Journal of Business Communication current issue

Performing Sustainable Development Through Eco-Collaboration: The Ricelands Habitat Partnership

Livesey, S. M., Hartman, C. L., Stafford, E. R., Shearer, M. — 2009-09-14

"Performativity" theory offers a useful framework for illuminating the role that organizational discourse plays in engendering new social imaginaries. In this article, the authors demonstrate this point through a genealogy and textual analysis of the Ricelands Habitat Partnership (RHP), an eco-collaboration between the rice industry and environmental advocates in California’s Sacramento Valley. Articulated here as a story of enemies becoming friends, the RHP gives life to a vision of more (if not perfectly) sustainable agriculture, where sustaining business and the natural environment can go hand in hand. The authors argue that sustainable development (like democracy or other abstract concepts) becomes "real" for businesses and for society at large through local enactment. That is, new understandings and practices of sustainability are brought into being and institutionalized through the stories that they generate. Attention to the performative effects of language points to the ethical dimensions of our own research and writing. It suggests the need to consider the potentially world-changing effects of stories that we choose to tell.

The Role of Leader Motivating Language in Employee Absenteeism

Mayfield, J., Mayfield, M. — 2009-09-14

This study investigates the relationship between strategic leader language (as embodied in Motivating Language Theory) and employee absenteeism. With a structural equation model, two perspectives were measured for the impact of leader spoken language: employee attitudes toward absenteeism and actual attendance. Results suggest that leader language does in fact have a positive, significant relationship with work attendance through the mediation effect of worker attendance attitude.

Obfuscating the Obvious: Miscommunication Issues in the Interpretation of Common Terms

Brewer, E. C., Holmes, T. L. — 2009-09-14

We communicate via many forms every day. When what we say or write is misunderstood, the fault may lie with either party. One source of miscommunication is the different meaning people place on commonly used words and phrases. In this article, the authors report preliminary results from a study on such miscommunication and lay out an agenda for research on improving business communication based on the Integrative Model of Levels of Analysis of "Miscommunication," developed by Coupland, Wiemann, and Giles.

Papers By the 2008 Kitty O. Locker Outstanding Researcher Recipient and Respondent: Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Business Communication, October 30, 2008

Ryan, C. — 2009-09-14

Economic Crises and Financial Disasters: The Role of Business Communication

Jameson, D. A. — 2009-09-14

Making a Difference with Business Communication: A Response to Daphne Jameson's ORA Address

Rentz, K. — 2009-09-14