Management practices are changing globally due to rapid workplace digitalization. The COVID-19 pandemic has created new demands for management and affected how information and communication technology and communication channels are used in everyday work. Despite the centrality of competent communication in the workplace, little is known about how managers can conduct technology-mediated communication appropriately and effectively. This article presents a problematizing review that develops and articulates a theoretical framework of managers’ technology-mediated communication competence (TMCC). The framework is based on business, management, and communication research that presents managerial TMCC as a critical process influencing individual, group, and organizational outcomes.

This study uses grounded theory to explore Korean professionals' experience with communication in Business English as a lingua franca (BELF). The author collected data for the study by conducting semistructured interviews with 12 Korean professionals, resulting in 120 concepts, 33 categories, and 14 main categories in the coding process. The findings highlight the significance of accommodation, which affects the success of BELF communication and serves as a major action for resolving problems. The study emphasizes that BELF dynamics should be understood as a multifaceted and interactive process in which various factors are intricately interconnected, giving rise to fluid and complex BELF phenomena.

This study describes the pathways by which prospective users of a website for natural hazard communication experienced agency as user-centered design (UCD) participants. Formative interviews with residents, community managers, and outreach professionals revealed two pathways for agency during the design process—by directly influencing design changes and by indirectly affecting developers’ understanding of user needs—and previewed users’ potential agency during real-world use. Findings reveal how agential opportunities were constrained by UCD structure and choices of the development team. The authors discuss how supporting user agency during UCD can improve design and support buy-in for humanistic methods in interdisciplinary research teams.

This article presents a case study of an online class in technical and professional communication pedagogy (the teaching of technical and professional writing) that uses digital video technology for discussions. Because students in the class share their experiences using the video technology, the study uses a collaborative autoethnography framework to learn if the digital technology, Flipgrid, would enhance students’ experiences with discussions in an online class compared to their experiences with discussions on traditional discussion boards. Providing such exposure to a new technology tool can help students gain the confidence that is necessary for learning new technologies in the workplace. When the technology did not provide the hoped-for results after a few weeks, the class stopped using it, returning to the traditional discussion board in the learning management system, which can be more effective when teachers participate and organize students into small groups. Reflecting on what happened, students in the class collaborated on this article to share their experiences.

Scrum is an increasingly important project management framework that has had limited study in technical communication (TC) and TC classrooms. While research has found student collaborations to be both frustrating and challenging, it has found Scrum to be a scaffolding framework that can improve student interactions and outcomes. Therefore, to determine whether Scrum affects the peer assessments of collaborative teams as well as project grades, this quasi-experimental classroom study compares the midproject and postproject peer assessments and grades of advanced TC students who used Scrum as a framework for collaboration against those students who did not use Scrum in their collaborations. The study found that students who used Scrum rated their team members significantly higher on some peer assessment measures and earned significantly higher grades than did those students who did not use Scrum. Additionally, students in the Scrum protocol reported satisfaction with their group experience broadly but did not report satisfaction with Scrum itself.

Risk communication is traditionally authored by institutions and addressed to the potentially affected publics for whom they are responsible. This study expands the scope of risk communication by analyzing safety guides produced by a hypermarginalized group for whom institutions show no responsibility: full-contact, street-level sex workers. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and keyword analysis to reveal patterns of word choices, the authors argue that the safety guides exhibit characteristics and qualities of professional communication: audience adaptation, social responsibility, and ethical awareness. This area of inquiry—the DIY, peer-to-peer, extrainstitutional risk communication produced by marginalized people—widens technical and professional communication's approach to risk communication.

While data 1 has shown that COVID-19 disproportionately affects Black people, the CDC’s early data listed race as “missing/unspecified” at high rates. Incomplete demographic data obscures the virus’s full impact on marginalized communities. Without more information about who the virus is affecting and how, we cannot protect our most vulnerable. This article demonstrates disconnects between reported datasets and data visualizations in public-facing COVID health and science communication and suggests steps that technical and professional communicators can take in creating or using data visualizations accurately and ethically to describe COVID conditions and impacts.

This study examines the effects of inductively versus deductively organized product descriptions on Chinese and Western readers. It uses a 2 × 3 experimental design with text structure (inductive versus deductive) and cultural background (Chinese living in China, Chinese living in the Netherlands, and Westerners) as independent variables and recall, reading time, and readers’ opinions as dependent variables. Participants read a product description that explained two refrigerator types and then recommended which one to purchase. The results showed that Chinese readers rated readability and persuasiveness higher when the text was structured inductively whereas Western readers rated these aspects equally high for the inductively and deductively structured text. The results suggest that culturally preferred organizing principles do not affect readers’ ability to read and understand texts but that these principles might affect their opinions about the texts.

This study asks whether grammatical and mechanical errors bother business professionals, which of these types of errors are most bothersome, and whether such errors affect perceptions of the writer and their ethos. We administered a 17-question survey to roughly 100 business professionals whose roles are not primarily writing and communication within organizations. The findings show that business professionals are bothered by these errors and that the level of bothersomeness has increased from previous studies. Additionally, the findings show that participants have clear views of writers who make errors and that the context of the error matters. The authors conclude by offering implications for technical and professional communication.

Although corporate greenwashing is a widespread phenomenon, few studies have investigated its effects on consumers. In these studies, consumers were exposed to organizations that boldly lied about their green behaviors. Most greenwashing practices in real life, however, do not involve complete lies. This article describes a randomized 3 × 2 experimental study in the cruise industry investigating the effects of various degrees of greenwashing. Six experimental conditions were created based on behavioral-claim greenwashing (an organization telling the truth vs. its telling lies or half-lies) and motive greenwashing (an organization acting on its own initiative vs. its taking credit for following legal obligations). Dependent variables were three corporate reputation constructs: environmental performance, product and service quality, and financial performance. Compared to true green behavior, lies and half-lies had similar negative effects on reputation. Taking credit for following legal obligations had no main effect. Only in the case of true green behavior did undeservedly taking credit affect reputation negatively. Overall, the findings suggest that only true green behavior will have the desired positive effects on reputation.

By analyzing a case study of organizational decision making at a large research university, this article argues that the agency to make a difference within organizations—to effect organizational change—is not exclusive to those in positions of authority. This case study demonstrates how subordinate members of a university affected management’s decision-making process through their use of rhetorical identification. Specifically, these organizational members gained this agency by reproducing certain values and identities through epideictic rhetoric in order to encourage collective action and effect organizational change from the bottom up.

This study explores how a spokesperson’s facial expressions and verbal response strategies affect participants’ evaluations of an organization’s crisis communication responses. Using a between-subjects experiment with Taiwanese participants, the study investigates the effects of congruence and incongruence between an organization’s emotional and verbal responses on participants’ perceptions of the acceptability of its crisis response. The findings suggest that an organization’s emotional response should be congruent with its verbal response strategy in order to enhance the audience’s acceptance of its crisis response and in turn protect its reputation.

This article argues that rhetoricians of health and medicine can benefit from new methodological orientations that more fully account for conducting digital research within vulnerable online communities. More specifically, this article introduces a feminist digital research methodology, an intersectional methodology that helps rhetoricians of health and medicine contend with the overlapping rhetorical, technological, and ethical frameworks affecting how we understand and collect health information, particularly within vulnerable online communities. The author considers methodological shifts in Internet research ethics, rhetorics of health and medicine, and feminist rhetorics as well as definitions and conceptions of online communities and vulnerability. The author next draws from a 5-year case study of an online childbirth community to demonstrate how a feminist digital research methodology offers an alternative methodological orientation that helps researchers navigate ethical decision-making practices that arise from conducting health research within vulnerable online communities. Finally, the author outlines the broader implications of this methodology by suggesting three ways that scholars can use it within and beyond the field.

Situated learning theory postulates that the environment in which learning occurs is foundational to understanding the outcomes of that learning. Taking classes in a nontraditional classroom, therefore, might have a noticeable effect on learning outcomes. This study examines three structures of the same general education course to understand the potential impact of mediated learning on students’ public speaking and writing apprehension and self-efficacy. Although situated learning theory suggests that the three structures (face-to-face, partially face-to-face, and fully online) should demonstrate differences, the results of this study are mixed, suggesting a complicated picture for situated learning’s ability to speak to differences based on technology use while highlighting the differences in how such technology might affect oral skills versus written skills. The application of situated learning principles to technologically mediated courses demonstrates the need to consider the interplay between environment and content.

This study explores the intersections between facework, feedback interventions, and digitally mediated modes of response to student writing. Specifically, the study explores one particular mode of feedback intervention—screencast response to written work—through students’ perceptions of its affordances and through dimensions of its role in the mediation of face and construction of identities. Students found screencast technologies to be helpful to their learning and their interpretation of positive affect from their teachers by facilitating personal connections, creating transparency about the teacher’s evaluative process and identity, revealing the teacher’s feelings, providing visual affirmation, and establishing a conversational tone. The screencast technologies seemed to create an evaluative space in which teachers and students could perform digitally mediated pedagogical identities that were relational, affective, and distinct, allowing students to perceive an individualized instructional process enabled by the response mode. These results suggest that exploring the concept of digitally mediated pedagogical identity, especially through alternative modes of response, can be a useful lens for theoretical and empirical exploration.

This study examines how a supervisor’s delivery of negative feedback affects employees’ tendency to respond by either voicing their ideas or remaining silent. The results show that approbation, or the use of praise to soften face threat, was the most effective facework message for the supervisor to use when providing negative feedback. When employees felt more threatened, they reported that they would be less likely to use voice to help others and more likely to use silence defensively as a response, but as their perceptions of threat decreased, they generally reported that they were more likely to use voice to help others. The article discusses implications of these results, limitations of the study, and future directions of this research.

Professional communication scholars have critiqued the idea that visual styles derived from cognitive theories of human perception can be universally understood by all people and thus effective in all rhetorical situations. Cognitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts that influence how individuals make decisions, provide a framework for reconciling the perceptual features of visualizations with the cultural and contextual features of particular rhetorical situations. This article analyzes information graphics using the heuristics of representativeness, availability, and affect, applying this analysis to a techne of visual design that accounts for both intuitive and contextual reasoning.

Many studies have examined organizations’ use of specific types of online media, but few studies have examined how organizations generate dialogues and develop relationships by using multiple online communication platforms. This study takes an integrated approach by examining how top global organizations incorporate brand Web sites, Facebook, and Twitter to cultivate relationships with stakeholders. Its findings suggest that those particular online media are used similarly, that is, more for information dissemination than user engagement and more for one-way than two-way communication. The findings also suggest that the types of products promoted can affect the way that organizations use different online media to develop relationships.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The authors report on a multiyear study designed to reveal how introducing a content management system (CMS) in an administrative office at a large organization affects the office’s writing and work practices. Their study found that users implemented the CMS in new and creative ways that the designers did not anticipate and that the choices users made in using the CMS were often driven not by technology but by the social implications the CMS held for their office. By contrasting how writers negotiated specific genres of writing before and after the CMS was introduced, the authors argue for increased attention to providing flexible technologies that enable writers to innovate new tools in response to the social needs of their writing environments. This approach must be driven by research on the implications of technology in workplace communities.

Rensselaer’s Technical Writers’ Institute, the first program of its kind, had a profound impact on technical communication. It enabled technical communicators without formal education in the field to gain important knowledge, provided a forum for communicators from different industries to meet in order to solve mutual problems, played a key role in defining the field and its needs, encouraged recruitment (including the hiring of more women), promoted professional societies and formal degree programs, and seriously affected industry training programs by enabling them to use institute teaching materials. Knowledge gained through the Technical Writers’ Institute enabled Rensselaer to develop many other innovations.

This article reports data from questionnaires assessing the day-to-day experiences that members of the technical communication field have in carrying out their research. The data revealed that most members experience at least some frustration and numerous constraints that prevent them from doing the kinds and amounts of research that they want to do and that may affect the quality of their research. In short, technical communication scholars face an array of challenges. This article presents examples of these challenges and ideas that respondents had both for lessening the challenges scholars face and for better preparing graduate students. It suggests several practical initiatives for addressing these challenges along with realistic strategies for implementing those initiatives.

Although considerable previous research has focused on Chinese students' expectations and experiences while studying in English-speaking cultures, little research to date has focused on how the instructor's cultural background affects the learning process within a managerial communication classroom Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, this exploratory case study involves two U.S. instructors teaching a managerial communication course to 106 Chinese students in Hong Kong. The findings from this study provide implications for managerial communication pedagogy and further research.

As college instructors endeavor to integrate technology into their classrooms, the crucial question is, “How does this integration affect learning?” This article reports an assessment of a series of online modules the author designed and piloted for a business communication course that she presented in a hybrid format (a combination of computer classroom sessions and independent online work). The modules allowed the author to use classroom time for observation of and individualized attention to the composing process. Although anecdotal evidence suggested that this system was highly effective, other assessment tools provided varying results. An anonymous survey of the students who took this course confirmed that the modules were effective in teaching important concepts; however, a blind review of student work produced mixed results.

This study explores social processes associated with e-mail overload, drawing on Sproull and Kiesler's first and second-order effects of communication technologies and Boden's theory of lamination. In a three-part study, the authors examined e-mail interactions from a government organization by logging e-mails, submitting an e-mail string to close textual analysis, and analyzing focus group data about e-mail overload. The results reveal three characteristics that contribute to e-mail overload— unstable requests, pressures to respond, and the delegation of tasks and shifting interactants—suggesting that e-mail talk, as social interaction, may both create and affect overload.

The cultural studies model of the cultural circuit can help students track the larger circulation and transformation of technical communication in order to ethically critique and respond to it. Applying the model to specific cases of technology and its accompanying documentation (in this case the OraQuick rapid HIV test) can illustrate for students the ethical necessity of extending the usual focus on production to distribution, marketing, interpretation, and use. Students can then channel this awareness to their own writing projects, taking action to ensure that these projects are responsive and empowering to those whom they affect.

This research provides a framework identifying dynamic tensions that occur as subordinates try to maintain a sufficient degree of politeness while reporting to superiors on workplace tasks. Building on politeness theory, the framework suggests how conventional politeness dimensions, such as deference, solidarity, and non-imposition are challenged by organizational obligations and workplace tasks requiring confidence, direction, and individuality. The framework evolved from a series of analyses of two samples: one consisting of e-mail between international project teams and their domestically located supervisors, the other of Asian and U.S. business undergraduates' responses to two workplace scenarios involving critiquing a superior's work. Analyses revealed competing communicative dimensions relevant to subordinate-to-superior interactions, including dimensions that are underdeveloped in politeness literature. Examples from these data suggest that managing a sufficient equilibrium between these dimensions requires a substantial knowledge of rhetorical and linguistic alternatives.

This article uses the notion of genre repertoire to examine electronic-mail communication exchanged in a period of three years by an interorganizational community of software developers (727 e-mail messages in total). It analyzes the development of this virtual work community by considering the use of communicative genres with respect to (1) the resources offered by the electronic-mail system, (2) the temporal development of the project in which the participants were engaged, and (3) the developing relationship between community members. The study shows that the community organized its communicative interactions mainly as informal exchanges between peers rather than as formal exchanges that followed the structure of an interorganizational project. The messages were strongly affected by the use of a system of electronic mail and changed as the community members' relationships developed.

This article shows how user-centered design can be applied to documentation and reports the results of a two-year contextual design study. The article (1) demonstrates how contextual design can be applied to information and (2) reports some of the study's results, outlining key insights gleaned about users. The study found that users vary widely in their information needs and preferences. Users employ a variety of learning strategies in learning new software and in overcoming problems encountered within applications. Documentation can better meet variances in learning styles and user preferences when tightly integrated into applications, accessible in the user's own language. Additionally, documentation is most beneficial when several assistance options exist for users to choose among, varying according to context, task, and user need. Finally, the article discusses the constraints that affect the implementation of design ideas and explores implications for practice and additional research.

Technical communicators have recently become interested in user-centered design (UCD) for designing and evaluating technical genres. Yet, a critical examination of the field methods of UCD suggests that they suffer from unintegrated scope: an undesirably limiting focus on a particular level of scope (either the macroscopic level of human activity or the mesoscopic level of goal-directed action) in their theoretical underpinnings and data collection and analysis. This focus is often paired with the assumption that this particular level of scope causally affects what happens at the other levels. Both the focus and the assumption are at odds with sociocultural theories of human activity. This article lays out the problem of unintegrated scope and examines it through critical analyses of two field methods used in UCD research. It concludes by proposing an integrated-scope research methodology for UCD research, with roots in both sociocultural theory and the central issues of technical communication.

This article describes the importance of annotation to reading and writing practices and reviews new technologies that complicate the ways annotation can be used to support and enhance traditional reading, writing, and collaboration processes. Important directions for future research are discussed, with emphasis on studying how professionals read and annotate, how readers might use annotations that have been produced by others, and how the interface of an annotation program affects collaboration and communication on revision. In each area, the authors emphasize issues and methods that will be productive for enhancing theories of workplace and classroom communication as well as implications for the optimal design of annotation technologies.

Many companies have entered a new era of human resources management—one based on transaction cost economics and one in which downsizing has become a permanent part of the corporate landscape. But their insistence on communicating decisions to downsize solely in economic terms is creating serious problems among employees who survive the layoffs. Disloyalty, disaffection, increased absenteeism, and even acts of sabotage are growing among workers who view downsizing as a social, not economic, issue. This article discusses the new era of human resources management and reviews survivor literature in an effort to provide guidance to companies about how to communicate downsizing, specifically, and how to communicate with the postdownsized workforce, generally.

This article summarizes the scholarly discussion about negative messages and reports the results of two pretests and two experiments using negative letters. The results show that buffers did not significantly affect college students' responses to simulated letters refusing credit and denying admission to graduate school and that strong resale was counterproductive. Students responded least favorably to rejection when they were surprised by it and when their other options were limited. On the basis of these experiments and the published literature, the author recommends that negative letters normally begin with the reason for the refusal. If the reason makes the company look good, then it should be spelled out in as much detail as possible. If an alternative or a compromise exists, then the writer should suggest it. Although a positive ending is not necessary, if one is used, then a bland positive is better than a strong one, especially in letters to clients or customers.

This article suggests a perspective on rhetoric of technology as discursive exploitation of the margins of indeterminacy affecting the development of technologies and technical artifacts. It examines such margins by examining the development of an aircraft auxiliary engine in a California aerospace company, focusing especially on how engines are tested. It examines technical documents associated with testing as arenas for rhetorical transactions involving various factors and interests vested in a technology and as residua of compliance and negotiation. It suggests that margins of indeterminacy in technology development provide critical rhetorical spaces for agency and decision making, spaces that engineers and technical communicators must be trained to appreciate and exploit appropriately.

Engineers' use of rhetoric differs from that of scientists because of the material objects engineers work with and the material conditions under which they act. For engineers, “publication” takes the form of releasing a marketable object, not a refereed article. Thus, they have less need than scientists do to create written theoretical work and can instead build knowledge by group discussion of instrument traces that they tie directly to the object. The fact that they usually work in hierarchical, for-profit organizations also affects their rhetorical practices, as they must shape the actions of those both below and above them in the corporate hierarchy.

To understand how context affects language use, students can analyze the relationship between the power dynamics in an organization and the linguistic politeness strategies in memos written to subordinates. Although this assignment offers a viable approach to understanding how power influences language, students should recognize that multiple variables can affect actual language use. They can also scrutinize the responsibility they implicitly assume when they perpetuate—or perhaps attempt to change—an organization's communication style.

This review of the relationship of law and art in the litigative context explores ways in which the methodologies of the novelist and other artists can be invoked by the lawyer in structuring and developing a case and presenting it to a court. To the litigators who transcend the form books and stereotypes and see their cases with a fresh eye, neither the law nor the facts are fixed in stone but rather created to meet the deepest realities of the case within the context of our most fundamental values and beliefs. Litigators, by the way they define and project the issues, can affect, even determine, what law and facts are legally relevant and dispositive. They must devise and write the story that threads the client's way out of the labyrinth. Mastery of the formal requirements of litigative writing is only a necessary first step. Freewriting; Hemingwayesque choice of words and syntax; harnessing the symbolic, often hidden, power of language; achieving the dramatic potential of case presentation—all these and more from the creative artist's repertoire empower litigators to win their cases. Resort is made not only to the applicable statutory, regulatory, and case law but also to the processes of the like of Cezanne, Conrad, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Joyce, Aristotle, and Faulkner.

Many teachers of technical and business communication consult in business, industrial, and governmental organizations. To make the consulting experience successful and to understand the communication problems in an organization, the consultant should be aware of how the organization's culture may affect communication practices of members and should learn to read the various signs of organizational culture. Effective reading of cultural signs may be critical to the consultant's success or failure.

Few, if any, studies on collaboration examine interactions between software manual writers and graphic designers. This study analyzes these collaborations, inquiring into the ways in which writers' and designers' processes of collaboration directly affect the form and substance of a finished manual. We argue that when these developers have dialogue, draft iteratively, and jointly make decisions, they produce manuals that could not possibly be developed through linear, assembly-line collaborative processes. We characterize three possible models of collaboration—assembly line (linear drafting), swap meet (iterative drafting and joint problem solving), and symphony (codevelopment in every aspect)—and use as a case study our own collaboration in developing a manual, detailing the concerns that writers and designers bring to a manual project. Analyzing our collaboration as an example of a swap-meet model, we examine four design problems that we faced and explain the ways in which our collaborative processes uniquely shaped our solutions to these problems.

Workers at a Canadian industrial site read a vignette asking them to send a message to a co-worker and then rated their preferences for available message channels. We explored the respondents' preferences for either a word-processed or a handwritten message. The results indicate that (a) main effects and interactions involving hierarchical level, message length, message complexity, anticipated reaction, communication task, need for documentation, and communication across work shifts affect preferences for wordprocessed versus handwritten messages; (b) the cost control perspective can explain preferences for word-processed versus handwritten messages; and (c) scholars should distinguish between various types of written messages rather than grouping all written messages together in a single category.

This study investigates the effects of case and traditional assignments on the writing products and processes of community college students. Specifically, each of 57 first-year business students in three sections of a business composition course wrote in response to either (a) two traditional assignments, (b) two short case scenario assignments, or (c) two lengthy, elaborated case assignments. Participants' letters were scored using a performance criteria rating scale for determining both overall quality and specific trait quality. Results indicate that the case assignments generally produced more effective writing products than did traditional paradigm assignments. Results also indicate that the elaborated case assignments generally produced better writing products than did the short case scenarios. However, results also suggest that the writing of participants who already possess business-related experience was not as affected by assignment type as the writing of inexperienced participants. Finally, qualitative measures suggest that the writing processes and attitudes of participants. completing the case assignments were highly sensitive to audience and context, whereas the processes and attitudes of participants completing the traditional assignments were highly sensitive to organization, format, and correctness.

Research in business disciplines about work-force diversity has been inadequate in terms of precise conceptualization and theoretical grounding. Two psychological paradigms from training literature (cognitive and affective) are examined here, but, because of their inability to explain the sources and significance of organization-level change, sociological paradigms about dominance and intergroup dynamics are presented as viable theoretical supplements. Substantive sharing of power with diverse or nontraditional employees hitherto marginalized in U.S. organizations is proposed as one potentially effective response to managing work-force diversity. Systemwide structural changes in U.S. organizations of today are recommended for optimizing diversity.

Preparing students for the behavioral description, or situational, job interview that is becoming common in business requires two components. In addition to (a) improving students' cognitive skills (learning about the company, preparing questions and answers) and affective skills (dress, composure, delivery), it requires (b) developing students' ability to answer behaviorally based questions. Most textbooks focus on the first component. This article suggests ways to take typical interview questions, translate them to behavioral questions, and prepare illustrative responses.

Most discussions of disciplinarity start by claiming an emerging group as constituting a discipline or a profession and authorizing that group by locating appropriate research foci, programs for graduate education and undergraduate certification, professional societies, and central professional meetings. Our discussion examines the field of professional writing, focusing not so much on defining it as a discipline as on working out its curricular geography, an activity that will affect its status in both academy and industry. To that end, we explore the status of professional writing within the department of English by (a) briefly examining the problem of defining professional writing; (b) reviewing several theoretical positions within English that have provided a status for professional writing—literature, rhetoric/composition, business and technical writing—to expose the competition for control of the term and to surface the implications of accepting these various groups on their own terms; and (c) considering the curricular status to which professional writing might aspire by sketching a geography that positions professional writing in a new space within English.

This article describes a dual grading process, initiated to expose students to collaborative evaluation and to verify instructor evaluation. Each group was assigned a case, with directions to print five copies of its response. I evaluated one copy, then distributed four blank copies to another group for evaluation. The group reviewed the paper and assigned a grade. I collected the graded responses, attached my graded copy, and returned the two graded copies to the composing group. Receiving feedback from both teacher and students reinforced the students' confidence in the evaluation process while teaching them important lessons on audience expectations.