International Journal of Business Communication

This study examines the genre of the monthly or quarterly commentary document in which managers of investment funds report on their funds to investors. The study aims to provide insights about this disclosure genre for business communication practitioners by examining its conventionalized features and the expression of critical thinking in the evaluative judgments of fund managers. A nonpurposive sample of 30 commentaries from investment funds in North America, the United Kingdom, Australasia and South Africa is rater-analyzed in relation to the social genre/cognitive genre model of Bruce (2008a), which is used as a framework to identify the principal characteristics of the genre. The findings suggest that the fund manager commentary is a relatively formulaic genre with a four-move structure that reports the current performance of the fund and presents its investment strategies and their underlying rationale, based on a critical evaluation of the current state of financial or equity markets.

Instant messaging is one of the most popular communication technologies in virtual teams, enabling interactions to intertwine whole working days, thus creating the sense of copresence for team members who are geographically dispersed. Through close linguistic analyses of naturally occurring data from a virtual team, this article discusses the implications of two novel communicative situations enabled by instant messaging: presence information and the persistence of transcript. The preliminary findings of this study indicate that these new communicative situations require the flouting or rethinking of previously existing interactional norms and that communicative practices employed by the team members are not yet conventionalized/normalized, the expectations and interpretations of interactional rituals and timing vary highly, even within the same virtual team.

The aim of the study was to develop, test, and partly validate a set of organizational communication factors for use in an organizational-change setting. Based on literature reviews and pilot interviews, a survey study was conducted using three samples. First, the testing involved construct validation through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Second, the sample was divided into three groups: employees who experienced change, those who had recently had finished a change process, and those who had not experienced any change processes. The communication factors were then examined as predictors of employee assessment of communication in these three groups, respectively. The results of the study indicated eight robust dimensions included in five categories: social contact, central leadership, information, influence, and barriers to improvement. The results of the factor analyses indicated satisfactory reliability and construct validity of the communication factors, and the confirmatory factor analysis revealed a satisfactory model fit.

The present interpretive research contributes to the increasing niche of studies that acknowledge spirituality and religion in organizations. The current study examines communication in the workplace as it is mediated by the organizational context. In particular, we explore how a faith-based organization navigated the seemingly incompatible ideologies of faith and business. First, we identify the ideological commitments and values that coexist for organizational members. Second, we argue that bridge discourse facilitated the coexistence of disparate ideological commitments and values. Specifically, we describe how three dominant discourses, (a) a spiritual-business discourse, (b) a theological-science discourse, and (c) a discourse of excellence, navigated ideological differences in a nonprofit, faith-based organization. The findings in this article have implications for future studies ranging from the pragmatic to the critical.