Jone Rymer

Team Projects: Achieving their Full Potential:

Team projects offer many pedagogical benefits, as is evident from their widespread use by marketing instructors. This article summarizes the major benefits of team projects, including new perspectives from educational research, and discusses a significant problem that can undermine these benefits, that of unequal team member contributions. The authors propose a reward structure with both individual and group grading components as a means to achieve the full potential of group assignments. The article concludes with a description of several techniques for individual evaluation.

The Genre System of the Harvard Case Method

Focusing on the case write-up within the Harvard case method of instruction, this study provides historical and empirical evidence for the theory of genre systems. The Harvard case literature and interviews at a case-based business school in the Harvard tradition show that the purpose of this largely ignored written genre is to prepare students to participate in the primary genre, oral classroom discussion of the case. The case genre system provides highly conventionalized conductor-choreographer roles for instructors and blunt, detached consultant roles for student writers/speakers who repeatedly enact decisive, adversarial personae affirming practices and values of the business school.

Business E-Mail: Guidelines for Users

medium in business today, many businesspeople and business students take it casually and fail to realize its full potential. It’s easy to assume that since e-mail can be produced quickly and easily, readers can comprehend e-mail messages quickly and easily too. Yet overly speedy e-mail writing can result in much slower e-mail reading and even miscommunication. Moreover, e-mail merits considerable attention because it comprises much of management work today-e.g., &dquo;I no longer meet with my team, I e-mail them.&dquo; Overall, e-mail is work, important work, which requires time and know-how to use effectively. The purpose of these guidelines is to help you become more effective and efficient in the use of e-mail. Since e-mail practices

Business and Management Communication Cases: Challenges and Opportunities

cases relevant to business communication in the workplace and functional for a wide range of users in both undergraduate and MBA programs. Instructors may photocopy the cases freely for educational use (see the Permission to Photocopy section on the inside of the BCQ front cover). Issues to facilitate incorporating cases into teaching are discussed in this introduction, and further assistance in integrating the cases into curricula and classrooms is available at the BCQ Web site, which includes teaching notes for most of the cases, as well as student sample communications: http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/rea/bcq

The Contexts of Collaborative Writing

Just a few years ago, most business communication textbooks made no mention of collaborative writing, journals published only occasional articles on the subject, and many of our colleagues ignored collaboration~onsidering it at best a special interest area at conferences, at worst the current fad from composition. Today, collaborative writing has become a central concern for business communication-a topic that cannot be ignored by textbook authors, by journal editors, or by

How Researchers Gain Access to Organizations

a guest scholar and will focus on a single practical issue, often presenting several different perspectives. The Research Committee invites your participation to help make &dquo;Doing Research&dquo; a provocative, helpful column. Please contact me to suggest topics for future columns, offer to edit a column, or recommend editors and writers. (LJntil June 30, phone 310-5454402 ; e-mail: jrymer@agsm.ucla.edu; fax: 310-2062002. After July 1, phone 313-577-4522; e-mail: jrymer@cms.cc.wayne.edu; fax: 313-577-5486.) —JR

Langley Communications: Socializing and Snooping on E-mail.

as brochures), and develops employee training programs for parts suppliers in the automobile and trucking industries. Almost a year ago, the company installed an e-mail system with access to the Internet but provided no policy or guidelines for use and, ironically, offered only a single brief training session for employees. Because of the crush of new business, management simply assumed that e-mail would become another useful medium for communicating within the company, including its offices in other cities, and with clients.

Doing Research: A Column Sponsored by the ABC Research Committee

Although coauthorship is becoming the dominant mode of publication among business communication researchers, collaboration is relatively uncommon among researchers studying business writing. The major journals of our field tell the outlines of the story. Whereas coauthorship accounts for over 60 percent of the articles in comprehensive publications such as The Journal of Business Communication (JBC; Reinsch & Lewis, 1993) and Management Communication Quarterly (MC(a), coauthored papers represent less than a third of those in The Journal of Business and Technical Communication (JBTC), a forum devoted primarily to writing. This column describes exceptions to the general rule that those studying business writing work alone. These essays tell the stories of long-term partners, collaborators who have been doing research together for several years and who continue today with new projects. All these teams study workplace writing. All favor qualitative methods. All but one of the co-authors come from English department backgrounds. And all

Using Qualitative Research to Generate Theory.

In qualitative research, one procedure that almost always produces better data is triangulation: using multiple methods to view a single object Geoffrey A. Cross (University of Louisville) uses triangulation to study the production of a two-page letter over a 77-day period in &dquo;A Bakhtinian Exploration of Factors Affecting the Collaborative Writing of an Executive Letter of an Annual Report7 (1990). Cross’s ethnographic case study not only contributes to our understanding of how collaboration affects the creation of texts in organizations but also serves as an excellent example of how qualitative methods can be used effectively. Over five months, Cross observed employees of a large midwestern insurance company as they revised an executive letter for the annual report through seven major drafts. He examined 16 factors that influenced this largely unsuccessful collaborative writing process. Denzin (1978) identifies four types of triangulation: data triangulation, theory triangulation, investigator triangulation, and methodological triangulation. Cross achieved rich data triangulation by collecting nine types of data: three kinds of documents from participants (personal documents, internal official documents, and exter-

What Makes Good Qualitative Research? Analyses of Four Excellent Qualitative Studies

in words (Marshall & Rossman, 1989, pp. 9-11). The category thus includes such varied products as ethnographies, case studies, and analyses of texts. While standards for quantitative research are reasonably well-established, qualitative research often seems harder to evaluate. Without hard numbers to point to, its conclusions seem idiosyncratic to the individual researcher. What’s more, the flexibility and variation in qualitative research mean that standards differ, with some criteria applying more to one study than another. Given this variety, how are we to judge the value of qualitative research? This &dquo;Doing Research&dquo; column attempts to answer that question by asking four people who perform qualitative research to select articles they see as excellent and to analyze what makes each piece outstanding (cm Sullivan & Spilka, 1992). In keeping with the aims of &dquo;Doing Research,&dquo; the articles analyzed here are deliberately chosen from slightly out-of-the-way sources. It can be difficult to keep track of the journals in related fields and the increasing number of interesting anthologies being published. The authors of this column function as colleagues at a dis-