This article explores four different topics of conversation in technical and professional communication (TPC) scholarship that overlap and connect with contemporary issues in generative artificial intelligence (AI): process and iteration, theory and power, actors and activity, and the social justice turn. The authors offer four nonexhaustive reviews of these conversations, offering insight into key issues and texts that have animated discourse in the field and can directly or indirectly address the complex relationship between TPC work and generative AI.

How should instructors adapt technical editing courses to account for generative artificial intelligence (AI)? This article addresses what generative AI means for technical editing pedagogy. While AI tools may be able to address rote editing tasks, expert editors are still needed to provide accessible, ethical, and justice-oriented edits. After reviewing impacts of generative AI on editing praxis, the author focuses on the microcredentials that she built into an editing course in order to address these impacts pedagogically. The goal was to enable students to understand AI, argue for their expertise, and edit from ethical and social justice perspectives.

The diversity and inclusion (D&I) report is an important element in the corporate public reporting genre; however, as an emerging genre, it receives little attention from scholars interested in public discourse, so there are few guidelines on what should be included in a D&I report. This study helps to fill this gap in the research by examining 10 D&I reports from information technology and banking industries, exploring the reports’ rhetorical purpose and identifying their typified rhetorical moves. The author concludes by recommending what aspects of the current genre's substance and form should be improved to help meet the needs of stakeholders.

This article historicizes the impact of the Common Rule, which mandates the existence of Institutional Review Boards, on technical and professional communication (TPC) research with a focus on the principle of justice. Justice is discussed as a complex principle that must be internally and coherently balanced along several axes in the design, implementation, and promulgation of research in technical communication. The author proposes that with shared language, which in this article begins with one principle—justice—TPC researchers can more plainly articulate their positions in the development and dissemination of scholarship, thereby adding coherence to ethical work in the 21st century.

Technical and professional communication (TPC) has recently turned to social justice to interrogate seemingly neutral documents’ impacts on marginalized populations, including disabled individuals. In workplace contexts, such efforts are often impeded by rights-based discourse that maintains ableist institutional spaces and impedes efforts toward broader institutional change. Recognizing that TPC practitioners likely will encounter rights-based discourse, this article offers an ethical decision-making framework that couples the field's previous disability studies work with disability justice. We offer guidelines and a critical vocabulary for bridging legal rights and social justice concerns to inspire ethical articulations of disability access needed for transformative change.

The social justice turn in technical and professional communication (TPC) has inspired a substantial body of progressive scholarship and discussion. But it is not clear how these scholarly efforts have shaped (or are shaping) programmatic and curricular efforts. This article reports the findings of a survey of TPC instructors and an analysis of 231 TPC programs to examine their curricular efforts toward social justice. Drawing from the mixed findings, the authors argue that vigorous curricular efforts in social justice enable TPC to fully and practically demonstrate the core mandate of our discipline.

Innovation and entrepreneurship are important yet understudied pathways in the technical and professional communication (TPC) literature for studying how underresourced people enact agency given weak or absent access to institutions. Despite TPC’s social justice turn and continued internationalization of research and practice, little is known about how economically underresourced entrepreneurs work in the majority world. Drawing on multisited, ethnographic research in communities of such grassroots entrepreneurs in India, the author inquires into the processes by which innovation and entrepreneurship are practiced in extrainstitutional settings of the majority world. Popular and scholarly reports paint a simplistic picture when they claim that grassroots entrepreneurs are resourceful, resilient bricoleurs who possess deep, contextual knowledge of complex problems for which they improvise affordable solutions. Challenging this homogenizing view, the author shares rich accounts of how such individuals navigate the complex sociocultural contexts that constrain and enable bricolage on institutional margins.

With the massive shift to remote work, what does researching home-based workplace writing look like? We argue that the collapse of traditional work–life boundaries might allow for a renaissance of feminist research methods in technical and professional communication, specifically because the home is a domestic space largely associated with women. Inspired by methodologies like apparent feminism and examinations of positionality, privilege, and power, the authors suggest three research methods that help capture the intricacies of blurred personal and professional lives: time-use diaries, embodied sensemaking, and participatory data collection and coding. These methods seek to illuminate the invisible work of women, as well as the diversity and range of experiences of home-based workplace communicators.

This article reviews images of people of Asian descent wearing masks in popular press articles discussing mask shortages and argues that visual framing had the potential of fueling racial antagonism during the initial months of COVID-19’s spread across the United States. Technical communicators need to include globalized perspectives in educational materials about masks as an advocacy strategy that can help communities and individuals to navigate the crisis situation and better protect themselves and those around them.

Using data from 88 students, 20 advisers, and 24 hirers about U.S. résumés, this article focuses on face of the company, the concept of employers' evaluating how well applicants might represent a company. The results of applying rhetorical listening’s identification–disidentification to “face” suggested two outcomes and their implications. First, primary audiences invoked secondary audiences to the point in which they conflated, suggesting that résumés should incorporate secondary audiences. Second, hirers sometimes violated their own beliefs about diversity hiring because of audiences they invoked, suggesting that because invoking audience can perpetuate inequitable hiring practices, hirers should be more nuanced about the audiences they choose.

This article examines the importance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rhetorical approaches in professional communication theory, introducing the theory of working closets as central to understanding how LGBT professionals navigate and succeed. The author presents case studies of LGBT professionals at the headquarters of a national discount retail company as examples of working closets and asks what the implications are for professional communication studies. He also looks at the need to learn from and through queer rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, and social justice frameworks, especially given the cultural turn of professional communication studies in the early 21st century.

This article calls for recognition of ways in which feminisms have, do, and can inform social justice work in technical and professional communication (TPC)—even social justice work that is not explicitly feminist. The authors distill some areas of feminist TPC scholarship that are relevant to future social justice work: (a) epistemological contributions, ways of knowing and methods for discovering them and (b) reclamations of dominant topics, groundwork laid by feminist research on technology and science. They close with nine recommendations to inspire scholars with specific ways to use feminist methodologies and theories to enhance social justice scholarship.

This article examines the tactical online rhetorical choices of a young African American professional communicator, Gina. Drawing on situated analysis to show how Gina engaged with her African American Hush Harbor (AAHH) of young professionals online, the author argues that Gina used Twitter to maintain professional network ties in her AAHH community while resisting organizational discourses of surveillance. The author further argues that analyzing particular choices in boundaryless career situations allows us to see important nontask-based professional writing activity.

This article introduces apparent feminism, which is a new approach urgently required by modern technical rhetorics. Apparent feminism provides a new kind of response that addresses current political trends that render misogyny unapparent, the ubiquity of uncritically negative responses to the term feminism, and a decline in centralized feminist work in technical communication. More specifically, it suggests that the manifestation of these trends in technical spheres requires intervention into notions of objectivity and the regimes of truth they support. Apparent feminism is a methodology that seeks to recognize and make apparent the urgent and sometimes hidden exigencies for feminist critique of contemporary politics and technical rhetorics. It encourages a response to social justice exigencies, invites participation from allies who do not explicitly identify as feminist but do work that complements feminist goals, and makes apparent the ways in which efficient work actually depends on the existence and input of diverse audiences.

Developing effective workplace safety and risk communication materials for Latino construction workers poses a challenge for technical communicators. These workers are at a disadvantage because of culture and language differences on many job sites. Furthermore, low levels of literacy in any language and lack of proper training compound their job site communication problems. This article builds on cultural studies-based recommendations to develop discourse in workplace safety and risk that these workers can fully understand. The authors in this study used direct creative input from Latino construction workers in order to create safety and risk communication products that were evaluated as effective and culturally relevant for these workers and their peers.

This article presents a critical, new historical analysis of the 2010 U.S. Census form. The authors demonstrate that the Hispanic origin and race questions, as currently formulated, imply a “double occupancy of Hispanics” that serves a dual function: to simultaneously monitor the Hispanic population growth and inflate the white count by incorporating Hispanics into the white racial category. This double occupancy of Hispanics results in skewed data analyses that support specific political agendas and ultimately produce racial inequities.

In 2010, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) commemorated its 50th anniversary by launching an anniversary Web site, which includes links to a photographic timeline, videos, and documents that the agency views as important in telling its history. This article uses concepts from narrative theory and visual rhetoric to analyze the images used in the NASA History Timeline, paying special attention to why certain images were selected as historical markers over other photographs that are more widely published and televised. Specifically, the author uses arguments from Sontag’s On Photography and Barbatsis’s “Narrative Theory” to explain how NASA’s photographic narrative provides a story with a plot that spans from triumphs and tragedies in space exploration to pioneering efforts in racial, ethnic, and gender diversity.

Even a cursory glance at the daily news will provide ample testimony to the importance for professional communication of the contributions to this special issue of Journal of Business and Technical Communication (JBTC). Indeed, as recent events have made abundantly clear, the most pressing challenges and crises we face—be these economic or environmental crises or social justice issues—are global. And yet, despite their global nature and their far-reaching consequences for local communities, much deliberation and decision making about these issues has been shifted to global economic

Compared to ethics in technical writing, ethics in design has received less attention. This lack of attention grows more apparent as document design becomes ‘‘information design.’’ Since Katz discerned an ‘‘ethic of expediency’’ in Nazi technical writing, scholars have often framed technical communication ethics in categorical terms. Yet analyses of information design must consider why arrangements of text and graphics have symbolic potency for given cultures. An ‘‘ethic of exigence’’ can be seen in an example of Nazi information design, a 1935 racial-education poster that illustrates how designers and users co-constructed a communally validated meaning. This example supports the postmodern view that ethics must account for naturalized authority as well as individual actions.

How should we teach international business communication? What role can multiculturalism play in the business communication classroom? Can we identify a set of business communication requirements that are valid across different cultures? This article enters this discussion by presenting a small empirical study of the business communication needs expressed by postgraduate students in a North Cyprus university and comparing it to similar studies conducted in the United States and Singapore. The findings reveal some interesting correspondences between the needs expressed by students in these different countries. In addition, the multicultural environment of the North Cyprus university studied suggests that multicultural interaction increases students' sensitivity to the need for a nonethnocentric approach to international communication. The findings also indicate that respondents in multicultural settings may be more inclined to engage in groupthink because of their heightened awareness of cultural differences and their wish to avoid conflict.

More than 1,600 serials from across the disciplines were identified as sources for technical communication scholars. The 99 most frequently cited serials are described. This citation analysis is distinguished from others by the size of the database (25,000+ citations), the 10-year review of articles published in five technical communication journals between 1988 and 1997, the number of serials cited and reviewed, and the focus on technical communication as a discipline. The analysis yielded two observations. First, five technical communication journals have grown in strength as forums for discussions of technical communication. Second, the serials cited illustrate the diversity of resources referred to from business, education, psychology, science, and technology-related sources. As a discipline, technical communication has developed depth and rigor through building the base of its research and theory while integrating the research and theory gathered from a number of disciplines.

To bridge the gap between composition and professional communication studies, we should add multiculturalism to the widely accepted international perspective in professional communication instruction, thus transforming the classroom into a contact zone (Pratt). The practical necessity of intercultural communication in a global marketplace necessitates internationalization. The international perspective, accounting for the heterogeneity of the technical communication audience, focuses on audience analysis and leads us to encourage students to learn about the multiple, cultural layers of audience. A multicultural perspective, however, can teach students of professional communication about the complex relationship between language and ideology and the underlying forces that shape and reflect the ways we use language. Multiculturalism's critical component provides insights into the structures and ideologies of domination/subordination and provides students with the linguistic, intellectual, and moral tools for resisting fear and prejudices. Likewise, the international perspective in professional communication can inform issues of audience analysis in composition.

This article uses the cross-cultural concepts of context and time to examine the rhetoric of German university students in an English business writing course. This participant-observer account, which includes numerous student examples and observations, provides a fresh perspective for American teachers in increasingly multinational, multicultural classrooms. It also suggests how Aristotle's concepts of ethos, logos, and pathos together with the case method and group work can help teachers respond to the challenges in such classrooms. The article concludes by suggesting that understanding the rhetoric of culture is an important step in accepting and negotiating cultural differences.

This study shows that race/ethnicity significantly explained differences in attitudes toward human resource policies fostering diversity held by faculty at a large public university in the midwestern United States. Overall, whites' attitudes were less positive regarding diversity programs and other human resource policies relevant to women and minorities than Black's, Hispanic's, and Asian's attitudes were. We also found that individual race and ethnicity significantly explained differences in attitudes toward diversity programs to a greater extent than the demography of the organizational work unit.

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.

What impact will a greater increase in the diversity level of an organization's work force have on its productivity? Practicing managers' desire to have this question answered has been the stimulus for much of the diversity-related research currently in print. However, the narrow focus on providing an answer to this particular question appears to have diverted researchers' attention away from a number of perhaps more fundamental issues. A major issue that has been neglected in previous research studies is the impact that greater increases in work-force diversity might have on communication processes within organizations—specifically, communication processes that are associated with organizational productivity. As a contribution toward helping to fill in this research gap, this article proposes a typology of impacts that greater increases in work-force diversity might have on communication effectiveness in organizations.