Abstract
Dear Members of ABC and Readers of Our Journals:
I want to thank Melinda Knight, BPCQ’s editor, for offering me an opportunity to comment from my perspective as Executive Director and managing editor on the significance of the name changes for our two journals: Business Communication Quarterly (BCQ) to Business and Professional Communication Quarterly (BPCQ) and Journal of Business Communication (JBC) to International Journal of Business Communication (IJBC).
The Association for Business Communication (ABC), now in its 78th year, has always been responsive to its members and to the changing world of communication. By agreeing to change our journals’ names, our Board of Directors is demonstrating that responsiveness as we continue to enact measures to meet the goals and objectives of our strategic plan that was approved in 2008. That plan highlights several key issues, two of which—the importance of internationalization and the need to respond to questions about our discipline—are in play with this decision.
The rationale for changing JBC to IJBC seems relatively transparent. Few people would argue with the notion of a globalized economy and, as a result, the significance of international business communication. To prepare students to meet the language challenges of this increasingly complex business environment and to address the questions that arise in the workplace that focus on ways in which the language of business communication crosses state and national borders, our members’ scholarship must, by necessity, cross those same borders.
The reasoning behind the change from BCQ to BPCQ is a bit less transparent, but it is equally in line with our strategic work, resulting from our focus on disciplinary questions such as the following: What kinds of disciplinary backgrounds do our faculty have? How are issues in business communication relevant to other fields such as technical or scientific communication and vice-versa? What kinds of research methodologies are relevant, and where are their intellectual and methodological roots? The name change reflects our understanding of the answers to these questions and addresses the increasing interdisciplinarity of our field.
ABC is becoming an even stronger international, interdisciplinary organization committed to advancing business and professional communication research, education, and practice. Our new journal names are one additional way to demonstrate our organization’s awareness of the demands that globalization and technological innovation place on those who produce and disseminate knowledge within and for the workplaces in the United States and around the world.