Disciplinary Practice(s) in Business Communication, 1985 to 2004

Abstract

When I began teaching in the English Department at Iowa State University in the mid-1980s, Carol David, a senior colleague, told me to join the Association for Business Communication (ABC), present at its conferences, and serve as chair for a regional conference. Although Carol David has a quiet personality, she can also be quietly implacable. I complied. Consequently, I have been a member of the ABC for 20 years now. The ABC-its journals, its conferences, and its members-is unquestionably the forum that has done the most to foster my own research.Research is inevitably a collaborative effort. As Charie Thralls (1992) concluded, "all writing, whether authored by individuals or groups, is collaborative" (p. 79; see also Rogers, 1993). Research is developed from reading the works of others. It is shaped by conversations with and suggestions from others. The entire peer-review system of our refereed journals is built on the notion that the ideas of others should shape an author's text. Although the support of family and coworkers has been vital to the development of my career, today I would like to reflect on what the ABC as a professional forum has offered me-and continues to offer to others.Despite multidisciplinary tensions, to which I will allude later, the ABC represents the idea (e.g., Toulmin, 1972) that research is not a disembodied endeavor but a practice embedded in the values of people who come together in sites or forums. To describe how this concept of forum works, I propose to identify a series of lessons I have learned from the people in the ABC. The specific purposes of this somewhat meandering lesson-learned approach is not so much to discuss my own research as it is to (a) demonstrate how one person's research is influenced by the research of others, (b) describe the breadth of research the ABC has fostered, and (c) pinpoint key issues in conducting business communication research.

Intercultural Organizational Communication: The Social Organizing of Interaction in International Encounters

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Investigating the current state and impact of the intellectual capital academic discipline

“…However, a brief overview of disciplinary development of business ethics and business communication reveals that both of them exhibit signs of independent academic fields, despite their smaller size. In fact, business ethics and business communication offer a variety of university-level courses, deliver a large quantity of excellent research, possess unique disciplinary identity, have relevant academic and professional associations, and employ a multi-disciplinary perspective to solve real-world problems (Enderle, 1996;Reinsch, 1996;Graham, 2006;Cyphert, 2009 ;Rossouw, 2011). In a similar vein, IC also possesses all attributes of a new yet burgeoning academic discipline.…”

Economic Crises and Financial Disasters: The Role of Business Communication

“…Priscilla Rogers (2001), in her Outstanding Researcher lecture, argued that the field should let go of disciplinary identity and instead embrace interdisciplinary convergence. But this inclusiveness has not been easy or without conflict, as Jim Suchan (2004) and Margaret Graham (2006) described in their Outstanding Researcher lectures. What could each of the epistemologies of science, social science, and the humanities do to help us gain knowledge that we could apply to the problem illustrated by the current economic crisis?…”