few years in Russia have revealed a need for Russian technical communicators to refocus their expertise and skills in order to enter the global marketplace successfully and competitively. Rather than dwell on the familiar differences between Americans and Russians, Cold War adversaries, a common ground exists and is growing. We share a mutual interest in the successful entry of Russian technical communicators in the global marketplace. We also share an understanding that technology is central to civilization as we know it, and that the masters of technology have a substantial influence on all activities that they touch; a belief that technology has had a major beneficial effect on the peoples of the world, but that with such power comes the potential for large, serious, and potentially devastating influences; the idea that the embrace of technology is a good cultural fit with cultures formed from revolutions, for technology in the later part of this century has come to be synonymous with rapid change, and cultures with revolutionary heritage welcome change; the notion that technological breakthroughs have profound influences on the nature of work, liberating the traditional intensive physical nature of labor to the emergence of a knowledge worker; and the belief that the global marketplace forces the need for clear and rapid communication across borders, as well as among cultures. If we can agree on these technical communications issues, then we have a firm foundation for building a gateway to communication in the global market.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

As part of Phase 4 of the NASA/DoD Aerospace Knowledge Diffusion Research Project, studies were conducted that investigated the technical communications practices of Dutch and U.S. aerospace engineers and scientists. The studies had the following objectives: (1) to solicit the opinions of aerospace engineers and scientists regarding the importance of technical communication to their professions, (2) to determine the use and production of technical communication by aerospace engineers and scientists, (3) to investigate their use of libraries and technical information centers, (4) to investigate their use of and the importance to them of computer and information technology, (5) to examine their use of electronic networks, and (6) to determine their use of foreign and domestically produced technical reports. Self-administered (mail) questionnaires were distributed to Dutch aerospace engineers and scientists at the National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR) in the Netherlands, the NASA Ames Research Center in the USA, and the NASA Langley Research Center in the USA. Responses of the Dutch and US participants to selected questions are presented in this paper.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The paper surveys studies of the process model for understanding writing, focusing in particular on problem-solving strategies in the writing process. It then presents a case study of the use of issue trees-a hierarchal network of goals not unlike the decision trees used in management science and artificial intelligence-to guide the writing process of the second author as he wrote a technical report. A good issue tree shows the relationships between various pieces of information: which information is central and which is supportive or incidental. Issue trees offer engineers a visual view of their writing plan. By building a hierarchal issue tree to illustrate the logical links of the proposed writing task, the engineer can put an overlay of "technology" on the task of writing-an overlay that may "trick" the unwilling writer into writing, and writing well.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

People who write in English as a second or foreign language often find it difficult to write clear, coherent, idiomatic English. Contrastive rhetoric studies the structure of language beyond the sentence (discourse), as well as the influence of culture on writing. Findings from contrastive research should be incorporated into writing instruction and teacher training to give nonnative speakers of English more help in writing for the world of work.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Document ownership attributions often have direct consequences for evaluation, in both classrooms and workplaces. But when writers work collaboratively, ownership attributions are not straightforward. This study, about how and why collaborative writers make such attributions, reports that interviewed workplace writers emphasized product criteria (quality and liability), while surveyed student writers emphasized process criteria (teamwork and workload). A review of previous research suggests that such a difference may result from cultural differences between the academy and the workplace. That analysis further suggests how both instructors and practitioners could help newcomers make successful transitions to professional writing, by foregrounding ownership attitudes.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>