F. Elizabeth Gray

Specific Oral Communication Skills Desired in New Accountancy Graduates

International research findings and anecdotal evidence alike suggest that new accountancy graduates often begin their careers with inadequate oral communication skills. However, there is a lack of well-grounded empirical data concerning precisely what accountancy employers mean by “oral communication” and what specific skills they value most highly. This article describes a research project investigating the importance of 27 oral communication skills for students intending to begin an accountancy career in New Zealand, as perceived by chartered accountancy professionals. It also examines how frequently accountancy employers are finding these desired skills in new graduates. The findings reported in this study offer important guidance concerning the oral communication skills that new graduates will find most useful in the New Zealand accountancy workplace and suggest useful directions for accountancy students internationally.

‘A distinguishing factor’: Oral Communication Skills in New Accountancy Graduates

This study into the perceived importance of oral communication skills in accountancy included the collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data from a national survey of New Zealand accountants, followed by a series of semi-structured interviews. Survey and interview data reveal agreement with existing literature: New Zealand accountancy employers find all oral communication skills somewhat important and a number of specific skills extremely important, but employers also report seldom finding the required level of oral communication proficiency in new university graduates. The study produced an inventory of 27 individual oral communication skills that will be useful to similar investigations in different national contexts. Additionally, the findings of this study may be useful to curricular development both in the New Zealand and international contexts.

Readable, audible, navigable: accessible communication for the non-profit health sector

For non-profit organizations (NPOs) working in the health arena, digital media – with its broad reach, relative cost-effectiveness, and vaunted inclusivity – might seem to offer an optimal ensemble of channels with which to offer accessible communications to groups affected by disability. However, NPOs may struggle to comprehend and meet the accessibility needs of their stakeholder groups. This article reports on the digital communication practices of seven New Zealand NPOs dedicated to serving the health and disability sector. Communication representatives of the organizations were interviewed; e-newsletters were assessed against the 2008 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0), and recipients of the organizations’ e-newsletters were surveyed for their perceptions and suggestions. Greater awareness of the need for accessibility standards across all digital communication platforms, systematic application of WCAG 2.0, and consideration of the perspectives of individuals with disabilities will assist NPOs in improving their communication efforts.

Alice Meynell, Literary Reviewing, and the Cultivation of Scorn

Arnold Bennett, editor of the late-nineteenth-century periodical Woman, produced in 1898 Journalism for Women, an advice volume that contained as much spleen as guidance. Unlike doctors who are women, of the dwellers in Fleet Street there are not two sexes, but two species—journalists and women-journalists—and the one is as far removed organically from the other as dog from cat.4

Transported: New Zealand non-profit organizations, digital platforms and the limitations of metaphor:

Digital communication has become ubiquitous to the non-profit sector, globally, and non-profit organizations (NPOs) have adopted multiple digital media channels and platforms in attempts to connect with and influence external stakeholders. This article examines how non-profits in New Zealand (NZ) are using metaphoric language around their deployment of digital media channels. Since its inception, digital information technology has been explained in terms of transport metaphors such as information superhighway and digital traffic. These metaphors have become largely invisible. A combination of empirical and interpretative analyses was deployed to examine the metaphorical framework at work in NPO discussions of their digital media engagements. The analysis uncovered rhetoric that valued movement over destination, de-emphasized the stakeholder perspective and narrowly restricted the power to contribute to organizational meaning.

Alice Meynell: Production, Reproduction, and the World of Work in the 1890s

abstract:Alice Meynell’s long and acclaimed career as journalist, essayist, and poet was built on a complex relationship with the print marketplace on which her livelihood depended. The 1890s was a watershed decade for Meynell, a period in which her ceaseless journalistic and editorial activity elevated her to a household name. The ways in which she produced and capitalized on that name, through multiply mediated publications and republications, reveal how she battled simultaneously supportive and constraining market imperatives. They also illuminate the political underpinnings of a woman writer’s efforts to manage a voracious late-nineteenth-century readership.

Journalism and Poetry in the Nineteenth Century

This article examines the inter-relationship of journalism and poetry in the nineteenth century, when poems on topical issues regularly appeared in newspapers alongside prose reports of the same events. Poems and news reports addressing the Cotton Famine of the 1860s are examined through the dual lenses of literary analysis and field theory, to query how journalism—and the idea of journalism—might be expanded, challenged, or developed by exchanges with poetry, or, in the Bourdieusian sense, how poems might modify the journalistic field. The article argues that nineteenth-century newspaper poems built on and extended the journalism-as-educative paradigm, seeking to move readers from reflection to action, and contributing significantly to the “crusadism” of the late nineteenth-century press. Nineteenth-century newspaper poetry worked with, but distinctly from, journalism to act on and mobilise the reader, and it also critically reflected on the journalism on which it drew and within which it was embedded. The ways nineteenth-century poetry worked to change the way the function of journalism was conceptualised suggest provocative implications for the twenty-first century.