Clive Muir

Using Consulting Projects to Teach Critical-Thinking Skills in Business Communication.

There is more to successful communication than learning the styles and proce dures often found in the traditional business communication syllabus. In this article, I discuss the benefits of using a critical-thinking approach to helping students to understand the complex social and political environment in which business communication is practiced. I explain how communication consult ing projects can be used to examine the context of organizational communica tion. Finally, I discuss the implications for teaching business and technical communication using a real-world, critical approach.

Responding to Public Issues: An Exercise in Managerial Communication

Communicating about issues or crises has become one of the most important tasks for managers who must address various stakeholders that have become more influential in the decisions, values, policies, and practices of the organization. This article describes an issue communication exercise for upper-level undergraduate and graduate business students. The students learn to examine public issues that companies face and to use traditional communication formats to address internal audiences (via memos, flyers, and reports) and external audiences (via personal letters, public letters, and reports) by using discourse appropriate to the rhetorical contexts of the issues.

Emotions at Work

Business Communication Quarterly, Volume 69, Number 4, December 2006 434-449 OVER THE PAST DECADE, there has been a surge of interest in the role of emotions in our lives at work. Thanks to the phenomenal success of Daniel Goleman’s (1995) Emotional Intelligence, managers and employees all over the world began looking for ways to understand emotions in order to manage interpersonal behaviors. While such efforts traditionally focused on enhancing teamwork and behaving appropriately toward customers, we now see research on the environment that influences our emotions and on the emotional wellbeing of employees. At the ABC Southeast/East United States conference last April, the theme “Our Emotions at Work” drew over 40 paper presentations dealing with a range of workplace issues, including aggression, verbal abuse, sexual harassment, computer flaming, blogging, assertiveness training, grapevines, and nonverbal behavior. Four of these papers were selected for this column. DeKay’s article reports on a study that examined the challenge of expressing emotion in the electronic job application process. He found that email cover letters that explicitly “demonstrated emotional engagement” with the position and prospective employer were more successful in securing job interviews than those letters that merely mentioned an interest in the job and that a résumé was attached. DeKay recommends that business communication teachers emphasize the “controlled expression of emotion” in their email job applications.

Book Review : Achieving Success Through Social Capital By Wayne Baker. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., 2000. 256 pages

ocial capital is a hot topic in organizations today. The concept, which gained wide appeal among social scientists in the mid-1980s with Bourdieu’s (1985) essay, The Forms of Capital, has been used to explain a variety of social issues, related to civic involvement, public school education, youth behavior, public health, economic development, and ethnic relations (Adler & Kwon, 2000). Then in 2000, Putnam’s classic, Bowling Alone, which chronicles American society’s increasing individualism, caught the attention of the popular media, and communities around the country began holding workshops to evaluate and repair their social capital. Corporations have begun to explore its currency as they face various operational and personnel changes and challenges. I, too, became fascinated with the term as I conducted field research on entre-

Smiling With Customers

EFFECTIVE CUSTOMER SERVICE usually relies on the artful interplay of verbal and nonverbal behaviors by service givers and customers. In the 2 decades since the publication of the influential bestseller Service America: Doing Business in the New Economy (Albrecht & Zemke, 1985), the movement toward refining the behaviors of service employees spawned a flood of “consulting firms, and even professional societies and academic research programs” (Albrecht, 2008). One nonverbal behavior that has received much attention for its ability to influence customers is the smile. Long regarded as a persuasive tool, the infectious smile is “transforming a facial expression into a global industry” (Womack, 2004). In this brief article, I discuss the psychosocial meaning of smiles and how service operations benefit from the smiles of their frontline employees. As well, I examine the challenge that the “smile requirement” imposes on some employees. Finally, I share one trainer/ consultant’s views on smiles and service training.

Book Reviews : The Social Life of Information By John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000. 320 pages

ately, I have been indulging in the word &dquo;information,&dquo; noting its conLtrived conjugations (infomate, infomedia, infomercial, informatics) and its prodigious pairings (information highway, information systems, information technology, information broker). Such nomenclatures designate information as an object to be transcribed, traded, and transmitted, with the help of state-of-the-art vehicles and busy information workers. Many organizations have been constructing information stations (a.k.a. computer clusters) to ensure their places at the &dquo;revolution.&dquo; We, as busi-

Book Reviews : Communicators Guide: For Federal, State, Regional, and Local Communicators. Marci Hilt. Washington, DC: Federal Communicators Network, 2000. 64 pages

cratic language seems to be evasive-the root of which is a lack of competence&dquo; (Shuy, 1998, p. 178), and that &dquo;doublespeak also allows politicians to explain away the contradictions between their words and their actions&dquo; (Lutz, 1996, p. 158). In 1998 thenPresident Clinton issued a memorandum requiring that all federal agencies write documents using plain language. This caused a flurry of activities as agencies reworded regulations, redesigned forms and booklets, and created user-friendly Websites. To help government agencies and their employees with this transition, 20 contributors from government, academia, and the private sector have written the Communicators Guide. Under the aegis of the Federal Communicators Network, a group of over 700 writers, edi-

Book Reviews : The Portable Business writer William Murdick. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. 218 pp

more commonplace in a typical business environment, instructors must construct a multifaceted course that exposes students to the wide range of conimunication skills now required for work. One approach is to rely less on a required textbook so that students spend less time reading and more time applying concepts and guidelines to realistic writing projects. For this reason, I find Nl11r~ dick’s The Portable Business Writer very useful. For such a compact text, The Potable Business Writer provides a comprehensive view of the oral, written, and graphic dimensions of business communication for beginning and advanced students as well as full-time professionals.The author’s style reflects a necessary trend in business communication: brevity, clarity, accessibility, and a focus on plain language.