The Self-Rated Writing Skills of Business Majors: Graduating Perceptions and Collegiate Improvement

We analyze the self-rated writing skills of graduating business majors and perceptions on how much these skills changed during college. Subjective skill measures may be good proxies of objective skills, and affect outcomes such as career goals, job applications, and graduate school enrollment. The sample includes 436,370 students from 619 different institutions. On average and all else equal, business majors are estimated to be 17.6% less likely to report high writing skills at graduation when compared with other students and 11.5% less likely to report high gains in these skills during college. Average differences across disciplines are often large.

Writing Apprehension in the Online Classroom: The Limits of Instructor Behaviors

In response to COVID-19, educational stakeholders are transferring traditional, face-to-face instruction to the online learning environment. The purpose of this study was to determine if business instructors’ use of immediate behaviors and clarity, which have been found to help business students overcome their writing apprehension in the face-to-face learning environment, can also be used to help business students to overcome their writing apprehension in an online learning environment. Findings indicated that instructor immediate behaviors and clarity are not interventions for writing apprehension in the online learning environment. The instructional strategies business instructors rely on in the face-to-face classroom did not have the same meaning or effect on the online classroom.

An Ecolinguistic Discourse Approach to Teaching Environmental Sustainability: Analyzing Chief Executive Officer Letters to Shareholders

This article argues for using discourse analysis in business and management curricula to increase language awareness. To that end, an ecolinguistic discourse analysis approach (Stibbe, 2015a) for teaching sustainability is proposed. The article first explores sustainability discourse in two chief executive officer letters to shareholders followed by a classroom implementation enabling students to practise discourse analytical skills. Students examined vocabulary, hedging, modals, abstract and concrete representation, and social actors. Linguistic features were interpreted to reveal communicators’ underlying ideologies. This systematic analytical approach allows students to reflect on communication processes and how these processes can be used strategically when communicating in organizational contexts.

“Corporate Sustainability” or “Corporate Social Responsibility”? A Comparative Study of Spanish and Latin American Companies’ Websites

This study aims to compare how leading companies in Spain and in Spanish-speaking Latin America communicate corporate social responsibility or sustainability on their web pages. For this purpose, the pages of 68 companies were examined to establish the accessibility of such topics and to trace how their prominence and wording had evolved over time. The results show a trend toward greater uniformity in both Spain and Latin America, with corporate social responsibility/sustainability discourse gaining in prominence and “responsibility”-related terms being gradually replaced by those related to “sustainability.” Various cases hint that changes in terminology may be unrelated to any clear distinction between both terms.

Teaching Workplace Genre Ecologies and Pedagogical Goals Through Résumés and Cover Letters

This study examines how and why 20 instructors (17 tenure-line and 3 nontenure-line) in introductory service courses enact their pedagogical values and address current concerns (e.g., personal branding, LinkedIn, and applicant tracking systems) when teaching résumés and cover letters. Research methods included a demographics survey, qualitative interviews, and critical discourse analysis of assignment sheets and deidentified student examples. Results provide an opportunity to renegotiate gaps between Business and Professional Communication’s research and pedagogical methods, shifting from overemphasizing formatting and checklists and toward understanding job applications as workplace genre ecologies to encourage deeper learning.

“This Happens in the Real World?”: Perceptions of Student-Developed Workplace Case Studies

This study examined student perceptions of an online case study development experience where students wrote their own case studies about workplace communication processes and created accompanying pedagogical materials. Students then shared their cases in small groups and engaged in dialogue. Students from organizational communication classes at four universities completed preevaluations ( n = 77) and postevaluations ( n = 67), providing quantitative and qualitative data. Analyses suggested that students perceived that the experience enhanced their understanding of course materials, aided them in connecting course materials to the real world, and enabled them to reflect on their own and their classmates’ organizational experiences.

Follow the Leader? The Impact of Leader Rapport Management on Social Loafing

To prepare students for the workforce, instructors of business, technical, and professional communication must incorporate team projects in their curriculum. However, both instructors and students have negative perceptions of team projects due to a variety of factors including team dysfunctions like social loafing. No prior study has examined the relationship between leader rapport management (LRM) and social loafing. LRM refers to the use of linguistic strategies to manage relationships between leaders and members. Therefore, we built and tested a model that examines the relationship between LRM and social loafing that is mediated by leader-member exchange and communication quality.