Margaret Baker Graham

Connections and Fissures: Discipline Formation in Business Communication.

n the last few years, discussions in business communication have I centered on questions of identity: What is business communication ? What should business communication be? These discussions are propelled, in part, by what Rentz (1993) calls our &dquo;collective desire to understand better the work that we are engaged in&dquo; (p. 234). The more driving impetus for our discussions, however, appears to be political. Because many business communication faculty are minorities in their academic departments, their work may not be understood or appreciated by colleagues, administrators, and tenure and promotion committees who, too often, perceive business communication as skills-oriented rather than as a coherent, knowledge-producing field. This desire to bolster our status to legitimize and clarify our work

Conflicting Values Team Management Portrayed in Epic Metaphors

This article analyzes a CEOs use of extended epic metaphor in building corporate culture. Whereas much of the research on managements use of narrative has examined shorter stories and anecdotes, here the authors analyze the text of a speech written by a newly hired CEO for his upper management team. The speech, which was never delivered but was instead sent out in a leadership manual to managers in the conglomerate, begins with a narrative history of the CEOs first five months in office. In his description of events, the metaphoric language suggesting heroes and competition contradicts the principles of team management that the CEO intends to implement throughout the company. These heroic metaphors valorize individual achievement, agency, and action—values more likely to be familiar to the business culture than the cooperative values of teams. Drawn from war and sports metaphors common in the language of the popular American lexicon, the images generate more excitement and appeal than those of cooperative planning inherent in team management systems.

Power and Politeness: Administrative Writing in an “Organized Anarchy”

In addition to reflecting the social and power relationships between the writer and the reader as well as the degree of imposition, politeness strategies in administrative writing also reflect the values of the organization. Operating in the egalitarian climate perpetuated in a university setting, administrators obscured their legitimate power when they wrote nonroutine memos to faculty. Hiding and de-emphasizing their empowerment by using indirectness, tentativeness, indebtedness, and personalization, academic administrators achieved a high level of politeness. This intensified politeness contrasts with the moderated politeness used in a corporation that openly accepts hierarchy and promotes efficiency. This study, therefore, offers a context-based approach to analyzing administrative writing, an approach that can be used to uncover discourse strategies in other organizational sites.

The Rhetoric and Politics of Science in the Case of the Missouri River System

Two versions of a biological opinion written by different teams in the U.S. Fish and Wild-life Service illuminate how different rhetorical strategies reflect different values. The historical narrative in the earlier biological opinion, which is used to argue for vigorous action to protect endangered species along the Missouri River, is largely erased in the later opinion that privileges human uses of the river system. This analysis emphasizes the problematic nature of authorship when the concept is applied to a document produced in an organization or agency. Moreover, examining how authors control information reveals the power technical writers have to influence meaning making.

Imagine: Visual Design in First-Year Composition

Abstract By not discussing aesthetics when asking students to analyze advertisements or other images, composition instructors may inadvertently lead students to assume that visual elements and design principles are irrelevant, ornamental, or at best subordinate to rhetorical considerations. However, if we use the language and theory of both rhetoric and aesthetics in the composition classroom, then students may gain a deeper understanding of the similarities and differences between the visual and verbal. This, in turn, may allow students to offer more sophisticated analyses as they consider the persuasive force of visual communication.

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

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.

Administrative Writing: Bringing Context to Pedagogy.

To understand how context affects language use, students can analyze the relationship between the power dynamics in an organization and the linguistic politeness strategies in memos written to subordinates. Although this assignment offers a viable approach to understanding how power influences language, students should recognize that multiple variables can affect actual language use. They can also scrutinize the responsibility they implicitly assume when they perpetuate—or perhaps attempt to change—an organizations communication style.

Book Review: Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century, by JoAnne Yates. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 368 pp

In her acknowledgments, Yates confesses that the book took more than a decade to write. When readers see the extent of the author’s archival word, however, their reaction will be only 10 years? Yates brings the same care to how the life insurance industry entered the information age that she brought to her earlier study, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (1989). Her first book covers 1850 to 1920, whereas the second looks at 1890 to the 1970s. Because the dates overlap and cover different companies, these books act as companion pieces rather than a series. Both books are part of Studies in Industry and Society, sponsored by the Johns Hopkins University Press. This second book is divided into two parts: “Life Insurance in the Tabulator Age,” which examines the years 1890 to the 1940s, and “Life Insurance Enters the Computer Era,” which examines the 1940s to the 1970s. Because there is not a clear border between the tabulator age and the computer age, the dates in each part overlap. Part Two ends with a case study of two firms, New England Mutual Life and Aetna Life. But the rest of the book is also specific in identifying life insurance firms—Franklin Life Insurance, John Hancock Mutual Life, and Prudential Life Insurance, to name just three; thus, it seems as if there are multiple cases throughout the book. There are at least nine major points that Yates makes in her book. I have grouped similar points together although all the points are interrelated. The first three points are the following: