“A place you haven't visited before”: Creating the conditions for community dialogue

Economic Sectors as Discursive Resources for Civil Society Collaboration

“…Alternatively, communication scholars offer a more complex view of human interaction and collaboration. Previous communication research has addressed concepts such as dialogue (Zoller, 2000(Zoller, , 2004, collaborative spirit (Heath & Sias, 1999), bona fide groups (Keyton & Stallworth, 2003), framing (Brummans et al, 2008), coordinated action (Eisenberg, 1995), translation and articulation (Cooren, 2001), ideology (Ruud, 2000), democracy (Heath, 2007), and meaning management (Dixon & Dougherty, 2010), which provide a more robust understanding of the role of communication for collaborative relationships between organizations and other stakeholder groups. Much of this communication scholarship on collaboration is rooted in a constitutive or meaning-centered view of communication (Craig, 1999;Deetz, 1992), which conceptualizes communication as generative of social realities, and that organizations of all types are constituted in and through processes of meaning construction (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009).…”

“The More Things Change…:” Civil Rights Health Assessment in a ‘Majority-Minority’ U.S. Community

“…The case study method allows researchers to retain all of the meaningful characteristics of real-life events in order to obtain a more holistic understanding of those events (Schwandt, 1994;Stake, 1995). Recently, communication scholars (Clark, 2003;Malina, 2002;Zoller, 2000) have found this especially valuable when studying community networks and social change. Given these things, a case study approach (Stake, 1995) provided a productive framework to gain insight to the everyday lived experiences involving civil rights issues in a 'majority-minority' community.…”

“…and (b) What civil rights issues are described as most salient in such a community? Through a phenomenological exploration of these questions, the article creates an ''intelligible framework'' (Geertz, 1973) for understanding the everyday civil rights experiences of citizens living in a 'majority-minority' U.S. community (see also Zoller, 2000). In doing so, it illustrates the utility of communication research to address a pressing social need related to effective civil rights advocacy.…”

“…Consequently, I turned to the case study formats offered by Yin (2003), Stake (1995), andZoller (2000) to guide the organizational structure of this essay. Following the model offered by Stake, I take a chronological=biographical developmental approach to the case.…”

“…The third section explains how phenomenology served as the methodological framework for the project. Then, like Zoller (2000), I offer a thematization of citizen narratives (Stake, 1995) illustrative of five widespread beliefs concerning the state of civil rights within their community. Following a discussion of these themes, the article concludes with a discussion section that outlines the practical applications of this line of research.…”