Richard Hill, a graduate of Cambridge University, UK, in Economics and Modern Languages, is interviewed. Dr. Hill is an interculturalist and international communications consultant working principally in the European theater. His experience as an advisor to international organizations and multinational corporations has provided him with insights into the nature and mechanisms of European cultures. In 1992, he wrote his first book, We Europeans, which has become a nonfiction bestseller in English-language bookstores. This was followed by Euromanagers & Martians, an examination of the business cultures of Europe, which is now used as course material at over 50 universities. Information on these works and the publishing house can be found at www.europublic.com.

This paper compares the Finnish and English Web sites of a Finnish company to find out what culturally geared strategies emerge and what constitutes the genre of company information on the Internet. Drawing on genre theory and cultural studies, the paper further explores the relationship between linear texts and nonlinear hypertext genre. The paper shows how the Web sites aimed at the English-speaking readers are different from the sites targeted to the Finnish readers. It further illustrates the company strategies employed to establish the Web site in Finnish and English. These are endorsed by a company representative who was interviewed for the paper. The Finnish Web site meant for local Finnish readers contained detailed and itemized information and portrayed a retail-oriented strategy. The Internet presence targeted toward English-speaking readers portrayed an investor-oriented strategy. The characteristics of hypertext that distinguish it from linear texts are high rate of repetition and low macrolevel cohesion.

We develop a conceptual framework for exploring significant differences in how people from diverse cultural backgrounds and with diverse individual characteristics might perceive and use Web documents. This is the first stage of a large multistage empirical study of user satisfaction and effectiveness of various Web designs based on cultural and individual factors. We identify six cultural factors and six individual factors that could impact the effectiveness of Web documents. The six cultural factors include: power distance, individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity, anxiety avoidance, long-term versus short-term orientation, and polychronic versus monochronic time orientation. The six individual factors include: demographics (age and gender), professional knowledge, information technology knowledge, flexibility, information processing abilities, and cultural knowledge. Based on the conceptual model proposed, we develop a number of testable, specific propositions on how Web document effectiveness could be impacted by the cultural and individual factors in various Web designs. In order to measure document effectiveness of each design, we identify components of Web document effectiveness as perceived usability, reliability, clarity, and comprehension that, in turn, influence readers' overall satisfaction with Web documents. Using the propositions presented, one can measure and analyze how cultural and individual factors influence users' satisfaction, which will assist researchers, educators, and communicators working with various Web designs.

I suggest that, if correctly worded, a company's mission or vision statement serves the same function as a team jersey. Both can serve to unify the group around a task. The task defines the group in contrast to the actions of competitors. At least two fields deal with the theory of T-shirts and vision statements: language theory and social psychology. I explicitly define Unifying Action Declarations and show how existing mission and vision statements can be made into UADs.

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.

The impact of differing national and professional cultural backgrounds is a salient issue that interacts with technological support of distributed teams. As we prepare for the world of the future it becomes imperative that we give students the experience of working in multicultural distributed teams. In order to gain experience in this area, a project between ten teams of students from the City University of Hong Kong and the Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands was initiated. A variety of group support technologies, primarily Group Systems, were used to service the teams as they learned to work together. This paper documents experiences from the Hong Kong-Netherlands project. Eight out of ten student teams successfully concluded a seven-week exercise resulting in an integrated report related to software engineering. Data collected on the process are reported and discussed. Those student teams who succeeded were found to be particularly attuned and accommodating to aspects of national and professional culture.

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.

Explores factors affecting the implementation of intranets, which are the technology upon which many knowledge management (KM) systems are built. Because intranets facilitate the sharing of employee knowledge, many believe that organizational culture influences intranet implementation. The results of this study found that intranet implementation is facilitated by a culture that emphasizes an atmosphere of trust and concern for other people (ethical culture), flexibility and innovation (developmental culture), and policies, procedures and information management (hierarchical culture). Management should ensure that the proper values are in place to optimize intranet implementation and to facilitate knowledge sharing.

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

User participation is defined as the extent to which users or their representatives carry out assignments and perform various activities and behaviors during the system development process. This work has identified three dimensions of user participation: responsibility, the user-IS (information system) relationship and hands-on activity. However, this 3D view of user participation does not capture an important aspect of participation: the communication between users and with various stakeholders. This paper replicates and extends past research by proposing the addition of a fourth dimension: communication activity. Data collected from 324 users drawn from 162 IS development teams were used to replicate our three dimensions and to examine evidence for the construct validity of the new dimension. Consistent with expectations, strong evidence was found suggesting that communication activity needs to be considered as a fourth dimension of user participation.

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.

Explanation is the bread-and-butter activity of any technical communicator. We explain things for a living, but how well can any of us explain the nature of explanation itself? What makes technical explanation different from persuasion or narration? Web-based instructional systems have pushed us away from traditional kinds of paper-bound explanation. In these new realms, anything better than hit-and-miss success requires a clear sense of basic principles. With that in mind, I discuss the basic logic of explanation first proposed by the philosopher C.S. Peirce in the 1870s, and more recently extended by J. Hintikka (1998).

Do readers of popular scientific texts appreciate references to the original sources? If they do, which reference system is most preferred? In order to answer these questions, we did two experiments. In the first one, four versions of a short popular science article were created: one without references and three with references-one incorporated references in running text, one in a separated text block at the end, and one between parentheses. The parentheses version was rated highest. In the second experiment, two versions of another popular science article were evaluated: one with references in parentheses and one with references in footnotes. This time, the footnote version was rated highest. We conclude that there is reason to doubt the received wisdom that common readers prefer omitting references or incorporating them in running text. Readers seem to favor the ancient and much-maligned mechanism of the footnote for providing background information.

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.

Previous researchers have given conflicting views as to what makes a "good" research article (RA) title. In this paper, characteristic features of research article titles, including length, punctuation usage, word frequency, and preposition usage are investigated using a corpus of 600 research articles from the six journals of the IEEE Computer Society. Results show, while some of the intuitive observations made in the literature about title writing are accurate for computer science journals, other observations have ignored the effects of discipline and field variation. Subsequently, these observations are either unjustified or misleading.

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.

The article presents an overview of the topic of Web access for people with disabilities. First, we describe the four basic disabilities and explain the benefits of making sites accessible, as well as the reasons that more sites are not accessible. We review the relevant laws regarding Web access, and then discuss efforts being made by vendors and professional organizations, especially Microsoft and the World Wide Web Consortium, to encourage accessibility. Finally, we describe major resources that Web developers might consult to assist them in making their sites accessible to people with disabilities.

Organizations are encountering novel external environments requiring flexible structures. A number of organizations have used virtual teams to provide the customer responsiveness, human resource flexibility, and speed in project completion these environments demand. Virtual teams create significant communication challenges for its leaders and members. This research analyzed the communication technologies that the Customer Support Virtual Team (CST) of International Consulting Systems (ICS), the pseudonym for a Fortune 500 organization, uses to support team interaction, the degree to which ICS systems and culture supported CST, and finally, the CST members' mindset toward communication and the methods its leader used to create the trust required for effective team interaction. Interviews revealed that ICS mission, strategy, tasks, reward systems, and attitudes toward technology supported virtual team structure. CST members were provided a suite of robust technologies to facilitate interaction; however, they relied heavily on voice mail and a large number of team, project, and organizational databases supported by Lotus Notes to generate a common language that facilitated task completion.

The spread of online communication technologies has brought with it new perspectives on international communication. Now, with the Internet, email, and application service providers, interacting with coworkers an entire hemisphere away can be almost as easy as interacting with coworkers in the same building. As a result of the "leveling of distance" created by online communication technologies, new kinds of international business models have been proposed; models that attempt to reduce production costs while maintaining product quality. However, some of these models fail to account for cultural differences that could cause communication problems in international online exchanges. The article examines how one particular international online production model, production facilities that never close, could encounter cultural communication problems if participants involved were not aware of certain cultural communication expectations, specifically those related to the cultural concept of "face".

In this qualitative content analysis, I examined 55 articles with keywords relating to collaboration published in the 1990-1999 issues of five major technical communication journals. I considered the frequency, types of research, and themes in the 55-article collection. My analysis reveals differences in the authors' discussions of collaboration depending on whether the collaboration occurred in the classroom or the workplace. I also found that most of the 55 articles were more concerned with collaborative practice than with theoretical discussions of collaboration. Suggestions for future research include investigating how experienced workplace collaborators and experienced teachers of collaborative skills in technical communication courses solve the nonroutine problems that occur when practice becomes difficult. From these investigations, researchers might determine what constitutes expertise in collaboration.

Previous empirical findings from the computer-mediated communication research literature are consistent with media richness theory because they suggest that the use of electronic communication media is likely to have a negative impact on the success and outcome quality of process improvement groups. These findings lead to the expectation that electronic communication media will not be as appropriate as the face-to face medium to support the type of complex and knowledge-rich communication that takes place in process improvement groups. The paper analyzes 12 process improvement groups interacting through an electronic communication medium and finds this expectation unfounded. In fact, the use of an electronic communication medium can actually have the opposite effect, that is, a "positive" effect, on process improvement group success and outcome quality. Two other theoretical models, namely the compensatory adaptation and social influence models, are used to explain these counter intuitive findings.

Object oriented coding languages are used to more accurately label and search for content embedded in electronic texts. An object can be a graphic, a row of specific data housed in a table, a written text, or any other piece of information that conveys meaning. XML, XLink and RDF are second-generation object-oriented coding languages and tools derived from SGML. I illustrate how these object-oriented languages can effectively deploy the indexing techniques and systems traditionally used by information professionals.

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) has been employed by the world's public health officials to chart the nature, frequency, and geographic origins of diseases and causes of death in human populations since the late nineteenth century. The ICD has been modified every decade since the 1890s. A study by Bowker and Star (2000) of these changes, in concert with the work of others on the practices employed in information mapping, can be used to better understand the organization of large-scale web sites. Specifically, web designers must adapt classification schemes to fit multiple social worlds. Additionally, we need to understand that these systems can become so entrenched in our thinking that they become "invisible", thus undermining our ability to adapt them as future needs or insights arise.

One newcomer to English language education, with research beginning in the 1960s, is English for Specific Purposes (ESP), a discipline that has experienced remarkable growth in the last 20 years in numbers of specialists, programs, and publications as well as in quality of research and education. ESP is English language instruction designed to meet the specific learning needs of a specific learner or group of learners within a specific time frame for which instruction in general English will not suffice, Most often, this instruction involves orientation to specific spoken and written English, usually unfamiliar to the average speaker, which is required to carry out specific academic or workplace tasks. The paper discusses learner needs analysis and course design.

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.

0361-1434/00$10.00 c 2000

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.

In virtual teams, members are physically distributed and often have not met each other in person. They work together and share information via electronic communication. To address business problems in a timely way, virtual teams must quickly become effective upon formation. However, prior studies have found that virtual teams are ineffective initially because electronic communication does not facilitate building of shared understanding among team members. This study proposes a dialogue technique that facilitates building of shared understanding in virtual teams. Results from an experiment showed that virtual teams which used this technique had better relational development and decision outcome than those which did not. Moreover these differences remained over time. Therefore, the dialogue technique appears to be useful for helping virtual teams become effective quickly so as to address business problems without unnecessary delays.