With the globalization of higher education, English has become the lingua franca of universities operating in non–English-speaking countries seeking internationalization. The communication needs of students studying in such foreign-language contexts have not been fully explored. In this study, the authors interviewed a purposeful sample of professors teaching a variety of specialties in the School of Business in an environment in which English is a foreign language in order to ascertain their perceptions of students’ ability to communicate in English, and these teachers’ ability to focus on their students’ writing skills. The findings reveal that although these teachers asserted the importance of communication skill, particularly in written English, they did not feel that nurturing that skill was part of their academic responsibilities. They felt that they had neither the time nor the expertise to nurture students’ ability to communicate in English.

Technical and professional communicators spend a good deal of time managing teams and documentation projects, and their organizations are increasingly introducing new project management practices. This article introduces Agile project management strategies that were created in software development environments, exploring how these iterative strategies can complement the traditional linear project management approaches that are taught in technical and professional communication (TPC) programs. To do so, the author presents a brief history of Agile, a case study of how the author applied specific Agile strategies in a grant writing course, and a comprehensive set of tips for implementing Agile in other TPC courses.

Professional writing scholars have often turned to activity theory (AT) as a rich framework for describing and theorizing human activity. But AT-based studies typically emphasize the uniqueness of activities rather than examining how certain types of activities share configurations. Consequently, these analyses often miss the chance to examine activities’ internal contradictions that are a result of interference between different configurations of activity. This article argues that a typology of activities can deepen our understanding of these internal contradictions. Drawing from a range of literature, it describes the general characteristics of different types of activities, providing examples from other AT-based studies. It concludes by discussing how this typology can help such studies to better analyze internal contradictions in activities.

This article explores how a doctoral student in theoretical physics constructs computational simulations and reports his work within the constraints of an academic dissertation. The author specifically identifies principal elements of the work ensemble that the student deployed to complete different tasks and analyzes two dissertation chapters in order to examine the semiotic resources that the student used to warrant the outcomes of his research. The study finds that these are not instrumental procedures in which the researcher represents material objects in a mimetic sense; they are epistemic practices through which he generates digital objects that do not have an experimental counterpart and must therefore be justified through references to technical production. Based on these findings, the author argues that theorizing writing as coextensive with the practical work of science demonstrates what makes it powerful as a semiotic resource and constructive rhetorical activity.

Network analysis is one of the instruments in the communication audit toolbox to diagnose communication problems within organizations. To explore its contribution to a communication audit, the authors conducted a network analysis within three secondary schools, comparing its results with those of two other instruments: interviews focusing on critical incidents and a communication satisfaction questionnaire. The results show that network analysis may complement interview and survey data in several ways, by uncovering unique problems or by explaining or corroborating problems that were uncovered by the critical incidents or the survey. The results also show that additional data are sometimes needed to make sense of network characteristics.

This article examines the challenges resulting from the regulation of written discourse on food packages. It uses as a case study Hong Kong’s strict new food-labeling law that requires distributers and retailers to remove certain nutritional claims from packages of imported food before they sell them. This practice of redacting unlawful text on packages requires that distributers and retailers engage in complex processes of discursive reasoning, and it sometimes results in packages that are difficult for customers to interpret. The case study highlights important issues in the regulation of commercial texts concerning collaboration, intertextuality, and the conflicts that can arise when the principals, authors, and animators of such texts have different agendas.

This study gauges workers’ degree of openness to significant changes in the organization, style, and design of a written report by analyzing metaphors that emerge from their talk about their report-reading and decision-making tasks. Workers at two work sites—in Maryland and in Washington DC—responded to two typical work reports: one written in the style currently in use and another in a fundamentally different style exhibiting features that make documents easy to read and understand. The dominant metaphor that the Maryland workers used was “the whole-man” approach, which represented the workers’ flexible approach toward work tasks that resulted in their willingness to accept the fundamentally different report. In contrast, Washington DC workers used the metaphors “paint by the numbers” and “stay within the lines” when describing their work. These metaphors suggest the workers’ adherence to organizational routines and uncomfortableness with change that caused them not only to reject the new reports but also to have strong emotional reactions toward them. These results indicate that assessing organizational talk, particularly the metaphors people use, is a useful tool in gauging workers’ perceptions about and degree of openness toward communication change.

This study examines the type of edit that amateur editors called Advisors used in their comments on Epinions.com product reviews and the extent to which their editing-related comments might have motivated reviewers to revise and update their reviews. Advisors made substantive-type suggestions most frequently, but for the most part, reviews that received editing-related comments were not updated more often than were those with nonediting-related comments. Unlike professional editors, Advisors lack gatekeeping control that compels writers to revise their work, but as companies recognize the value of quality user-generated content, they may use amateur editors more often, perhaps in conjunction with professional technical editors.

Drawing on an earlier study that views CEO communication as an important strategic tool, this study analyzes the content of CEO messages on Web sites of major corporations in Greater China to reveal their extratextual and intratextual characteristics. The study suggests that the language style employed in these messages, including the linguistic characteristics, regional themes, and interlingual themes, is associated with a corporate communication strategy that is underpinned by CEOs’ beliefs and rooted in cultural values. The findings enhance our understanding of how CEOs view their stakeholders and the content that they include in their messages to stakeholders in order to compete in this digital age.

Roughly 1 out of 10 students in our classrooms has some form of disability, and now that a growing number of technical and professional communication (TPC) courses and programs are offered online, scholars need to adequately address accessibility in online course design. Calling on the field to “pay attention” to this issue, the authors report the results of a national survey of online writing instructors and use Selfe’s landmark essay as a way to theoretically frame the results. They conclude by offering strategies for TPC instructors to design more accessible online courses.

This article considers how technical communication practitioners and teachers can approach Donald Schön’s notion of problem setting as rhetorical and reflective work that offers us a richer, more precise language for articulating the technologies, narratives, and values from which problems appear as problems in the first place. The author posits that problem setting, when foregrounded in our work, adds value to the knowledge we make in practice rather than the knowledge we gain from stepping back and abstracting. After briefly describing problem setting as a significant yet invisible practice already underlying technical communication, he then describes a vignette from a digital marketing and design firm to foreground problem setting as creative, on-the-spot reflective work that we often use to invent, rather than discern, problems in unstable situations. The larger goal of this article is to further investigate Schön’s past construction in order to examine how the practice of problem setting affects our ability to act within the instability of digital, divergent, and knowledge-intensive settings—the kinds of settings we regularly face in the workplace and the classroom.

Using a narrative–semiotic approach, this article explores the decisions, plans, and actions involved in dealing with organizational risks and crises. It describes a model, or methodological framework, for crisis analysis as well as for organizational learning aimed at crisis management and prevention. The model is based on the interrelational positioning of the relevant agents (project managers, project team members, and stakeholders), the discourses produced by these agents, and their actions. This model is valuable for understanding the situations, goals, motivations, and anxieties that underlie the risk assessment and actions taken during crises. To illustrate the theoretical discussion, the article analyzes the Columbia Space Shuttle accident of 2003.

Drawing on a survey of the content management (CM) discourse, the author highlights CM trends and articulates best practices in content strategy that CM thought leaders are helping organizations adopt. These trends and practices are changing the nature and location of rhetorical work in organizations that produce intelligent content. In these contexts, rhetorical work is located primarily in the complex activity of building content strategy frameworks that govern text-making activities. The author highlights the need for a praxis-based collaborative model for technical communication education and research, and she offers some preliminary considerations for ways that the field might move in this direction.

This study investigates important questions for any emerging high-technology firm attempting to obtain funding: Does the design of the presentation and the perceived passion and preparedness of the presenter influence expert reviewers’ assessment of the merits of the firm’s proposal? The authors analyzed 22 videotaped presentations to reviewer panels at a U.S. Department of Defense technology transfer consortium and compared the panels’ assessments of the presenting firms’ proposals both before and after the formal presentations. The data showed that, on average, higher levels of perceived entrepreneurial passion and presenter preparedness and presentation designs that effectively captured the audiences’ attention resulted in higher ratings by decision makers on the firm’s technology merit, management ability, and commercial potential.

Communication skills are an increasingly important component of college students’ education because these skills are in high demand from employers. This study provides a close examination of communication instruction in both a typical landscape architecture class and a modified one (i.e., with the addition of formalized communication instruction that is grounded in design), analyzing changes in students’ perceptions of their own communication abilities (self-efficacy). The study reveals that in the typical class, students had a decrease in self-efficacy whereas in the modified class, students had a significant increase in self-efficacy. Viewing these results through the lens of self-efficacy and situated learning provides a complex understanding of the influences on students’ experiences. For both teaching and research in communication across the curriculum, this study has implications about the importance of the nature of instruction.

Hospitals have encountered significant changes since implementing the hospitalist model. The changes have been most prevalent in the communication between patients, primary care physicians, specialists, and hospitalists. This comparative case study examines hospitalists’ and patients’ perceptions of communication challenges. During interviews, hospitalists reported that most of their communication challenges related to patients and their families. But during group sessions, hospitalists reported that less than one third of their communication challenges related to patients and their families. A comparison of patients’ and hospitalists’ perceptions demonstrates that there are critical gaps in patient education that affect patients’ care and their trust in their caregivers.

This study examines interaction between corporate representatives and critical consumers in today’s social media environment. Applying a microanalytical form of discourse analysis to a data set of corporate Facebook page discussions, the study contributes to a better understanding of the communicative resources that organizations use as part of their impression management (IM) for upholding their acceptability and promoting their credibility. The study also reveals the complexity of the work of corporate Facebook representatives, who need to align their individual IM with that of the organization while adjusting to the technologically mediated context.

Senior U.S. business executives reported that in making recent promotion decisions, they had placed a great deal of weight on candidates’ interpersonal skills, less weight on oral communication skills, and even less weight on writing skills. Older business managers ranked communication skills as more important than did the younger managers. If this age-related difference is a maturation effect, younger managers may place more emphasis on communication as they mature. If the age-related difference is a cohort effect, the relative importance of communication skills for advancement may shift as Generation X executives replace boomer executives in top-level positions at U.S. corporations.

Corporate social responsibility is a topic that is increasingly incorporated into business school curricula. This article describes a study of undergraduate business majors who wrote about an environmental topic in response to an Analytical Writing Assessment question in the Graduate Management Admission Test™. Of 187 students, only 76 mentioned natural resources in their responses. The study examines this smaller corpus for stance, framing, and argument. The results indicate that the majority of those 76 students supported sustainable practices but were less adept at presenting their perspectives, invoking a personal frame over a professional one. The authors suggest ways to help students develop stronger skills in writing about corporate social responsibility.

Networks have a remarkable ability to bring people together in communities, both online and offline, but such community building is not the only possible result of network use. This article examines the case of a tagging network on Twitter, the online social networking service characterized by short messages. Although Twitter has many social features that foster interaction between users, the use of hashtags to signal the topic of a message exists outside of the site’s primary social structures, creating a unique writing environment. This article analyzes a hashtagged exchange surrounding the 2009 health care debate in the United States, examining the social features of this exchange and how participants used it to communicate about that debate. While traditional social features were certainly present within the exchange, they were not prominent or common; rather, users engaged the network properties of this exchange to make connections with other networks, drawing on a form of network power called switching. The analysis focuses on how the Twitter network’s structural features affect communication between users.

This study examines how members of a global virtual team chose communication media while managing multiple boundaries. The study is unique in that it considers the perspectives of U.S. managers who teleworked from domestic workplaces and virtual team members located in offices in India. It describes the complex dynamics of the decision-making processes that team members used in attempting to allocate their individual resources in order to meet the demands of a high-performance organizational culture. The findings suggest that managers chose media that met task requirements and maintained the boundaries between their work and personal lives rather than media that would provide the most satisfactory experience.

Integrating and using technology in the technical communication classroom is an ongoing interest and challenge for the field. Previous work tends to focus on best practices and other types of generalized advice, all of which are invaluable to teachers. But this article encourages teachers to also pay attention to sociotechnical forces and dynamics in local settings. It explains how a cartography of affect can be useful in demonstrating how technologies become imbued with meaning and significance in particular pedagog-ical contexts. The authors illustrate the value of this mapping practice through a case study of iPad integration and use in a technical communication service course and its teacher-training course. They also provide examples of heuristic questions that can guide critical cartography projects in local settings.

Technical communication increasingly occurs in distributed, cross-cultural, and cross-organizational environments in which stakeholders may have widely disparate—even conflicting—perspectives. Information and communication technology for development (ICTD) is one such environment. Balancing complex and conflicting perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups is a challenge, and unstable stakeholder participation is a widespread problem in ICTD projects. The study presented here shows that stakeholders’ participation in a project was sustained most easily when the value that the stakeholders would gain from such participation was congruent with their respective national and organizational cultures. This study has implications for technical communicators working on cross-organizational projects, particularly projects that occur in distributed, cross-cultural environments.

Globalization promises a world without boundaries that will increasingly necessitate the exchange of international and intercultural business communication. In this globalization process, a significant proportion of future economic growth (and the exchange of messages associated with this development) is projected to be centered in Asia, with a shift in such growth and power away from the United States and Europe. Following Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, mainland China and, to a lesser extent, India are moving to upscale positions on value-added chains in global industries. New major Asian players (e.g., countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) are replacing the United States and Europe, who are taking on downscale positions. In addition, the Middle East, because of global dependence on it for oil, is a critical player in international business. With this shift in global trading patterns, we must focus on Asia in order to gain an up-to-date understanding of business communication in global contexts. But previous research and theory have been directed toward business communication in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Europe.

Scholars have become increasingly interested in how organizations communicate with external stakeholders, such as consumers. Recent studies have looked specifically at consumer response to the use of English in advertising texts in a number of different European countries. The use of English in such texts is part of a commonly used marketing strategy to standardize advertising campaigns that builds on the assumption that English is not only neutral but also widely understood. This article presents the results of a survey of the attitudes of Emirati consumers toward the use of English in advertising texts in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The survey findings are discussed in terms of the unique social and cultural fabric of the modern-day UAE, as well as of the Emirati community as an economically powerful Muslim population.

To contribute to critical public relations (PR) and communication research, the authors employ an institutional perspective in examining how actors conceptualize PR and make sense of PR practice in relation to their shared and competing logics. Specifically, they highlight the primacy of logics and identities in the social construction of PR by exploring how a wide range of actors interpret and understand PR in Chinese cultural contexts. In conducting 40 semistructured interviews with PR agency consultants, in-house PR practitioners, media journalists, and industry association officers, the authors have found multiple and competing logics within the field that, in turn, confer reconciled identities on Chinese PR. The Chinese cultural contexts serve as a repertoire for stakeholders to draw institutional logics and legitimize their interpretations of PR practice in China.

Past research in intercultural business communication has laid a partial foundation for explaining Asian business communication. Asians are classified as high-context communicators and speak English in intercultural communication. Nevertheless, the relationship of language and culture on communication behaviors has remained unclear. To address this gap in the research, this study compares the communication behaviors of business professionals from two prominent Asian cultures—Japanese and Hong Kong Chinese—when these professionals participate in intercultural and intracultural decision-making meetings. The study reveals some differences in communication behaviors between the two cultural groups in both the intracultural and the intercultural meetings. Although both groups generally reflected their high-context communication orientations, they exhibited some deviations from the general discourse patterns, especially in the ways in which they expressed disagreements.

This study questions the conventional view of the indirectness of Chinese communication. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Finnish and Chinese business professionals, the authors examine the effect of cultural identity on the directness of the communication of Chinese professionals who work for internationally operating Finnish companies located in Beijing and Shanghai, China, and who use English as the shared language with their Finnish colleagues. Three components of cultural identity (i.e., vocation as an international business professional, fairly young age, and the use of English as the business lingua franca) are particularly relevant in the participants’ professional communication and stimulated its openness and directness. The study finds that the evolution of English as the business lingua franca can be detected in the signs of convergence identified in Chinese and Finnish professional communication.

Telework—the performance of paid labor activities at sites other than conventional workplaces and through the use of communication technologies—has not been considered a legitimate work form in China. Analyzing in-depth interviews thematically, the authors found that teleworkers from the post-80s generation not only legitimized their work form pragmatically and morally but also elevated it as a better choice for more achievement, flexibility, autonomy, efficiency, and professional development. Although they evaluated their choice positively, these teleworkers also acknowledged the unique challenges in cultivating guanxi (building relationships) and careers in China when working remotely. The authors suggest that telework in China offers a contested site for studying the dialectic tensions between traditional Chinese values and Western business discourses.

This experimental study investigates the impact of short-messaging service (SMS)—text messaging—on social connectedness and group attitude in student technical communication projects. It also investigates message types and communication medium preferences. Using a between-subjects design, the experiment compares two student groups: SMS only and non-SMS. The results indicated several statistically significant differences. Compared to students in the non-SMS group, students in the SMS-only group (a) communicated more, (b) felt more connected, and (c) sent more questions, answers, and nonproject-related messages. These results provide empirical evidence for using SMS in team contexts.

This study examines the nature and value of empathic communication in call center dyads. Our research site was a multinational financial services call center that we came to know through grounded study techniques, including analyses of 289 stressful calls. Examining calls as communication genre revealed that agents and customers have conflicting organizational, service, and efficiency needs that undermine communication. But three types of empathic expression can mitigate these conflicts in some interactions. Affective expressions, such as “I’m sorry,” were less effectual, but attentive and cognitive responses could engender highly positive responses although customers’ need for them varied tremendously. Thus, customer service agents must use both diagnostic and enactment skills to perform empathic communication effectively, a coupling that we call empathy work.

This article reports the results of a qualitative study on the joint publication of research articles by a group of supervisors and graduate students in an Iranian university. The results indicate that the ministry-regulated incentive system for publication had increased the research output of the participants. It argues that material and credentialing incentives for supervisors can be regarded as symbolic violence in the exercise of disciplinary power, which required that the participants form local communities of practice and interconnect with international journal reviewers to get their articles published.

Novice Web developers and other technical communicators need to learn not only accessibility standards but also factors that make designs usable to audiences with disabilities. One challenge of teaching accessibility to novices is creating exigency; another is emulating experiences of users with disabilities. This article tackles teaching novices to create Web sites for visually impaired audiences using a five-stage, recursive approach. Teaching best coding practices is only one stage: Instructors should create exigency by introducing real users and their experiences. They should also check for accessibility and emulate screen-reader output using tools such as WAVE and FANGS, respectively. Furthermore, novice developers should examine how different tools can be used in combination to provide a variety of feedback.

In 2008, a grassroots opposition movement succeeded in stopping California’s aerial spray program for eradicating the light brown apple moth. The movement included a small core of citizen experts who focused on refuting the technical assessments that the state used to justify the aerial spray program. This article analyzes the rhetoric of the opposition movement, especially its written technical discourse, to find out how the movement established expert authority and why the movement’s rhetorical success represents a cautionary tale for public deliberation in an era of democratized expertise.

Research has noted an increase in the use of assessed group projects across disciplines in institutions of higher learning. Consequently, this study investigates the prompt for an assessed group case-study project in a sophomore business module in order to provide lecturers with tools and techniques for probing a prompt document. The authors use a task-analysis framework developed for task-based language teaching to examine the project’s requirements and chain of integrated tasks. The study shows that the project prompt was dense and complicated and the component tasks were highly interactive and complex. Further, the study reveals that group case-study projects can play an important role in developing the team skills needed for future real-life projects.

This article highlights the creation of professional electronic portfolios (eportfolios) in an upper-division technical writing course (Writing for Interactive Media) so that students can profile their work. This application emphasizes the professional aspect of eportfolios in order to help students develop multiple literacies as they transition into the job market. The author proposes administering a four-part assignment series that leads to the production of a professional eportfolio: (a) proposal, (b) design document, (c) script, and (d) professional eportfolio. Following each assignment, she discusses its limitations and assessment criteria.

This study explores the interactive relationship between apology, as a crisis-response strategy used in the current Toyota recall crisis, and product involvement in influencing the restoration of the organization’s reputation and customers’ future purchase intentions. The authors measured the impact of the interaction between participants’ perception of an apology and their product-involvement levels using a 2 (perception of apology: high sincerity vs. low sincerity) × 2 (product involvement: high vs. low) experiment design. The results showed that an apology was an effective strategy for repairing the organization’s reputation for those participants who were highly involved and perceived the strategy as highly sincere, but it did not increase their purchase intentions.

Despite the legal and social ramifications of presentence investigation reports, little is known about them outside the legal community. The author uses the frameworks of genre theory and activity systems to analyze the documents, the criminal justice system’s ideology of sentencing, and the statutes and regulations that govern the reports. What emerges is an ambiguous and contradictory genre at odds with the philosophy of individualized justice underpinning its origins, a genre that has eschewed narrative for the sake of objectivity. The article further underscores the value of employing a flexible theoretical framework when studying workplace genres.