Introduction: As technical and professional communication (TPC) becomes increasingly networked, students must learn to work cross-culturally. However, these skills can be difficult to develop. We report on a service-learning project aimed at helping students write and design for an audience in India. About the case: The authors saw a need to provide course materials to practitioners in India that became an opportunity to involve students in global content creation. This teaching case reports on two courses designed collaboratively to teach design and communication skills through service-learning, while providing course content to Indian practitioners of TPC. Situating the case: Technical communication has a long history of teaching writing skills for the globalized workplace. Service-learning opportunities can engage students cross-culturally while encouraging them to think critically about audience awareness. This case extends the literature by reporting on how students learned principles of cross-cultural and accessible communication. Methods/approach: This study uses qualitative student reflection documents from two courses to answer questions about how service-learning opportunities shape student skills. Their responses illustrate the successes and failures in the course designs and provide strategies for instructors working on similar projects. Results/discussion: Students reported that their experiences helped them to think critically about audience awareness, synthesize skills in collaboration, engage flexibly with new technologies, and work through time constraints. Conclusion: We provide practical suggestions for implementing similar course designs at other institutions and information about implementing relevant technologies. It outlines adaptations for new teaching environments.

Background: Technical communication, business communication, and professional communication are potentially overlapping disciplines with open disciplinary questions. A comparative topical analysis of research topics can identify similarities and differences between them, addressing intellectual and physical concerns for each. Literature review: Recent topical analyses have been done for technical communication. Historical topical analyses have been done for business communication. Few professional communication topical analyses exist. Some studies were done 15 or more years ago, and one related comparative study exists. Research questions: 1. What research topics are unique to each of the disciplines of technical communication, business communication, and professional communication in a corpus of research abstracts spanning 1963-2017? 2. What topics are shared among the disciplines of technical communication, business communication, and professional communication in a corpus of research abstracts spanning 1963-2017? Research methodology: I used collocation analysis on the target phrases technical communication, business communication, and professional communication from a 4822-abstract corpus. I compared words collocated with target phrases to find words unique to a single term, those shared with two terms, or those shared with all three terms. Results/discussion: Findings identified science communication as a technical communication topic; other findings corroborated previous research. Business communication findings corroborated previous research and identified an emphasis on global communication. Findings show professional communication as a rhetorically flexible term that creates a space for emerging concepts and expands disciplinary boundaries. The three shared communication, pedagogy, international, and disciplinary concerns. Conclusions: The disciplines feature some overlap but maintain distinct research foci. Professional communication is a distinctive discipline that assists technical communication and business communication by incubation of emerging concepts.

Background: Engineers increasingly work and advance their careers in international business settings. As technical managers, they need management and technical skills when working with different stakeholders with whom they may not share a common first language. Studies have revealed that informal oral communication skills are of prime importance for global engineers who face challenges in building shared meaning and formulating clear messages in meetings with non-native speakers of English. This article proposes that studying the use of multimodal resources (spoken language, gaze, gestures, and objects) in meetings can unpack how work tasks are accomplished in business through different communicative strategies. Literature review: This paper focuses on engineers' and technical managers' needs and challenges in professional and intercultural communication where English is used as a business lingua franca (BELF) in multimodal meetings. While multimodal conversation and discourse analytic studies highlight the dynamic nature of meeting interaction, previous technical and professional communication and BELF research on multimodality is limited. Research questions: 1. How do technical managers use multimodal resources to articulate their ideas in BELF meetings with their peers? 2. How does the use of multimodal resources contribute to the construction of shared meaning in explanatory, consensus-seeking, and solution-finding communication? Methodology: This study reports on two case studies and multimodal discourse analysis of video-recorded meetings among technical managers and their peers in four companies. The use of multimodal resources is analyzed in explanatory, consensus-seeking, and solution-finding communication. Results and conclusions: In BELF meetings, assemblages of spoken language, gestures, tools, whiteboard, and documents contribute to constructing shared meaning. This study has implications for global professional and engineering communication. Future research should further examine multimodality in BELF meetings.

This article is the first in a two-part series. It features 13 teaching innovations selected from the 60 My Favorite Assignments presented at the 2019 Association for Business Communication’s annual international conference in Detroit, Michigan. Pedagogy presented includes experiential learning methods to teach how to deliver peer feedback, new approaches for incorporating the Internet and social media into learning experiences, and a boost on a classic topic, ethics.

U.S. undergraduate business communication (BCOM) classes teach students workplace communication fundamentals, but may not build the cross-cultural communication (CCC) skills that learners will need in today’s global workplace. This project surveyed BCOM instructors and students about the importance of including cross-cultural material in BCOM classes. While all instructors considered it at least moderately important to include CCC material, most covered the subject briefly. Students showed interest in receiving CCC training in their BCOM courses but received limited information about it in their classes. Incorporating CCC comprehensively and systematically into BCOM classrooms may help students become competent intercultural communicators.

Search engine optimization (SEO), or the set of practices involved in attaining a high ranking in search engine results, is a web writing skill that requires more attention in business communication pedagogy, because SEO helps businesses attract customers. This article presents the results of interviews with seven SEO experts on SEO best practices and describes how to integrate SEO into business communication courses.

Nearly every business communication textbook includes an explanation of “hard” and “soft” skills. Indeed, most business professionals understand the importance of honing interpersonal competencies as well as technical proficiencies. However, measuring the importance of soft skills and how they are used in an organization is often a difficult task. Therefore, the focus of this article is on rethinking the conversation by applying front-stage and back-stage communication theory to the genres in the case study example of Samsung surrounding its Galaxy Note 7 recall.

This article celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Reflections Journal, as a premier publication in service learning, public writing, rhetoric, community literacy, and activism. The author applauds Reflections as a space that nurtures emerging voices and professional development, even prior to the printing of individual volumes and issues. In general, the author showcases four professional collaborations between doctoral students, early-career professionals, and/or more seasoned scholars that are demonstrated through and within select special issues in Reflections. More specifically, the author recalls successes and challenges of editorship when taking on the duties as a coeditor for an African American literacy special issue. The author highlights visible and mostly invisible editorial processes, reflects on the labor of editing submissions, and discusses high and low stakes editorial choices that impacted the final production of the special issue. The author makes the case that editing and editorial decisions may illuminate scholarly voices, show community engagement, and reify pre- and early-career professional development, which has been a twenty-year hallmark of Reflections.

Background: The lab report is a commonly assigned genre in engineering lab courses; however, students often have difficulties meeting the expectations of writing in engineering labs. At the same time, it is challenging for engineering faculty to instruct lab report writing because they are often under-supported in writing pedagogies and usually unfamiliar with the extent of students' prior writing knowledge. Literature review: Literature on technical communication in engineering addresses the importance of a rhetorical approach to writing instruction, as well as an emphasis on genre. Extending this literature, research into writing transfer provides valuable insight for better understanding how undergraduates negotiate the engineering lab report as a new genre within this distinct rhetorical context. Research questions: 1. How effective is a transfer-focused writing pedagogy in supporting students' understanding of the genre conventions of engineering lab reports? 2. How does the transfer-focused writing pedagogy impact students' writing quality in five categories (rhetorical knowledge, organization, evidence, critical thinking, and disciplinary conventions)? 3. What are the rhetorical features that engineering students improve or struggle with the most with lab report writing? Research methodology: Four engineering instructors and two English instructors participated in this study to design and develop the lab report writing instructional module, and implemented the module materials into their engineering lab courses. The module, consisting of lab report writing instruction and assessment resources, shares a rhetorical approach and foundational writing terms with first-year composition courses to emphasize a writing-transfer pedagogy. We collected and analyzed undergraduates' lab report samples to evaluate the impact of the module on students' writing performance. Two sets of lab reports were collected for analysis: the sample sets before (control), during the 2015-2016 academic year; and after (experimental) implementation of the module, during the 2016-2017 academic year. Results and conclusions: Data collected via pre- and post-implementation writing artifacts show that a rhetorical approach to teaching lab reports helped students better understand the expectations of the lab report as a discipline-specific genre, and it developed students' understanding of the rhetorical features of engineering writing. The pilot module positively impacted the quality of students' lab reports, a finding that suggests that using a transfer-focused writing pedagogy can successfully support the transfer and adaptation of writing knowledge into gateway or entry-level engineering laboratory courses.

Transactions of the Royal Society, in London in 1665.This journal published papers shared at meetings and served as a permanent record of those contributions to knowledge.Peer review in those days was essentially the acceptance of a person's credentials for election to the Society.Since that time, and especially during the past 50 to 75 years, peer review has evolved into the process of double-anonymous vetting of manuscripts by expert reviewers that we take for granted today for the vast majority of technical and professional journals.In our own time, our own discipline, and our own journal, we rely on rigorous peer review to ensure that only the highest quality content in the field of professional communication appears in these pages.This process of peer review relies on the knowledge and the good graces of reviewers who undertake this important and time-consuming task with only the thanks of the editor and the TRANSACTIONS' readers as payment.

About the case: Female entrepreneurs play a significant role in new business creation, yet women's entrepreneurship stories remain largely absent in professional communication research. Therefore, a need exists to “give voice” to female entrepreneurship stories, and this exploratory case examines the unique identities that three female entrepreneurs express in their narratives. This case asks how three female entrepreneurs reconciled the discourses of entrepreneurship, gender, and culture to construct a unique entrepreneurial identity in their reflective narratives. Situating the case: Professional communication has only recently begun to explore entrepreneurship communication, and little of that literature explicitly investigates women's experiences. This case, by comparison, uses three conceptual categories-entrepreneurial identity, gender identity, and cultural identity-to explore how three women negotiated their workplace identities. Methods: We recruited three women who self-identified as technology company entrepreneurs, each from a different culture, and recorded their oral narratives about their entrepreneurial journeys. Three raters independently coded data drawing on dimensions extracted from prior literature to build “identity curves” for each narrative. Results: Analysis suggests that each participant negotiated discourses of entrepreneurship, gender, and culture differently, with the greatest divergence appearing on cultural codes, and the least divergence appearing on gender codes. Conclusions: Based on these results, we suggest that future research should begin with the assumption that no single “entrepreneurial identity” exists for female entrepreneurs, and more broadly that professional communication research should foreground differences among individuals rather than attempt to aggregate individual experiences into homogenous characterizations.

Introduction: This tutorial article explicates some of the 2017 updates to the 1991 Common Rule. Implemented in January 2019, these changes impact the evolving landscape of research with human participants in the US. The introduction provides context for the article as well as framing research questions. Key concepts: These include a brief definition of research for the purposes of the article; a discussion of the foundational ethical principles of autonomy (respect for persons), beneficence, and justice; and a brief overview of the recent policy revision process and its impact on scholarship in the field. After establishing this context, readers are provided five key lessons from the policy revisions. Key lessons: The lessons for researchers working with human participants include discussion of the impact of policy changes in the Common Rule associated with broad consent, single Institutional Review Board (IRB) mandate/cooperative review, updated exemptions, modified definitions of vulnerability, and international research. These are all contextualized within a specific example for professional communication researchers. Implications for practice: Although educative efforts are underway at both the federal and institutional levels, it is important for disciplines and researchers to understand how policy changes will impact the IRB review process. Attendance to the infrastructures that guide our research design and development warrants attention.

Introduction: Given the importance of visual communication to technical communicators' work, 40% of undergraduate programs in technical and professional communication require a document design course. However, document design pedagogies such as structuring peer review are still being researched, and popular textbooks do not provide instruction about how to facilitate this important pedagogy. About the case: An adapted form of studio critique was used to provide students with design feedback. Situating the case: Studio critique literature and document design peer review scholarship were used to devise an adapted critique, which I implemented in my course. Methods/approach: Twenty-five undergraduates were surveyed, and 23 were interviewed about adapted critique. Results/discussion: Results were favorable but recommend extending critique time, better facilitating participation, capturing feedback effectively, focusing the presentation, evaluating feedback, and requesting revision plans. Conclusions: Future research includes expanding the study to other courses and online environments.

Mentoring of graduate students is essential to the professional development of business and professional communication (BPC) scholars; it also helps advance the field of BPC and its disciplinary identity. In this article, a professor and graduate student use a case-study approach incorporating historical/archival data collection and grounded in critical reflection to describe and characterize their own long-term, cross-institutional mentoring relationship. They analyze artifacts from their mentoring experience; discuss benefits and challenges to mentoring in BPC; offer implications for mentees, mentors, and academic programs in creating formal mentoring plans; and suggest topics for further research.

This qualitative study reviewed student application of self-regulated learning (SRL) processes in self-paced graduate business communication courses. It was preceded by a quantitative analysis of the same courses. In both studies, researchers sought to understand student experience in a self-paced learning environment, and how this experience demonstrated SRL and increased student performance. Neither study established a clear connection between a self-paced learning environment, SRL, and student performance. However, both studies confirmed the importance of student predisposition for the cyclical phases of preparation, performance, and appraisal and highlighted the critical role of support in readying students for learning strategy changes.

Despite its ubiquity across business contexts, video creation is a rarity in business communication curricula. This article is intended to offer the field of business communication education both a rationale and mechanism by which to better align with modern business communication practice. Part 1 provides a comprehensive demonstration of the pervasive uses of video in business, including statistical evidence, genre examples, and analysis of the medium’s communicative value. Part 2 (and subsequent appendices) then empowers the business communication educator to implement the change suggested in Part 1 by way of a turnkey assignment easily adaptable across business courses.

I still remember the feeling. I was beginning the 2nd year of my PhD program and was finally feeling like I had an understanding of what being a technical communication scholar means. I was also starting to feel critical of our field---wondering if I, an Indigenous scholar from rural Alaska, would find a meaningful place in technical and professional communication (TPC). I was at the grocery store and my phone dinged; I had received an email from Natasha Jones. She and her coauthors were writing a book and wanted to include a list of multiply marginalized and underrepresented (MMU) scholars to amplify in its pages. They asked if I wanted to be part of their list and if I knew others who should be added. I emailed back immediately thanking them, consenting, and gave them my friends Zarah Moeggenberg and Les Hutchinson's names. I paid for my groceries, walked out to my truck, and cried.

Through an auto-ethnographic reflection, this article describes an attempt to enact a Black Feminist pedagogy in an undergraduate business writing course. Discussing both benefits and challenges to this pedagogical approach, I advocate for an increase in decolonial methodologies and pedagogies in teaching technical and professional communication and argue for their potential to intervene for equity and justice in both the classroom and the workplace.

This article reports the results of a survey of technical and professional communication (TPC) undergraduate and graduate students regarding their perceptions of diversity in TPC academic programs. The responses of the total group of respondents and a subset of respondents identifying as a person of color (POC) are compared. Results show that both the overall group and the group of students identifying as persons of color see their TPC programs as both diverse and supportive of diversity. Respondents identifying as a person of color also reported that they were not worried about fitting in when enrolling in their TPC programs. However, the survey also shows that TPC students who identify as persons of color note a lack of students and faculty of color in TPC academic programs and departments. Possible reasons for respondents’ perceptions of having diverse and supportive departments while also observing the lack of POC within the department are discussed.

According to Lisa Meloncon (2014), “…TPC [technical professional communication] practitioners and academics have few resources to understand issues related to disability studies and accessibility, ...

Pedagogical and programmatic research remains important in technical and professional communication. For such approaches to be effective, meaningful, and successful, they must represent effective scholarship that can be used within and address the needs of the greater field. The authors performed a metasynthesis of pedagogical and programmatic scholarship published in five central technical and professional communication journals between 2011 and 2015 ( n = 82). The authors report the results of this research and what it means for the field to approach pedagogical and programmatic scholarship in the future.

Police officers do a significant amount of high-stake writing in police reports, but report writing is given little attention in policy academies, and prevailing guidelines treat the task as a mechanical process of recording facts. As a result, officers are ill-prepared for this essential and inherently complex task. In this study, we interviewed officers to study what makes for a good police report. Our findings reveal that police reports are goal-directed genre actions. This understanding peers through the positivist emphasis on factual details to emphasize the social function of police reports in the criminal justice system.

By addressing how writing centers can work to help computer science students be ready for professional challenges related to writing in computer science fields, this study of computer science professionals and students illustrates how findings were applied to train a team of writing tutors. Drawing upon self-reports about writing in computer science jobs and writing in computer science classes, the authors identify both professionals' workplace writing challenges and students' perceptions of these challenges. Implications for writing center practitioners and researchers are discussed, including how writing centers can collaborate with computer science faculty to acquire resources, access the discourse of computer science assignments, and implement a similar training program in their centers.

This profile offers insights from an established dual credit first-year composition program at a public state university in Texas, focusing in particular on the preparation and professional development of high school instructors who deliver college writing curriculum through an embedded partnership. The authors provide an overview of dual credit’s expansion and exigency nationwide, describe the history of the program at their institution, offer a discussion of relevant literature and research opportunities in composition studies, examine the program’s affordances and constraints, and conclude with strategies for writing pedagogy administrators and others with stakes in first-year composition/dual credit partnerships.

Not only is the current scholarship on technology professional development (TPD) of writing faculty at the periphery of Writing Studies, there doesn’t seem to be a clear conceptualization of the scope of knowledge and skills needed to teach writing with technology critically and productively. In this study, I address these issues using two research questions: a) What are the teaching with technology-related expectations for college writing faculty as stipulated in 11 CWPA, CCCC, and NCTE position statements? b) What are the characteristics of technology professional development programs, as identified in these statements, that train teachers to meet these expectations? The deductive analysis of these statements reveals that the three organizations have collectively stipulated three levels of technology-related expectations for writing faculty as well as the fundamental characteristics of an effective TPD program that would train in-service faculty to meet these expectations. Based on findings of this study, I argue that the institutional responsibility to provide writing faculty with robust TPD opportunities is not only professional but ethical as well.

In this program profile, we describe how the FYC program at Texas A&M University-San Antonio is working towards developing an antiracist and decolonial program in response to our recognition of the racialized violence and injustice the program was unintentionally inflicting on our student population. We structure this profile using comadrismo, a conversation between two Latina faculty, to describe their experiences around five themes: labor division and equity, assessment and social justice, revising programmatic documents, professional development, and constraints and shortcomings. Furthermore, we discuss the most salient aspects of this work for programs that may also be interested in seeking social justice through antiracism and decolonization. Specifically, we work through and identify three forms of labor we have learned are necessary to engaging in this work: honest and critical self-interrogation, faculty buy-in and community building, and an understanding that this kind of work is an ongoing process.

This multimedia article shares five short video-recorded stories that highlight specific moments of struggling to practice antiracist and linguistic justice values within different disciplinary situations: giving feedback on student writing, training tutors in the writing center, working with pre-service teachers, debating learning objectives in department committees, and responding to prescriptivist attitudes from colleagues. This praxis-driven work responds to Inoue’s 2019 CCCC Chair’s Address and his calls to confront white language supremacy by providing vulnerable accounts of the intellectual, interpersonal, emotional and pedagogical labors and challenges involved in fighting for raciolinguistic justice. Teachers and administrators may find the video stories and accompanying reflections useful when developing pedagogical approaches, designing professional development workshops, or reimagining departmental policy-making and curriculum development.

This article reports survey and interview research on how graduate student instructors (GSIs) across the United States navigate the boundaries of disciplinary expertise that define their work as students and teachers. The disciplinary backgrounds of GSIs in this study influenced their experiences with formal writing pedagogy education and their teaching practices. GSIs imported content, mindsets, pedagogies, and skills and expertise from their home disciplines into the FYW classroom and exported practices and dispositions from FYW into their own work as graduate students. I suggest how writing pedagogy educators might reframe preparation experiences to recognize the disciplinary boundaries GSIs work across and to repurpose these boundaries as sites for richer professional development and writing instruction.

The reviewers feel that what makes "Digital Justice: Technology and the Internet of Disputes" so valuable is its relevance to a wide range of professional and nonprofessional applications, including healthcare, technology, e-commerce, social media and social relationships, law, and the workplace. Readers who use digital media for organizational and business communication can benefit from Digital Justice and its insights into disputes, access to justice, and the influence of digital media on barriers to justice. Ethan Katsch and Orna Rabinovich-Einy address the emerging disputes brought by the advancement of technology as well as the ways that these disputes could be resolved or prevented altogether. There has yet to be a dispute resolution and prevention process that works flawlessly in all cases, but the authors provide valuable insight toward what issues need to be addressed, as well as how and why these issues affect users involved in disputes.

Background: Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce involves consumers re-selling products to other consumers using online platforms. Research identifies trust as a major factor in this exchange. It concludes that seller-generated product descriptions can mitigate mistrust. Further, technical and professional communication research can reveal what content sellers tend to provide and can reveal how platform design may encourage that content. Literature review: C2C e-commerce and TPC researchers agree that mistrust can be mitigated by detailed content, and they call for platform designers to help improve platform and seller reputations. Research questions: 1. What content do sellers provide about their technical products? 2. How do the platforms' web form designs and the associated documentation about listing a product for sale encourage certain content types? Research methodology: Four platforms were chosen using specific criteria. Product descriptions were collected once per week for six weeks, generating 1900 product descriptions. These descriptions were unitized and given reliable content categories, a methodology called quantitative content analysis. Further, the documentation and processes for posting items were explored to determine how they may encourage content types. Results/discussion: Sellers mostly provide product information and sales procedures, and they rarely give benefits and goodwill to the buyer. The platform design seems to encourage this content because of the content-entry process, the content-entry options, and the required and unrequired content entry. Conclusions: This study invites technical and professional communicators to provide more guidelines for users about the kinds of content they may include, and designers to explore the content entry process using usability and user-experience research.

Business communication instructors can improve their own instruction about networking online given further understanding of the gender gap among LinkedIn users. An analysis of the rhetoric of magazine advice articles finds gendered differences in the representation of LinkedIn to readers. Examining how publications talk about LinkedIn leads to guidance on how instructors can discuss LinkedIn and gender in the classroom. The article suggests instructors can modify or create assignments to address potential gender usage patterns.

Data from a survey of 864 executives and managers with hiring authority suggest that business communication has external legitimacy regardless of program sponsorship and that hiring managers favor courses that comprise the business communication curriculum, such as public speaking, leadership, business management, and interpersonal communication. Findings from the study can give students guidance when selecting coursework electives and writing résumés, guide faculty in making curricular and advertising decisions, and support the legitimacy of the business communication curriculum.

In order for students to effectively transfer oral communication skills from academic to professional settings, they must have high oral communication self-efficacy. We significantly increased oral communication self-efficacy in a sample of 97 undergraduate business majors by incorporating enactive mastery, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological arousal into a business communication course. Self-efficacy was positively and significantly correlated with course performance, and increases in self-efficacy were positively and significantly correlated with changes in overall grade point average. By targeting self-efficacy, instructors can improve students’ oral communication skills and help them transfer these skills from academic to professional settings.

Employers provide their interpretation of the meaning of communication skills in this qualitative study of 22 managers. Employers understand written communication to be types of documents, a way to write, and a mode of communication. Oral communication skills mean a style of interacting, presenting, and conducting meetings. Visual communication skills were understood to be data visualization or nonverbal communication. Electronic communication was interpreted as email. The findings contribute to closing-the-gap research by highlighting areas where meaning converges for employers and instructors. Faculty members in communication disciplines can incorporate these findings into their course design and learning outcome discussions.

This study traced the adoption of a new social language among financial advisors responding to intense regulatory pressures. Register – specialized vocabularies, argumentative moves, and syntactical patterns – was analyzed to explore rhetorical practices embedded in agency–structure dynamics. Through analysis of advisors’ correspondence with clients and semi-structured interviews exploring their communication practices, this study demonstrates how register changes embody everyday rhetorical tactics for managing complicated audiences. This article contributes to studies of agency–structure dynamics in professional communication contexts governed by strong regulatory constraints.

Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis (times change and we change with them). Not only is the techne of today’s rhetoric and professional communication changing but we rhetors and professiona...

As discussed throughout this special issue, interest in design thinking as a process, a set of mind-sets and practices, and also a potential addition to writing studies and technical and professional communication (TPC) program curricula has increased recently, opening discussions about the rhetorical nature of design-thinking practices. Does design thinking align with the already rhetoric scholarship on design in TPC? In this working bibliography, we pull together literative from across disciplines, popular media, and higher education media to examine design thinking from a variety of angles and to offer a starting point for peers interested in learning more.

In this special issue, we explore design thinking as a broad conceptual process as well as a tool that might align with the work of technical and professional communication (TPC) programs. But what is design thinking? What are the benefits and drawbacks of the process? Can design thinking be used to help students address rhetorical challenges and complex problems? How is design thinking showing up in the field, and does it belong in TPC programs? Four scholars explore these questions in their niche areas: process, usability and user design, technical communication, and industry and programmatic perspectives.

In design thinking, extreme users have found work-arounds for common problems, but they are few in number and often overlooked in toolkits and write-ups. This article posits that positive deviance, an approach to social and behavioral change that is compatible with design thinking, offers technical and professional communicators an accessible and innovative methodology for engaging extreme users. The authors analyze a case study of how the positive deviance approach was used to address federal recidivism on the U.S.–Mexico border. They conducted a positive deviance inquiry to arrive at the everyday replicable behaviors that enabled released individuals to complete their terms of supervised release successfully, despite the odds against them and without access to special resources. The authors conclude by discussing the value and implications of focusing on extreme users.

Research problem: This study investigates the way in which large Chinese firms communicated occupational fatalities in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. Research questions:1. Did the sample firms disclose information about workplace fatalities in their CSR reports? 2. What communicative strategies were used in the disclosure for the purpose of self-legitimation? 3. How were these strategies manifested linguistically and rhetorically? Literature review: The study is based on legitimacy theory, which suggests that when reporting bad news, firms may use communicative strategies to maintain or restore organizational legitimacy. Previous studies of negative CSR disclosures focus more on information selection and omission than on information presentation. A lack of consideration of actual organizational performance in some studies also makes it less feasible to account for strategies that firms use to misrepresent reality. Methodology: The study compared CSR reports issued by Fortune 500 Chinese firms with the firms' reports of fatal occupational incidents to see whether the incidents were reported faithfully. An integrated analytical framework of legitimation strategies, developed from previous studies of legitimation in organizational communication, was applied to the analysis. Results and conclusions: Most firms disclosed their fatality incidents. Legitimation strategies-in particular, positive performance evaluations and corrective actions-were used by the firms to de-emphasize or minimize the bad news. This study calls for greater attention from CSR monitors and professionals to information presentation as an important indicator of report quality. The findings are limited to one type of CSR disclosure and to the firms that were examined.