Ronald C. Arnett

Organizational Ethical Standards and Organizational Commitment

Organizations interested in employee ethics compliance face the problem of conflict between employee and organizational ethical standards. Socializing new employees is one way of assuring compliance. Important for longer term employees as well as new ones, however, is making those standards visible and then operable in the daily life of an organization. This study, conducted in one large organization, found that, depending on organizational level, awareness of an organizations ethical standards is predicted by managerial adherence to and organizational compliance with those standards and/or discussions with peers. Regardless of level, organizational commitment was predicted most strongly by managerial adherence to organizational standards. These findings have theoretical implications for the fields of business ethics, organizational identity and organizational socialization and practical implications for the implementation of ethics policies.

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.

Metaphorical Guidance: Administration as Building and Renovation.

This essay, undergirded by the insights of Christopher Lasch, outlines the practicality of applying the metaphors of building and renovation to administration. This essay acknowledges the difficulty of applying such metaphors in an era where the importance of discovering meaning through institutional life is often dismissed. However, institutions are well‐served by administrators who function as “builders” and “renovators,” trying to leave something behind of value in their place of work. Institutions are constantly being created and re‐created, and it is the responsibility of the administrator to help “build” and “renovate” an institution capable of passing on ethical values, ideas and beliefs to the next generation of students, faculty and alumni.

Interpretive Inquiry as Qualitative Communication Research

Qualitative communication research approaches vary from grounded theory and participant-observation to Q-sort, content analysis, and ethnographic inquiry—to name but a few. What often rests outside the qualitative rubric is the hermeneutic tradition of interpretive scholarship. This essay unites interpretive inquiry and qualitative research in summary fashion by outlining a macro understanding of qualitative communication inquiry, an interpretive approach to communication scholarship within a philosophical tradition entitled philosophical hermeneutics, and finally a public roadmap of how to understand and engage interpretive inquiry as a form of qualitative research in communication. This essay advocates interpretive inquiry as an additional contributor to the ongoing tradition of qualitative research in communication.

Pointing the Way to Communication Ethics Theory: The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgement

This essay outlines the contribution of Michael Hydes The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgement to the study and practice of communication ethics. Hyde provides theoretical insights for engaging communication ethics. Communication ethics in a postmodern context requires theoretical grounding; the presupposition that there is one understanding of communication ethics no longer exists in a time of narrative and virtue contention. The importance of this book is that it points to a theoretical understanding of an area of study now marked more by difference than by commonality.

Dialogic Learning as First Principle in Communication Ethics

This article frames a dialogic learning theory of communication ethics based upon Buber (1955, 1958), Gadamer (1988), Freire (2000), and Arendt (1998). This communication ethics theory privileges dialogic learning as first principle, accompanied by attending and listening as one searches for temporal answers emerging among three coordinates: (a) communicative partners (self and Other), (b) communicative content, and (c) the communicative demands of the historical moment. We situate a communication ethic within a philosophical and pragmatic first principle: dialogic learning (Arnett, Fritz, & Bell, 2009), working within the tradition of Levinas (2001) that ethics is first philosophy and first principle (Bergo, 1999).

Sustaining Institutional Ethos and Integrity: Management in a Postmodern Moment

A local hospital runs a campaign for being a place of “caring and healing”. In conversation with a consultant for that hospital, one hears contradictory insights. Employees feel underpaid in a hospital strapped for money, unable to supply the latest equipment. The advertising misrepresents the “real” story that guides the hospital. Public information has managerial and employee consequences. Cynicism, fueled by disconnection between public mission and organizational reality, decreases managerial effectiveness and endangers institutional integrity and ethos. Health care institutions need communication that promotes organizational health, lessening the possibility of organizational cynicism.

Defining Philosophy of Communication: Difference and Identity

This article defines philosophy of communication as an emerging option in the doing of qualitative research in communication, differentiating its identity from philosophy proper. Philosophy of communication, in its commitment to questions of meaning and understanding, illuminates communicative understanding and meaning in the engagement of qualitative research in communication.

The Lecture as Testimony: In a Technological Age

The question of this essay, shaped by a changing historical moment of a digital age, examines the old as garnering renewed importance. The text is old wine ever vital and now rediscovered in new wine skins of a digital age. This essay invites a creative opening for a historically important standpoint: the necessity of the understanding the rhetorical importance of the lecture as testimony in an era of technological change. The digital world in this case permits the old to find new energy and purpose in a changing rhetorical environment where the constant of text (that which matters) propels both a traditional and an ever-changing technological world. In a digital world of blurred issues of time, space, and speaker/audience, one must ask a basic question: Is there a rhetorical rationale for reliance on the lecture in a digital and information age? I contend that the connecting link between the lecture as a traditional form of rhetoric and digital modalities is the notion of text.

Philosophy of Communication: Qualitative Research, Questions in Action

Qualitative research meets and gathers insight and information, commencing with the particular. Qualitative research moves us from reductive and abstract engagement to experience of the subject matter before us. Philosophy of communication, understood as qualitative research in action, centers inquiry on questioning, reading, writing, editing, thinking, and interpretation. These five qualitative acts of inquiry are not isolated categories, yet they are simultaneously distinct characteristics within philosophy of communication scholarship. I contend that these five coordinates facilitate the performative engagement of philosophy of communication inquiry. I offer a story centered on five research coordinates, explicated with scholars repeatedly referenced in philosophy of communication literature. I engage these scholars in a manner akin to Walter Benjamin’s (1968) “pearl diving,” seeking insight from selected parts of their copious contributions. Their collective insights function as threads with which I weave a story about the doing of philosophy of communication.