Search

Organizational communication extends beyond communication that takes place in an organizational context to the ways communication is used to organize and facilitate activity. This article is designed to enhance organizational communication pedagogy practices by highlighting foundational concepts and content areas that should be included in undergraduate organizational communication courses. Additionally, four active learning assignments, including case studies, applied organizational communication theory papers, organizational audits, and media assignments, are described to enhance student engagement with class material and to assess student learning. Finally, the article includes common issues to help educators anticipate concerns and plan effective classroom strategies.

Courses: Communication and Diversity, Intercultural Communication, Gender Communication. Objectives: After completing this semester-long activity, students should be able to (1) articulate a systems-of-oppression (privilege??oppression) approach to thinking about difference; (2) confront and "interact differently" with one social identity category where they have privilege; and (3) explain the corresponding form of oppression at individual, institutional, and societal/cultural levels.

Instructors who teach critical communication theory sometimes have difficulty explaining key concepts to students. Discussions of power, ideology, hegemony, and emancipation often bring confused expressions to students upon first exposure to these ideas. This activity provides a simple, grounded approach to examining facets of critical theory in that students role-play a script written from actual words of private country club employees to explore how power is created and maintained in "ordinary" communication exchanges. Doing so not only demonstrates how layers of structure (e.g., board, members, managers, employees) create circumstances where the interests of some individuals are maintained over other individuals, but illustrates how deeply embedded scripts of societal inequities, including differences in sex, race, and class, can emerge in the form of status and power differentials between members and employees. A list of references and suggested readings is included.

Explores the metaphor of managing diversity and its related discourses that dominate current business communication about the changing workforce. Examines the language employed in practitioner-oriented texts and consultant websites on diversity. Contends that language that constitutes individuals as resources emphasizes managerial and economic interests and potentially marginalizes human and ethical aspects of diversity. (SG)

[Scene 1: Walking to get lunch at the Bistro.] Erika: Chad, how's that reflection on what it means to teach at a Jesuit institution going? Chad: Well, I'm not really [...]

Conducting medical interviews is one of a physician's core clinical duties. Traditional methods of teaching the 'art' of medical interviewing include the use of written case studies (Novack, Dube, & [...]

Although work-family benefits are increasingly important organizational policies, limited research addresses the impact of communication on benefit utilization. However, communication is significant because the perceived appropriateness of work-family benefits emerges through interaction. For example, when coworkers complain about 'picking up the slack' for those using family leave, their discourse may impact future decisions of other workers regarding whether they utilize the work-family benefits available to them. We apply Giddens' (1984) Structuration Theory to examine organizational members' discursive responses to conditions (and contradictions) present in utilizing work-family benefits in a governmental organization. We argue the daily discursive practices of individuals can either reinforce or undermine formally stated work-family initiatives, and in turn discuss the implications of this 'structuration' of policy. KEY WORDS: Work-Family Policies, Structuration, Coworker Communication, Work-Family Communication.

The article informs about life and works of M. Chad McBride, and his professional accomplishments. Topics include feminist collaborators to help students and instructors has been a shared blessing; and treasure that time co-conceptualizing, coauthoring, and coediting forever by sharing his experiences within his own cases are everlasting.

This article describes the (Ignatian) Leadership Minor structure and curriculum for undergraduates at Creighton and suggests how to embed principles of Ignatian leadership into undergraduate classrooms whether or not "leadership" is the explicit focus. First, I explain how the Leadership Minor was created specifically to embrace Ignatian leadership and describe the required courses in terms of their learning objectives and related assignments. Second, I illustrate how principles of Ignatian leadership could be used in other undergraduate classrooms, offering additional units including Ignatian charisms, the Examen, downward mobility/living simply, and discernment that includes a Personal Manifesto based on the notion of "falling in love" attributed to Pedro Arrupe and Dean Brackley's vocation to love and serve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the authors' insights on the effect of organizational communication scholarship on nonprofit and voluntary organizations (NPVOs). They cite essays such as one from M.L. Sanders which encourage scholars to be attentive to tension and contradiction and directions for future research in NPVOs. They add that the essays highlight contributions organizational communication scholarship can give to NPVOs.

This article presents information about the benefits of integrating research on the work-life relationship with that of organizational rhetoric and communication. Some researchers are finding that some communication concepts connect these two apparently dissimilar areas of communication. Three theoretical areas for connecting workplace and private-life frames of reference are examined: structuration, systems, and relational dialectics. Integrative directions are identified in each area for future research.

Women construct their identities amidst contradictory and competing societal expectations about career success and motherhood. Due to the enormous value society places on our organizational lives and to the contradictory rhetoric on women `s roles today, the ability of stay-at-home mothers to construct their identities is argued to be in crisis. The purpose of this feminist critical-interpretive study is to interrogate corporate discourse as a new linguistic frame for defining mothering identity. Through textual analysis of online support Web sites and self-help books or guidebooks, four subject positions of stay-at-home mothers as professionals, managers, productive citizens, and irreplaceable workers are articulated and problematized. Corporate mothering is then further deconstructed in relation to historical ideologies of mothering, contemporary organizational privilege, feminist and postfeminist debates on women's roles today, and raced and classed ideologies of mothering. Finally, implications for feminist praxis and organizational communication scholarship are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a curriculum involving communication research methods. This course helps students become knowledgeable consumers and limited producers of communication research as they develop skills in gathering, organizing, interpreting, presenting and evaluating research information competently using appropriate methods. Working alone or in dyads, students design and conduct an original research project that measures individual opinions on an issue of interest. If students choose to work in dyads, twice the resources are expected. After topic approval, students conduct library/online research about their topic and collect at least five published sources of information, three of which must be peer-reviewed journal articles. Students then write a 3-4 page research proposal integrating this information to create an argument for their research. Students should be developing the research instruments to execute the study throughout the proposal phase. To expose students to several methods, students are required to create a survey protocol to gather quantitative research as well as an interview protocol to gain some experience in qualitative methods. Students present their findings to the class at a poster session. Students are instructed to address a lay audience in formatting their findings. In addition to creating the poster, students are also expected to answer questions about their projects.

Objective: To illustrate aspects (i.e., power, ideology, hegemony, emancipation) of critical theory Course: Organizational, Communication Theory [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dramatic demographic, technological, and social changes are reshaping how individuals experience family and work as we begin the 21st century. As the composition of the paid workforce continues to change, men and are rearranging what used to be a rigid distribution of wage, work, and family responsibilities in traditional families. Coupled with these changing demographics, technological innovations have changed the way work is accomplished. Computer technologies now enable new forms of virtual work, thus blurring the boundaries between workspaces and homespaces. Communication can serve as a catalyst for empowerment when workers take opportunities to act by asking for family leave, pressing for flexible work schedules, and questioning traditional stereotypes surrounding who performs wage work and family labor. Until recently, work and family received limited attention from communication researchers in relation to researchers situated in psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior.

The article presents a course related to work-life communication for senior college students which searches the intersections between paid work and personal or family life. It focuses on communication and other issues surrounding balancing personal needs and commitments particularly child or elder care, with a career. It also tackles differences in societal and organizational expectations of workers based on gender, marital status and childbearing/childrearing status. In addition, the ways in which people communicate about their working lives at home are discussed.

The article discusses the impact of technological innovations on training future physicians on health care interviewing through the use of standardized patients (SP) and computer-simulated patients (CSP) in the U.S. It focuses on the practical experiential activities of students who does not possess the medical knowledge required to complete a diagnostic interview. Moreover, SP is a non-physician who is hired to simulate illnesses in a standardized fashion to provide medical students with an early introduction to patient care. In addition, through the technology the replacement of human SPs with CSPs has made possible for it offer cases with chief complaints to the student who interacts with the patient by requesting additional history and interviewing laboratory data and x-ray.

The article offers information pertaining to cultural studies in communication. The goal of the said study is to sentisize students to representations of organizational diversity in popular culture. Cultures are referred to texts and practices that function to represent or create meaning. Critics to culture hope to restructure the attitudes and behaviors of men and women who produce and consume the discourse of particular societies through analyzing the textual forms and documented cultural practices. Its classes were divided into two parts. The first one focused on the explanation of ideological criticism and the second part emphasized to the themes of diversity. The said activity provided the students an opportunity to their own ideological criticism, either individually or groups.

In this article the book review editor introduces her reviews of feminist literature.