Pat Arneson

Communication Ethics: The Dialogic Turn

This essay reviews a community of memory about communication ethics scholarship, updating Ronald C. Arnetts “The Status of Communication Ethics Scholarship in Speech Communication Journals from 1915–1985” and outlining the evolution of communication ethics scholarship: (1) identifying metatheoretical surveys of the literature, (2) engaging Kants metaphor of “ought” to understand communication ethics as a “good,” and (3) reviewing scholarly journal articles addressing communication ethics categorized into six separate themes with a significant scholarly article serving as standard-bearer for each theme. The final contribution of this work frames the theoretical and practical movement from a communication ethic to the postmodern reality of a multiplicity of communication ethics. The “dialogic turn” embraces this multiplicity of “goods”, seeking to meet, learn from, and negotiate with difference.

Communication in a shared governance hospital: Managing emergent paradoxes

Shared Governance (SG) is a model of employee participation that is increasingly being implemented in hospitals. This paper examines communication processes that occur in SG by providing a case study of a Nursing Department at Western Hospital A review of literature related to SG in professional nursing provides a background for introducing a chronology of implementation in Western Hospital. Data was collected in long interviews conducted with 15 bedside/staff nurses. Nurse accounts revealed paradoxes that paralyze the SG process. Forms of paradox are discussed and examples of paradox are identified. Leaders must determine priorities in managing on‐site paradox and suggestions are offered for working within paradoxes to enhance organizational functioning.

Teaching free speech across the communication studies curriculum

ABSTRACT While we applaud the efforts of those instructors who teach classes in free speech, we recognize that as a discipline we are often missing important opportunities to teach students about free speech in a variety of other communication studies courses. Our discipline and our democracy rest on the tenets of free speech, and our classrooms should reflect its importance. In this essay, we outline how topics in free speech can be integrated into four different types of classes in the communication curriculum that do not focus solely on the First Amendment.

Playful Seriousness: The Virtue of Eutrapelia in Dialogue

ABSTRACT In Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle identified three moral spheres associated with human communication: speaking with decorum, conversation, and social conduct. Each sphere has a corresponding virtue. The virtue in speaking with decorum is truthfulness, the virtue in conversation is eutrapelia (refined, playful wit), and the virtue in social conduct is friendliness. Eutrapelia is gained in part by education and in part by personal experience. One learns to habituate oneself in conversation to avoid the excessive vice of bomolochos and the deficient vice of agroikos. A communicator enacts phronesis to deliberate good communicative choices, relying on one’s awareness of ethics, tact, and ingeniousness. Eutrapelia functions in dialogue to reveal unexpected connections in language, to open new interpretations in linguistic speculation, to negotiate meaning in the play of language, and to potentially shift one’s horizon of understanding about the content under consideration. Enacting eutrapelos as both refined humor and keen insight offers a place of respite that allows one to engage in the playful seriousness that is the hermeneutic work of dialogue.

Considering Social Divisiveness: Offensive Communication, Historical Fiction, and The Help

Offensive communication has long been a point of contention in the entertainment industry. When controversial artistic works are discussed in the public sphere, conversation about the work can quickly become heated. This essay considers three US Supreme Court decisions that attempt to legally limit offensive communication. In these decisions, the Court began moving away from restraining potentially offensive content and toward considerations in communication process (e.g., time, place, manner) while retaining an emphasis on breach of peace. Since the first ruling related to offensive speech, the US Supreme court has shifted to effectively rule that hate speech potentially contains social value and is deserving of Constitutional protection. One rhetorical strategy for communicating hatred is the hate stratagem. In considering historical fiction as a form of expression, a case study of The Help provides insight into how historical fiction can legally express the hate stratagem. While First Amendment court cases emphasize legally permissible speech, ethical considerations must also be a part of one’s discourse decisions.

Bridges Not Walls: The Communicative Enactment of Dialogic Storytelling

This essay examines Stewarts Bridges Not Walls: A Book about Interpersonal Communication as a textual artifact in discussing dialogic storytelling. Using interpretive qualitative research, we detail the philosophy of dialogic storytelling and then engage in an interpretation of Bridges Not Walls. This essay first situates our interpretive path through the metaphors of historicity, temporal common center of responsiveness, and horizon of historical consciousness, which manifest dialogic storytelling. The interpretive method used in this essay is a philosophically constructive approach grounded in the work of Gadamer and Ricoeur, which renders the meaning of a text through the “fusion of horizons” of the text and the historical moment while offering a public accounting of that meeting. We next provide a public accounting of the evolution of the study of a relational view of interpersonal communication. We explore Stewarts time-tested interpersonal reader Bridges Not Walls as an artifact of dialogic storytelling; the editions of his work both shape and exhibit a shift in emphasis from transactional, to humanistic, to dialogic interpersonal communication. We address the dialogue of horizons, the “between” of our interpretive metaphors and Bridges Not Walls as a text, suggesting that dialogic storytelling offers a heuristic invitation to understand the varying traditions of human communication.