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Addressing calls for increased communication scholarship that interrogates power in stigma processes, we develop a critical postmodern approach to stigma management communication (SMC) theory and demonstrate how it can be used in the context of difficulty orgasming. Semi-structured interviews with mostly white, cisgender women experiencing orgasm difficulties in mixed-sex relationships (N = 31) revealed how dominant discourse creates an idealized standard of sexual behavior that stigmatizes women with orgasm difficulties, and how stigma management strategies act as discursive practices that reify, resist, and transform the status quo. We extend SMC theory by articulating a critical postmodern approach that can be used to interrogate power in stigma processes, and by illuminating how stigma management strategies are enacted in varied ways and toward different ends. Practically, our findings underscore the need for multifaceted interventions aimed at addressing the underlying causes of stigma and offer recommendations for reducing stigma through health campaigns, programming, and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study enhances the explanatory power of the stigma management communication theory [SMCT] while providing practical communication techniques for people who may want to respond to racist/colorist comments. Using the typology of SMCT, we propose a predictive model that includes two new variables– perceived agency and perceived efficacy to verbally respond to racist/colorist comments. Results from a survey (N = 655) and in-depth interviews (N = 43) of predominantly US adults show that perceived agency and perceived efficacy impact how one responds to racist/colorist comments. The study also found that social media can nurture the perceived sense of agency and learning the history of racism/colorism can nurture the perceived sense of efficacy. The study concludes by discussing how the explanatory power of SMCT can be further improved by refining the constructs of agency and efficacy, and providing practical steps to equip those who want to verbally respond to racist/colorist comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the lens of Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory, this article examines communication between health care providers in the southern United States emergency department (ED) and patients who have experienced IPV. We qualitatively examine communicative challenges that COVID-19 protocols have created, as well as routine difficulties that occur when communicating with survivors of violence. The participants described challenges including: (1) Feeling uncertainty, (2) Encountering patient resistance, (3) Managing apathy and frustration, and (4) Navigating time pressure. Furthermore, the providers explained how COVID-19 compounded those challenges through: (1) Minimizing contact, (2) Losing nonverbal behavior, (3) Encountering limited resources, and (4) Facing visitor complications. This article extends CPM theory by exploring disclosure challenges related to IPV in health care settings during the COVID-19 pandemic including permeability, linkages, and privacy rules. It offers practical suggestions for increasing patient disclosure of IPV experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by the practical question, ‘What is a fair wage?’, this paper takes a culture-centered approach to the discursive construction of a fair wage in the context of industrialized labor. Specifically, this study juxtaposes discursive constructions within (a) corporate social responsibility (CSR) communications concerning wage policies and practices and (b) industrial workers’ narratives about their experiences with wages. Thus, I demonstrate a mutually constitutive process in which the meaning of ‘fair wage’ results from and reifies the structures of supply chain labor. Specifically, I explore how wage fairness is understood in the context of legal and government mandates, international organizations’ recommendations, and the issue of labor sustainability. The culture-centered emphasis of the study explores the possibility of bringing alternative voices to mainstream articulations of labor rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High turnover among volunteers means organizations spend significant resources recruiting and retaining them. Research on employees indicates the importance of role development in increasing employee identification and satisfaction while reducing turnover, but limited research has addressed these issues for volunteers. This study explored zoo volunteers’ role development in two phases. In phase one, interviews explored how volunteers learned and understood their roles. Results indicated volunteers learned their roles through communication with supervisors and peers and were generally satisfied with them despite limited opportunity to be innovative. In addition, some volunteers became concerned when their roles were changed with limited input from them. In phase two, questionnaires explored relationships between volunteers’ communication experiences and outcomes. Results indicated volunteers responded negatively to role-remaking, but communication with management, education staff, day captains, and family was associated with positive outcomes. By contrast, communication with peer volunteers had a negative impact on some outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This case study reports the identification strategies and related tactics that American Airlines CEO Don Carty and his team of professional communicators used in their employee crisis response to the September 11 attack. Data analyzed in the study include 78 internal documents; 10 articles from the airline's corporate newspaper; and interviews with Timothy Doke, then American Airlines Vice President of Corporate Communications, and Andrea Rader, a senior member of Doke's team. The results of this study provide guidance to corporate communicators tasked with rebuilding employee morale after a malevolent-type crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on organizational change program implementers' problems with communication. Implementers' over-anticipation of problems; Association of perceived accuracy and over-anticipation with success; Implementation failure rate.

Presents an actual job loss case and analyzes it from both traditional and feminist organizational communication ethics approaches. Details about the job loss case; Classification of unethical messages; Framework for ethical analysis from feminist perspectives.

Examines the effects of mass-mediated communication on consensual support for organizational goals at a sample setting in Santa Monica, California. Measurement of exposure to mass-mediated information; Significant predictors of goal consensus; Discussion of impact of communication channels on goal consensus; Recommendations for collective action organizations.

Studies the effects of downsizing, delayering, resizing, outplacement, layoffs, demassing work force reductions on employees and the role of communication in addressing the effects. Influence of managers on survivors in terms of information, career, and work; Survivors' reactions towards organizational interventions; Conceptual framework by J. Brockner on communication components.

Integrating the verbal planning and decision science literatures, it was reasoned that individuals whose decision rule organizations are complex exhibit greater complexity in their verbal plans than do individuals who are simple is rule orientation. Verbal complexity was based on business student participant's plans for conducting a negative performance appraisal interview; decision rule orientations were assessed by participants' responses to choice-making scenarios. Linear discriminant analysis substantiated a relationship between college business students' decision rule orientations and their verbal planning complexity. Seventy-one percent of the business students were classified correctly into decision rule orientation groups based on their complexity scores. This finding was cross-validated on a sample of executive level managers. Results are considered in terms of several tentative implications for administering of negative performance appraisal interviews and for management training and development generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information on organizational consulting and organizational research. Organizational consulting includes any activity that has its main apparent justification the giving of advice to organizational participants about how to improve the effectiveness of organizations or specific individuals in them. Organizational research, on the other hand, is any activity that involves gathering systematic data about organizations or speculating about them in a systematic way. In particular and most conspicuously, consulting and research exist in different social structures. They have different incentive systems, different social norms, and different bases of competition and survival. It is further noted that consulting and research attempt to complement, rather than duplicate, the contributions of experiential learning in specific organizations.

This article intends to describe a mindset for applied communication research. It is noted that the mindset for the application researcher mixes together concerns for language, glossing, therapy, and relevance. To apply research and to study the application of research is to be mindful of the said concerns. Once sensitized to the this kind of mindset, practitioners become fascinating research collaborators, because they construct novel activities requiring novel applications; they introduce novel variations on activities; they reconfigure an overdetermined world into unexpected patterns, and they need help in forms and around issues that are not understood well. The four components of the application researcher mindset are discussed in this article.

This study examined three prevalent forms of conventional wisdom by comparing volunteers and paid employees in the following areas: (1) intrinsic motivation, (2) perceptions of supervisors' decision-making style, and (3) perceived compliance-gaining communication of supervisors. Subjects (190 paid and 118 volunteer) from eight different organizations provided information regarding these areas via questionnaires distributed through their respective organizations. Results revealed that volunteers were higher in intrinsic motivation than paid employees. Supervisors of volunteers used more participative decision-making than supervisors of paid employees. Further, volunteers were more satisfied with their supervisors' decision-making than were paid employees. Additionally, significant effects regarding compliance-gaining behavior emerged as strategies emphasizing the worth of the individual, and of the work itself, were used more frequently with volunteers. However, few differences emerged between volunteers and paid employees regarding the motivational properties of the compliance-gaining strategies used by their supervisors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the theme of the papers featured in the June 1991 issue of the "Journal of APPLIED COMMUNICATION Research." A common theme running through the papers is the relationship between research and application, mainly through consulting. The first paper focuses on guidelines for what makes for quality and relevance in research. The second one looks at how researchers can learn from consultants and vice versa in a speech delivered to the Academy of Management. The third paper reviews a theoretical work and overlays it on the work of postmodern philosophers.