Mary Helen Brown

That reminds me of a story: Speech action in organizational socialization

This study demonstrates how the use of stories relates to the socialization of members of an organization. Research questions concerning the form, subject matter, and function of stories are examined. Interviews with 75 organizational members reveal 363 stories which are analyzed through use of partitioned Chi‐square. The analysis of these factors indicates that storytelling acts as a form of sense‐making as the member moves through the stages of organizational socialization.

Defining Stories in Organizations: Characteristics and Functions

Stories arc an important and influential aspect of an o-gani nation’s discourse. This essay explores the characteristics and functions of stories in the organizational selling. In this examination, definitional criteria are established for the identification of organizational slories as a conversational unit. Stories must exhibit (a) a ring of truth, (b) relevance for the membership, (c) a story grammar, and (d) a sense of temporality. In addition, stories in organizations perform a variety of functions that work toward shaping organizational reality fur members. These functions include (a) uncertainty reduction, (b) management of meaning, and (c) bonding and identification. Sample itories drawn from a county jail are used throughout the chapter to illustrate the points being established. In addition, two major areas for research examining organizational stories are outlined: (a) story circumstances and (b) story applications.

Culture as text: The development of an organizational narrative

An organizations culture is captured and understood as text. The use of grounded theory serves as a basis for an interpretative narrative that provides researchers with a method for presenting the everyday dramas members find important in organizations. The story‐form captures scenic elements, action, and characters. The narrative presented here acts as a means of displaying the cultural dialectic, cultural strain, and cultural sub‐texts.

“Reading”; an organization's culture: An examination of stories in nursing homes

This essay argues that the ability to “read”; the stories members tell provides insight into the culture of a nursing home. Using qualitative techniques, the essay exmines the stories found in nursing homes and demonstrates how these stories reveal heroes and villains in the organization, explain unwritten rules, provide comic relief for their members, and define success and failure within the facilities. Possible applications of the information obtained from stories are also discussed.

Relational referents in the nursing home: The staff to resident link

The relationships between staff members and residents is seen to be an important part of the effective operation of a nursing home. This essay argues that aspects of this relational link are expressed through the referents used by staff members with regard to residents. Chi‐square analyses of conversational data reveal that the socialization stages and hierarchical levels of staff members are related to the type of referents employed. Specifically, members at the encounter stage use dysfunctional referents to a greater extent than members at other levels. As members become socialized these referents fall more closely in line with organizational values. Further, administrators are more likely to use organizationally approved referents, the nursing staff is most likely to use relational referents, and nurse aides are most likely to employ dysfunctional referents.

The Development and Validation of the Vocalic Sensitivity Test.

Abstract Recent research has established that presbycusis (the hearing loss associated with aging) may be marked by a second dimension of hearing loss first experienced by people in their 70s. This second dimension of presbycusis appears to be a loss in vocalic sensitivity, i.e., the ability to hear the nonverbal aspects of speech. This article reports on the development of the Vocalic Sensitivity Test, which controls for the verbal elements in speech while at the same time allowing for the vocalics to exercise their normal metacommunicative function of commenting on the words. The Vocalic Sensitivity Test is shown to possess high reliability for its total scores and for two of its four subscales. In addition, the Vocalic Sensitivity Test is validated by its systematic relationships with subscales of the Watson-Barker Listening Test, the Kentucky Comprehensive Listening Test, and the PONS TeSt.

The Multidimensionality of Presbycusis: Hearing Losses on the Content and Relational Dimensions of Speech

Abstract Presbycusis, the age associated decline in hearing and listening, has been traditionally conceptualized as the progressive inability to distinguish phonemes and hence to apprehend the content of spoken communication. Based on the distinction between the content and relational dimensions of communication, this study posed the possibility that presbycusis also involves a loss of listening ability along the relational dimension of communication. Using five measures of speech discrimination and listening, the study confirmed that aging is significantly associated with losses on the content and relational dimensions of listening. Furthermore, there are different rates of aging for these two dimensions. Whereas the loss on the content dimension is linearly related to age, the loss on the relational dimension is curvilinearly related to age with little decline in ability until a relatively drastic loss occurs in the early to mid-70s. These results indicate that the communicative impact of presbycusis is...