Management Speak Research Articles

Understanding American Business Jargon: A Dictionary (2nd edition)

Understanding American Business Jargon: A Dictionary (2nd edition)

Understanding American business jargon: a dictionary

Understanding American business jargon: a dictionary

Sword play: The cultural semiotics of violent scapegoating and sexual and racial othering

The abiding cultural significance of swords, in an age of technologically-sophisticated weapons of mass destruction, is as much a semiotic puzzle as it is a socio-psychological one. The semiotics of swords displays certain features - commodity fetishism, the business speak of 'cutting edge' performance, primitive vitality, and related elements - that reveal the double-ness of desire in market society, the simultaneous desire to negate the capitalist present in favor of a primitivist past, together with an invigoration of the present through tropes of violent conflict. The edginess of sword-semiotics also marks certain points of cultural instability, in terms of race, gender, and sexuality, evincing an incessantly transgressive impulse.

More talk, less business speak

In the not too distant past, nurses were frequently reticent about speaking out about concerns over staffing levels, equipment shortages and the effect on patient care. Time, and the ever-expanding roles nurses now embrace, has led to more openness in the debate about high quality, patient-directed health care – a debate now often fronted by nurses.

The no-nonsense guide to climate change

The hole in the ozone layer is now the size of a continent. Ships can negotiate the North West Passage without confronting pack ice. Floods devastate Mozambique and tinder-dry forests of the American North-West go up in a blaze. Yet scientists are still divided as to whether this is a random blip or an irreversible trend. Worse, political and corporate jargon confuses the issues, sometimes with deliberate disinformation. This book charts up-to-the-minute developments, explores the extent that the human race is responsible for the catastrophes and suggests what can be done to prevent them.

Book Review: Guide to Managerial Communication: Effective Business Writing and Speaking

Book Review: Guide to Managerial Communication: Effective Business Writing and Speaking

Why Companies and Countries are Taking On Each Other's Roles

The relationship between countries and companies is changing. In some ways they are becoming more like each other. But in other respects they are beginning to exchange roles. Nations increasingly emphasize nationality; global companies increasingly ignore it. Nations increasingly use business speak, gdp and so on; global companies increasingly emphasize soft issues. The relationship between companies and countries is getting closer. They compete, they overlap, they swap places.

Understanding American business jargon: a dictionary

In the 1990s, the American workplace is undergoing right-sizing, restructuring, downsizing, empowerment, and paradigm shifts! In other words, fewer people are attempting to do more tasks. Business buzzwords help convey ideas, issues, or responses. Business jargon is communication shorthand, but people need to correctly interpret this shorthand, which requires a common understanding. American business people too frequently assume new individuals in their organization and their professional counterparts around the world understand business jargon. This book is a practical reference for students, managers, and international business people trying to comprehend the fast-paced buzzword-laden language used by business people in the United States.

The knowledge-based marketing concept – a basis for global business

Globalisation of competition is leading to firms becoming customer-oriented and knowledge-oriented. Firms are discovering that the customers exist both outside and inside the firm. Knowledge is said to be our new form of capital and the only source of competitive advantage for global businesses. Knowledge management and market management processes are interdependent and essential for global business. This paper explores the meaning of customer- and knowledge-orientation in the context of marketing and more specifically global business. We introduce the knowledge-based marketing concept as a conceptual framework, which provides a coherent basis for firms to: (i) exploit knowledge, by co-ordinating action more effectively; and (ii) to gain competitive superiority by becoming more customer-oriented. We also refine the traditional marketing concept to acquire a better fit with a global business context and introduce the IT-enabling marketing concept. Hence knowledge management and customer-orientation becomes more than just popular business jargon.

Quality Management for Poison Centers

Poison centers are struggling with the concept of service quality and how to improve it. The business world has dealt with this concept by establishing internationally agreed-upon criteria for quality management. Poison centers deliver health care services and can benefit from the approach taken by the corporate community. This review article takes the criteria of quality management proposed by the ISO 9000 series guidelines and demonstrates their applicability to poison center operations by translating the business jargon of the ISO 9000 series into terminology more familiar to health care professionals and by providing examples and approaches to satisfy specific guidelines. This article offers poison center staff a framework to help them understand how to improve the quality of service they provide.

Quality in nurse education: an exploration of the concept of students as customers

The issues of Quality and Quality Assurance in nurse education, have become prominent in the design, management and marketing of courses. However, quality is a concept which has many meanings. One of the central ideas which has emerged from the current discourses on quality, is that of the ‘customer’. In the new business jargon of the 1990s, with its emphasis on the market and competition, the importance of ‘satisfying the needs of the customer/consumer’ has been a dominant theme. One of the customers of nurse education is seen as the student. The reconceptualization of the student as customer may carry with it, connotations which do not readily fit into the context of education and learning as a jointly negotiated process. A collaborative, rather than consumerist model is proposed as a preferable basis for the ensuring of quality, and the involvement of students in that process. Such a model, would be in line with a truly student-centred approach to nurse education, where power is shared between those involved in the process. The importance of the current inequality of power in student-teacher relationships is a barrier to such an approach and true student participation, rather than tokenism is called for.

Confessions of a Researcher: A Reply to Kitty Locker

I believe that Professor Locker has focused on an important topic with this presentation. Much attention recently has correctly been drawn to interdisciplinarity within the academic ranks. Much evidence supports the contention that we have built detrimental walls between various disciplines. Accordingly, it is difficult to disagree with Professor Locker's position that interdisciplinary research is important for the advancement of knowledge in business communication. While it is easy to support the notion of interdisciplinarity, application of it is much more difficult. Dr. Locker suggests, our professional training is opposed to interdisciplinary. Not only our research paradigms, but our entire way of thinking, are skewed toward a single discipline. And, unfortunately, we are not even aware that we are strongly biased toward this approach. a member of the academic community, I understand that research from another discipline has value and it should be respected. Granted, I have difficulty understanding why some research--for instance on the average family size of some extinct culture--is important; but I have been trained to believe that research for the sake of knowledge is what advances societies. But this is not to say that this esoteric research has any value to my area of inquiry. Accordingly, I understand that a research publication by Kitty Locker (1987) As Per Your Request: A History of Business Jargon and the article, From Press Book and Pigeonhole to Vertical Filing: Revolution in Storage and Access Systems for Correspondence by Yates (1982) may be good pieces of intellectual inquiry but these articles aren't what I would have termed valuable research. The research might be interesting to someone else in his or her own narrow field of inquiry but I seriously doubted that it had any applied value for of us doing serious research in business communication. But now I must admit that I never really read journal articles unless they applied to my own narrow areas of research interest. Generally when I reviewed a new issue of The Journal of Business Communication or some related journal and saw an article with a rhetorical slant, I said to myself, here is another of those types of articles. I would generally read the abstract to determine if I could cite the article in a textbook. Such a citation would, I hoped, give others the impression that I had a broad perspective and lead them to regard me as an interdisciplinary researcher. Approximately five years ago I became an editor of an interdisciplinary journal, Management Communication Quarterly. an editor of this journal, I had the opportunity to work with reviewers and editors who had much different academic backgrounds than mine. I was impressed with anyone who had training in rhetoric but also understood behavioral research. Gradually, and it was gradually, I began to realize that it might be valuable for me to better understand rhetorical research as it could potentially make a nice contribution to business communication. I took on the challenge of understanding rhetorical analysis, I found it surprisingly easy to understand. …

Quality assurance. A gentle lesson in quality advice.

The language of quality is loaded with business jargon and unfamiliar terms, but there is away to guide a group of staff around the world of quality; suggests Quality adviser Sonia Mangan

Distinguishing Public and Presentational Speaking

In the November 1987 issue of Management Communication Quarterly, Frank E.X. Dance concludes that behaviors for public and presentational speaking overlap, and any differences between them must be differences not of genre but of situation or setting. In response to Dance, this article examines pedagogical and linguistic literature to recommend the validity and value of adopting “presentational speaking” as a distinct genre or speaking type. In conclusion, the author suggests that treating public, presentational, and conversational speaking as distinct genres may spawn the development of theoretical models and pedagogical approaches more relevant to particular business speaking events.

Tilting at Windbags: My Losing Battle with Business Jargon

Tilting at Windbags: My Losing Battle with Business Jargon

Tilting at Windbags: My Losing Battle with Business Jargon

Tilting at Windbags: My Losing Battle with Business Jargon

Book Reviews : Business and Professional Speaking. Eric W. Skopec. En glewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983. 266 pages (paper)

Book Reviews : Business and Professional Speaking. Eric W. Skopec. En glewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983. 266 pages (paper)

Reviews of teaching/learning resources

Books Confidence in Public Speaking By Paul E. Nelson and Judy C. Pearson. Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown Company, 1981; pp. xviii + 302. $11.95 (paper). Speaking for Results: Communication by Objectives By John E. Baird, Jr. New York: Harper & Row, 1981; pp. xiii + 301. $10.95 (hardcover). The Elements of Public Speaking By Joseph A. DeVito. New York: Harper & Row, 1981; pp. xvii + 446. $14.50 (hardcover). Speak for Yourself: an Introduction to Public Speaking By James H. Byrns. New York: Random House, 1981; pp. xv+329. $10.95 (hardcover). Successful Business Speaking: a Practical Guide for the Student and Professional By David A. Thomas and Maridell Fryar. Skokie, Ill.: National Textbook Company, 1981; pp. 91. $2.63 (paper). Speaking by Doing: a Speaking‐Listening Text By William Buys, Thomas Sill, and Roy Beck, rev. ed. Skokie, Ill.: National Textbook Company, 1981; pp. iv+311. $4.95 (paper). Communication for the Business and Professional Speaker By Randall Capps, Carley H. Dodd, and Larry James Winn. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1981; pp. xii+300. $12.95. Intercom: Readings in Organizational Communication Edited by Stewart Ferguson and Sherry Devereaux Ferguson. Rochelle Park, N.J.: Hayden Book Company, 1980; pp. 412. $12.95 (paper). The Enjoyment of Theatre By Kenneth M. Cameron and Patti P. Gillespie. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1980; pp. viii + 479. $12.95 (paper). Interpersonal Communication: a Question of Needs By Michael D. Scott and William G. Powers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978; pp. xx + 324. $12.95 (hardcover). One to Another: a Guidebook for Interpersonal Communication By Richard Crable. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1981. $12.50 (paperback). Understanding Us—Family Development I By Patrick J. Carnes. Minneapolis: Interpersonal Communication Programs, Inc., 1981; pp. 204. $8.95 (paper). Understanding Intercultural Communication By Larry A. Samovar, Richard E. Porter, and Nemi C. Jain. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co. $8.95 (paper). Methods of Rhetorical Criticism Edited by Bernard L. Brock and Robert L. Scott (2nd ed.). Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980; pp. 503. $16.95

Modern business speaking: A Rhetoric of “Conventional wisdom”

Modern business speaking: A Rhetoric of “Conventional wisdom”

“What and whither? The undergraduate course in business and professional speaking”

Business Speaking courses differ from courses in Professional Speaking and both courses should have academically viable and departmentally unique content and organization.