ethical business cultures
Association for Business Communication
A listing of works published by Association for Business Communication in the field of technical communication.
- Assurance of Learning: Implementing a Uniform Assessment Process Across Multiple Sections of a Managerial Communication Course
This case study documents how two business school professors worked together to design and implement a process for uniformly assessing learning outcomes across all sections of a managerial communication course. The study demonstrates and provides examples of the answers to the five questions in the school’s assurance of learning process model. The study also provides prescriptive tips for administrators and instructors on how to avoid the typical pitfalls of implementing an assurance of learning process. - Business Etiquette: New Day, New Time
Business etiquette including communication, ethics, and teamwork has changed considerably over the years. Core values of companies are evolving. Companies now want to be the "place to work". Issues that were once taboo in the business world are no longer. This can be observed in an employee's appearance for example. The once standard business suit has been replaced with casual dress. The normal peer to peer communication has been replaced with upward and downward communication throughout the business organization. - Communicating with the Press Release: Teaching Undergraduates the Basics
Communicating with stakeholders is a concern for every organization. The press release allows firms to convey a message to the public without exorbitant advertising fees and has greater impact than a paid ad because it appears less one-sided. As undergraduates leave academia for the workplace, they become more valuable to employers if they have had practice composing clearly written press releases that achieve the goals of an organization. Teaching the press release allows business communication instructors to reinforce key writing skills such as audience awareness, purpose, clarity, and conciseness. It can be integrated into the syllabus as part of a unit on persuasive writing or taught as a separate genre. Instructors who teach the press release will need to address its core elements: the concept of newsworthiness; conveying the company's main message in the headline and first paragraph; composing in the "inverted pyramid" style typical to journalism; creating compelling quotes for attribution; and designing the document. Classroom activities and assignment ideas are provided. - Communication Strategies for Implementing Organizational Change
This work advances a stronger conceptual and empirical understanding of two broad, conceptual communicative treatments for implementing change: programmatic and participatory. These theoretical approaches are elucidated respectively through established communication models, activities, and strategies advanced by previous scholarship within the communication and business disciplines. In addition, conclusions are drawn about the supposed limitations and benefits of using these change implementation approaches in applied settings. This article concludes with potential strategies for advancing for research in this arena. - CSR Communication: A SME-Oriented Approach
A case study of Danish SME managers’ understanding of CSR and CSR communication conducted in the beginning of 2007 concluded that CSR communication in SMEs is a practice rather than a corporate strategy. - Documentation Methods for AACSB Learning Assurances
In 2003, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) redefined their accreditation and reaffirmation standards to move from a traditional outcome-based system to a systematic process-based review. Documentation is required to assure student learning in several core areas, including communication. This paper outlines the data collection procedures and documentation methods used to document one university’s business communication learning assurances. - Gender Differences in Employees’ and Students’ Knowledge of Office Politics
Office politics goes on in most work environments. Learning the rules of office politics helps employees of both genders reap the rewards to which they are entitled. As future employees, students must become knowledgeable about office politics to be successful in the world of work. - The Impact of EQ Training on Collaborative Professional Writing
Over the course of each semester, students in 300-level business communication courses can expect to produce a number of various types of messages and reports with emphasis on the psychological development of the message. Although education has traditionally demanded an individual approach to most writing tasks in order to assess student performance, most practitioners in the field of business communication recognize the importance of collaborative writing as a necessary skill in preparing students to enter the job market where teams rather than individuals are the primary work unit. - A Rhetorical Tool and a Link to Composition: The Appeals of Narrative in Professional Writing Pedagogy
Narrative is a valuable genre to use in composition classes to help students understand their own identity, develop writing skills, including understanding how to structure and use personal experience with a rhetorical purpose in an essay or argument. Once they get to upper division writing courses, however, students are exposed to writing that places less emphasis on that personalized, subjective genre and moves toward the impersonal. Such writing limits the use of narrative, which is generally perceived as highly personal and subjective because it generally conveys only the narrator’s perspective. Narrative includes precise details of an event that occurred in the past which are reported in the same order in which they occurred, as well as an observation or evaluation of the information by the narrator. - A Transformative Typology of Pragmatic and Ethical Responses to Common Corporate Crises: Interaction of Rhetorical Strategies, Situational Contingencies, and Influential Stakeholders
Scandals, accidents, product problems, criminal activity, deception or fraud, misconduct, harassment, discrimination, financial or regulatory improprieties, malfeasance, misappropriations, or ethical breaches can not only damage the reputation of corporate executives but can reek financial havoc on the value of a company’s brand 'assets.' When companies face these types of crises they are compelled to act quickly and decisively in order to limit their brand and image losses and seek to repair the 'black eye' to their corporate 'face' as effectively as possible. Although companies will attempt a wide range of actions and messages as symbolic appeals to that organization’s constituent publics, there is little certainty about what types of actions and messages are persuasive. - Uncertainties and Resistance to Change
This paper aims to fill a gap between knowledge and practice about the effectiveness of rhetorical strategies in the communication of change inside large private organizations. - Word Power: Implications for Minority Managerial Candidates
Diversity literature suggests training programs are short term whereas education and development involves a long term comprehensive approach. Proponents of diversity training programs contend that understanding the importance of a diverse workforce creates productive environments in which everyone feels valued, where their talents are used and organizational objectives are met. Critics contend that there is not enough evidence to adequately measure whether implementation of diversity training programs increase organizational financial success. - Identity and Cross-Cultural Communication
In this project special attention is given to legal, commercial, political and institutional discourse used in specific workplaces, analysed from an intercultural perspective. In particular, through an exploration of the international ‘image’ suggested by major social and economic actors, our project aims to improve the understanding of identity-forming features linked to ‘local’ or professional cultures, as communicated by contemporary English in various specialised domains among native and non-native speakers. - Overcoming Barriers in Developing Conversation Skills: A Pedagogical Perspective
This paper examines the relevance of culture to language learning, the meaning and the structure of conversation, the obstacles in developing good conversation skills, the impact of these obstacles on students’ communication skills in the first part of the paper. The second part describes the class-room based pro