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The Business Communicator as Presence Allocator: Multicommunicating, Equivocality, and Status at Work

Georgetown University

N. Lamar Reinsch, Jr.

Georgetown University

Conceptualizing the contemporary business communicator as a presence allocator, this article introduces the concept of multicommunicating and reports two exploratory studies. The authors used qualitative and quantitative data to explore factors that influence multicommunicating behavior, an increasingly common form of polychronic behavior and multitasking. The analysis builds on the concepts of social presence and media richness to describe the contemporary worker as seeking to economize in the allocation of personal presence across multiple, interleaved interactions. In the authors’ exploratory qualitative study, they identified message equivocality and interlocutor status as two factors that seem to encourage (or discourage) multicommunicating. In the quantitative study (a 2 x 2 posttest design), the authors evaluated two hypotheses, confirming that equivocality and status influence the perceived likelihood of multicommunicating. The discussion section includes several suggestions for future research.

Key Words: multicommunicating • equivocality • status • presence • polychronicity • multitasking • instant message • chat

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