Abstract
The termsocial justicehas a long history, as the author of our lead article has noted. A useful current definition is provided by theNational Association of Social Workers (2017), with the “view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities.” In another explanation, social justice is “the virtue which guides us in creating those organized human interactions we call institutions,” and “social institutions, when justly organized, provide us with access to what is good for the person, both individually and in our associations with others” (Center for Economic and Social Justice, 2017). Social justice has been widely examined by scholars in many disciplines in all three areas of the academic enterprise traditionally evaluated: research, teaching, and service. One college, for example, has established a department entitled Critical Theory and Social Justice, with the goal of bringing critical theory “to analyze, unpack, and address issues and approaches to social justice” (Occidential College, n.d.). A large number of conferences have, in fact, been organized to promote social justice across the curriculum. Special issues in professional and technical communication have been devoted to this area of inquiry; see, for examplePresent Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society(2015, Volume 5, Issue 3) andRhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization(2013, Volume 4, Issue 1).
There appears, however, to have been little attention to social justice in business communication. Some eight articles in past issues ofBusiness and Professional Communication Quarterlymentioned social justice. Two of these described approaches to teaching and were included in the former “Focus on Teaching Column”; five others mentioned the term only tangentially—in a description of a university’s mission, in an author’s biography, in a quotation from a work on composition studies, in an interview with an academic leader in South Africa, and in a description of how an organization might be evaluated. The eighth article that has mentioned social justice does so in the context of teaching ethics-based cases (Stevens, 1996), but here again there was no real discussion. Thus, our lead article is a timely addition to business and professional communication scholarship.
In our lead article, the author offers a hybrid model for service-learning that emphasizes a social justice perspective for pedagogy in our fields. She combines immersive learning with situated learning theories and reports the rewards and challenges of implementing this method. This approach demonstrates to students how communicative practices have the potential to move from analysis to action, thereby producing what has been defined astransformative learning(Mezirow, 1978). In her case study, the author has analyzed student reflections on what they were learning and discovered two important themes: knowledge transfer in the rhetorical situation and social justice goals in a service-learning context. She concludes that the students were deeply engaged in the course, and they were ready to apply concepts that they had learned to real-world situations.
Our second article also discusses the value of applying theory to practice, this time via scaffolded client projects. Scaffolding, followingVygotsky’s (1930/1978)theory of experts assisting novices, has long been recognized as a valuable pedagogical approach, whereby instructors move students from dependence to independence as various supportive strategies are gradually removed.
In this issue, we also include two feature topics. The first relates to communicating corporate social responsibility (CSR). The authors of the first article in this section provide a content analysis of 46 corporate Facebook pages fromFortune’s“World’s Most Admired Companies,” finding that corporations communicate noncorporate social responsibility more frequently than CSR messages. The study further reveals that corporations do not optimize the social media venue and instead rely on a one-way communication strategy of internal voices, thereby reinforcing public skepticism about CSR activities. The authors suggest several practical and pedagogical strategies for improving CSR communication. Our second article in this section reports on terminology used to describe CSR on company websites and changes over a 4-year period.
Our second feature topic in this issue addresses teaching large classes in business and professional communication. One article describes the challenges involved in teaching a 780-student class, including recommendations for how a hybrid model might be more successful; the authors confirm their belief in the value of the physical proximity, material exchanges, and personal touch of the traditional writing classroom, although they recognize that online platforms have considerable appeal for many reasons, including cost effectiveness. The other article in this section presents a multicase study of what teaching large sections of a business communication course has meant for two different universities, including how pedagogical strategies must be adjusted.
Look for more feature topics in upcoming issues, and, as always, we appreciate hearing from our readers.