Dale Cyphert

Integrating Communication Across the MBA Curriculum

THE CHALLENGE AT the University of Northern Iowa, perhaps even more than with most 1vlBA programs, has been to integrate communication into the curriculum. UNI, an AACSB accredited program, has recently begun to offer an accelerated MBA program that can be completed in a single-albeit very intense-year of study. While the program has historically catered to executives in the local community, the accelerated schedule has proven very attractive to international students who now comprise about 30 percent of a typical class.

Who We Are and What We Do, 2008

A recent survey of some Association for Business Communication members highlights changes in the organizations focus over the past 40 years. Members continue to highly value pedagogical relevance, but the Association for Business Communication clearly attracts research-active academics, suggesting potential directions for the organization.

Presentation Technology in the Age of Electronic Eloquence: From Visual Aid to Visual Rhetoric

Attention to presentation technology in the public speaking classroom has grown along with its contemporary use, but instruction generally positions the topic as a subset of visual aids. As contemporary public discourse enters an age of electronic eloquence, instructional focus on verbal communication might limit students’ capacity to effectively participate in an evolving public sphere. Instruction that more fully integrates visual, verbal, and haptic forms of communication might provide a better foundation for effective civic participation in the media age.

Ideology, knowledge and text: Pulling at the knot in Ariadne's thread

Contemporary controversies in rhetorical criticism cluster in three ostensibly separate areas: the ethical and political consequences of ideological or cultural criticism, the possibility and desirability of viewing rhetoric as an epistemic process, and the implications of broadening the purview of rhetoric beyond text to include cultural and personal performance. In each of these realms, current theory provides no conceptual room for reconciling oppositional positions. Proponents are left to agree to disagree‐a civil enough resolution within the discipline, but a sign that the current paradigm might have outlived its usefulness. This essay argues that contemporary critical vexations are not unrelated, but stem from a single theoretical source: a failure to consistently distinguish between culture‐bound rhetorical practice and the transcultural processes by which humans create and maintain rhetorical community.

The Rhetorical Analysis of Business Speech Unresolved Questions

Serious attention to the rhetorical analysis and criticism of the public discourse of business leaders can offer important insights about influential participants in political and social decision-making processes, contributing to the development of a coherent body of scholarship that addresses communication at the intersection of business, rhetoric, and society.

In search of the corporate citizen: the emerging discourse of corporate ecology

Examinations of corporate discourse tend to dichotomize ethical stakeholder relationships and strategic business decisions, but when the ethical/economic conflict is cast in rhetorical terms, the apparent contradictions can be seen as a failure of traditional Western managerial discourse. Decision making within bureaucratic organizations has followed the traditionally rational, assertive forms of Western discourse, but management theorists increasingly urge corporations to adopt practices more appropriate for complex, adaptive, self‐organizing communities. This emerging rhetorical form has practical utility in an adaptive, post‐industrial “learning organization” but also allows a performance of organizational citizenship that integrates ethical and economic values in a discourse of corporate ecology.

Persuading the Body: A Rhetoric of Action in The Fugitive

A rhetorical examination of The Fugitive as a “relationship movie” examines its persuasive use of action, which calls on the viewers implicit physical knowledge and tacit awareness of kinesthetic significance, as well as symbolic interpretations of action within the narrative structure. The potential of cinematic forms to call forth physiological responses in an audience has not traditionally been considered a rhetorical dimension, but this contemporary action film illustrates the rhetorical role of communicative physicality. A complete description of the films argument requires a theory of rhetoric that accounts for the integrated effects of perception, physiology, and cognition. Such theory offers insights into the rhetorical impact of film more generally, as well as a framework to consider the rhetorical significance of embodied communication.

Curricular Implications of Virtual World Technology: A Review of Business Applications.

As business organizations grow increasingly virtual, traditional principles of organizational communication require examination and modification. This article considers the curricular implications of the growing business uses of virtual world technology through three different lenses—students as employee-users, students as strategic designers and decision makers, and students as theorists. The instructor’s approach to communication principles relevant to persistent virtual worlds should be grounded in current and anticipated business applications. Emerging business practice provides guidance regarding the communication principles and skills that might be required of students entering careers in a contemporary business world of networked, digitized, and virtually enhanced communication.

Strategic use of the unsayable: Paradox as argument in Gödel's theorem

Godels Theorem was the mathematical proof that has been said to mark the loss of certainty in formal logic; Lyotard named it as the beginning of the post‐modern reformulation of the nature of knowledge. Godels proof is also an eloquent paradigm‐changing text, demonstrating the inability of language, however perfect, to represent reality in a way that guarantees unambiguous communication. Instead, he uses paradox as an alternative form of argument that creates certainty through performance.

Developing Communication Management Skills Integrated Assessment and Reflection in an Experiential Learning Context

The value of experiential learning is widely acknowledged, especially for the development of communication skills, but students are not always aware of their own learning. While we can observe students practicing targeted skills during the experiential activity, the experience can also color their explicit understanding of those skills. Transfer of applied knowledge to managerial contexts requires an explicit grasp of the skills as appropriate solutions to the problems they encounter within the experiential team. This article reports the adaptation of assessment processes to encourage the reflection steps necessary for developing the desired managerial perspective on team communication.