Examines the linear or bureaucratic career models (dominant in career research, metaphors, paradigms, and ideologies) which maintain career myths of flexibility and individualized routes to success in organizations incapable of offering such versatility. Describes nonlinear career models which offer suggestive metaphors for re-visioning careers…

Develops an approach to rhetorical criticism by integrating the work of Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson with that of the depth psychologist C. G. Jung. Reconceptualizes the cultural psyche as composed of historical and universal elements, redefines the rhetorical and moral functions of narrative texts, and casts the rhetorical critic as…

Analyzes three trait measures (argumentativeness, verbal aggressiveness, and need for cognition) related to argumentation behavior. Confirms that all three are separate constructs. Finds significant ethnic differences among Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and European Americans for verbal aggressiveness and need for cognition. Discusses…

Uses a computerized style checker to analyze 14 direct-mail letters used to market books to a middle-class female audience. Outlines methods for correlating stylistic traits with sales success. Finds that letter effectiveness is enhanced by lowering readability levels, as well as by limiting the use of negative words and modifiers. (PRA)

Examines the influence of communication competence, roommate rapport, and loneliness on academic performance and student persistence. Finds that communication competence is important in a college student's academic and social life. Notes that the social confirmation dimension of communication competence differentiates persisters and nonpersisters…

Examines the roles of librarians and reporters and the use of information technologies by newspapers. Finds that information retrieval technologies and databases are causing the work of newspaper reporters and librarians to merge and blend. Finds that 90 percent of the newspapers studied subscribed to a least one database, and 60 percent searched…

Develops an instrument to study organizational conflict management as a disputing process involving the social escalation from grievance to conflict and dispute stages. Finds differences in dispute process according to different strengths of informal relations. (SR)

Confirms a model of language intensity effects based on information processing theory, in which attitude change was a multiplicative function of message discrepancy, perceived credibility, and message strength, adjusted for counterarguing, with trustworthiness as the salient source perception variable. (SR)

Describes a case study of an organization that recently began implementing W. E. Deming's Total Quality (TQ). Finds and discusses five framing devices used in routine work conversations between leaders and members to implement the TQ vision: communicated predicaments, possible futures, jargon and vision themes, positive spin, and agenda setting.…

Analyzes a particular conversation which invokes Soviet and U.S. cultures, demonstrating how conversation is, at least in part, shaped by cultural systems, and how cultural systems differently employ a generic ritual communicative form. (SR)

Reflects briefly on how the author chooses what research to do. Discusses specific communication research projects that arose from near-sighted, midrange, and far-sighted planning. (RS)

Explores how graphic symbols came to represent underlying linguistic constituents. It is suggested that the relationship between speech and writing may be just the opposite of what is traditionally assumed. Writing systems may provide the concepts and categories for thinking about the structure of speech rather than the reverse. (47 references)…

Suggests that much of communication scholarship has been message driven and that this dominant form of explaining what communication is or does is slowly being challenged by reflexive explanations, which see humans as cognitively autonomous beings, reflexive practitioners of communication with others, and morally responsible interveners in the…

Argues that the issue of difference is at the root of the problems in the field of communication. Maintains that it is how the differences that characterize human beings, their symbolic lives, and their symbolic products are treated that confounds the field. Discusses the methodological moves involved in locating something defined as difference.…

Compares television phone-in polls to random sample polling. Finds significant differences between the two types of opinion indicators. Shows that persons with strongly held opinions and a pro-change, activist stance are more likely to respond in phone-in polls. (SR)