Tom Bruyer

“We Never Even Wondered Whether We Trusted Them or Not”: From Freedom to Mutuality in a Student Research Project

Of the many lines of research in the broad field of business and professional communication, one that has received increasing attention over the past few years is focussed on the complex interactions between practice and learning. Sarangi and Candlin (2010), for example, have discussed the impact of inviting practitioners to the classroom in order to share their expertise in a specific field of interest. More recently, Drury-Grogan & Russ (2013) have looked at how to integrate simulations of real cases in pedagogical settings. As Blake (1991) indicated, the ultimate step in bridging the gap between learning and practice is to get the students out of the classroom and provide them with opportunities to work with practitioners in the work field. This paper reports on one such effort made in the context of the master’s program in Multilingual Business Communication (MBC) at Ghent University, where students work in teams on a specific research project that has been commissioned by a professional organization. In particular, we present a case study on a student research project in the area of employer branding that was conducted for the Belgian division of a multinational in the food industry.

Good Pharma? How Business Communication Research Can Help Bridge the Gap Between Students and Practitioners

This article presents a case-based exploration of the complex interactions between learning, research, and practice in the field of business and professional communication. It focuses on a student research project in the area of corporate social responsibility in the biopharmaceutical industry. Adopting an autoethnographic approach, we aim to document the students’ development from researchers to insiders or even consultants. The findings reveal that while the students feel confident in their roles as researchers, they fail to live up to some of the commissioning practitioners’ expectations. The study concludes by providing guidelines to strengthen interaction between students and practitioners.

Book review: Leon Barkho, News from the BBC, CNN and Al-Jazeera. How the Three Broadcasters Cover the Middle East:

The two chapters in Part IV report on institutional responses to HIV/AIDS, but from two opposing perspectives. While Mark Finn and Srikant Sarangi believe the Europeanbased individualized methods of HIV/AIDS prevention used in India have failed in such a group-based culture (Chapter 11), Annabelle Mooney in contrast illustrates, through a semantic-pragmatic analysis of HIV/AIDS signs on the Andaman Islands, that the disease has actually been kept under control (Chapter 12). These two chapters appropriately lead us to evaluate and accept the messages in the previous chapters as context-specific and socioculturally significant. In all, this book, through its mix of sociological, anthropological, autobiographical and linguistic approaches, succeeds both in contributing to knowledge in this domain and in presenting a more humane and participatory dimension to what has been treated with bias, stigma and stereotypes often limited to gay men and sub-Saharan Africa. The many suggestions on how HIV/AIDS prevention could be better managed in specific educational and cultural contexts make the volume a great companion for social workers, peer group trainers, policy-makers, NGO facilitators, educators, and even parents and traditional rulers. Using a personal story, as Chapter 1 does, is innovative and will help give face to a condition often described by social scientists only as a research object. The discourses and levels of analysis in the book provide linguists and researchers in communication studies with a fresh glimpse into strategies in interpersonal, inter-group and official communication not only in offline face-to-face contexts but also in computer-mediated situations. This book is therefore a good companion for students and researchers interested in linguistic and communicative aspects of HIV/ AIDS discourses.