Addressing sexual harassment in a sexually charged national culture: a Journal of Applied Communication Research forum

Sexual harassment remains a persistent workplace problem. The 2017 #Metoo movement and what-have-come-to-be routine news stories about sexual hostility, sexual assault, and sexual harassment in American organizations have opened wounds and reinvigorated public commentary. Although the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sets forth guidelines for organizations to follow, questions remain about what counts as sexual harassment, and what is an organization’s responsibility in maintaining a harassment-free workplace for its employees. At the invitation of the editor, seven organizational communication scholars responded to a series of questions addressing seven issues related to sexual harassment. These are: sexual harassment policy and training; the responsibilities of bystanders of sexual harassment; organizational culture that provides more support to the harasser than the harassed; the intersection of race with sexual harassment; same-sex harassment and female-to-male harassment; and what can be learned from public movements (e.g. #Metoo). The co-authors’ responses describe sexually harassing situation with which they are familiar.     

Inoculating Against Pro-Plagiarism Justifications: Rational and Affective Strategies

Student plagiarism continues to threaten academic integrity. This investigation assessed whether an inoculation message strategy could combat university plagiarism by protecting student attitudes against pro-plagiarism justification arguments. Additionally, we sought theoretical confirmation of previous findings on involvement and accessibility in inoculation, examined the effects on vested interest, and evaluated matching and mismatching strategies in terms of affect- and rationality-based inoculation treatment messages and subsequent attack messages. A total of 225 students participated in three sessions spanning six weeks. Results indicated that none of the inoculation treatments conferred resistance as measured in attitude toward plagiarism, but all treatments enhanced involvement and attitude accessibility, and the fear- and rationality-based treatments enhanced vested interest. Additionally, fear-based treatments derogated the source of the message. Results also suggest that a matching strategy is superior with both affect- and rationality-based attack messages, such that inoculation treatments are most effective when using the same argument bases (e.g., affective or rational) as the attack message. These results offer guidance for crafting communication campaign strategies to reduce the occurrence of student plagiarism offenses.     

Urban Youth's Perspectives on Flash Mobs

Flash mobs are new, emerging, and evolving social phenomena that have recently been associated with youth violence in the US cities. The current study explores how youth understand flash mobs through focus groups conducted in Kansas City, Missouri (a site of violent youth flash mobs). Results indicate that youth have varying familiarity with flash mobs and define them in different ways; that youth perceive youth boredom to be the most frequent cause of problems with flash mobs; that youth connect ongoing social disorder with the violence associated with flash mobs; and that while social media are facilitators of flash mobs, flash mobs have their roots in youth activities that have been going on for generations (e.g., hanging out in groups and cruising). Results illustrate the importance of conducting formative research with youth, particularly about emergent phenomena, when developing interventions and communication campaigns aimed at reducing youth violence.     

Using Structural Equation Modeling to Examine Group Differences in Assessment Booklet Designs with Sparse Data

The current research demonstrates the effectiveness of using structural equation modeling (SEM) for the investigation of subgroup differences with sparse data designs where not every student takes every item. Simulations were conducted that reflected missing data structures like those encountered in large survey assessment programs (e.g., National Assessment of Educational Progress). A maximum likelihood method of estimation was implemented that allowed all data to be used without performing any imputation. A multiple indicators multiple causes (MIMIC) model was used to examine group differences. There was no detriment to the estimation of the MIMIC model parameters under sparse data design conditions when compared to the design without missing data. The overall size of samples had more influence on the variability of estimates than did the data design.     

Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism

This tropological analysis of “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790) argues that Judith Sargent Murray deployed a series of ironic reversals, including an example of Kenneth Burke's “dialectical” irony, to make her famous case for women's capacity to reason. As such, the article elucidates this trope's peculiar rhetorical potential within the context of eighteenth-century debates on female education and investigates how it can function in conjunction with romantic irony. Significantly, Murray deployed romantic irony in order to question her era's commonplace ideas about women's intellectual capacities and conventional female education. She then employed dialectical irony in order to sidestep relativism, playing off and departing from the expanded field of possibilities that romantic irony opened up. In so doing, she cast doubt upon commonly held doubts themselves, questioning the subversiveness normally associated with learned ladies. Through this series of ironic turns, readers were invited to change their previous beliefs and then presented with a clear means of moving forward—thereby opening a path for elite European American girls to be educated in traditionally masculine domains.     

Review Essay: Mourning Humanism,or, the Idiom of Haunting

LINCOLN THE PRESIDENT: LAST FULL MEASURE. By J. G. Randall and Richard N. Current. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1955; pp. vii+421. $7.50.

THE METALOGICON OF JOHN OF SALISBURY. Translated with Introduction and Notes by Daniel D. McGarry. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955; pp. xxvii+305. $5.00.

THE HUMANISM OF CICERO. By H. A. K. Hunt. Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1954, and London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1954; pp. viii+215. $4.50.

LIBERTY AND REFORMATION IN THE PURITAN REVOLUTION. By William Haller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955; pp. xv+410. $6.00.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN THE UNITED STATES. By Richard Hofstader and Walter P. Metzger. New York: Columbia University Press; pp. 527. $5.50.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN OUR TIME. By Robert M. MacIver. New York: Columbia University Press; pp. 329. $4.00.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM. By Harry H. Clark, Richard H. Fogle, Robert P. Falk, John H. Raleigh, and C. Hugh Holman. Edited by Floyd Stovall. Chapel Hill, N. C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1955; pp. ix+262. $4.00.

ONE MIGHTY TORRENT: THE DRAMA OF BIOGRAPHY. By Edgar Johnson. New York: Macmillan Co., 1955; pp. 591. $6.50.

THE THEATRE ANNUAL, 1955. Edited by Blanche A. Corin. Vol. XIII. New York: Theatre Annual, Inc., 1955; pp. 89. $1.50.

THE FLOWER IN DRAMA AND GLAMOUR: THEATRE ESSAYS AND CRITICISM. By Stark Young. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955; pp. xiv+223. $3.00.

THE TEMPEST. By William Shakespeare. Edited by Frank Kermode. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954; pp. lxxxviii+167. $3.50.

CYMBELINE. By William Shakespeare. Edited by J. M. Nosworthy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955; pp. lxxxiv+224. $3.85.

KING JOHN. By William Shakespeare. Edited by E. A. J. Honigmann. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955; pp. lxxv+176. $3.85.

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. By William Shakespeare. Edited by J. R. Brown. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955; pp. lviii+174. $3.25.

PRESENT DAY PSYCHOLOGY. Edited by A. A. Roback, with the Collaboration of Forty Experts in the Various Fields. New York: Philosophical Library, 1955; pp. xiv+995. $12.00.

THE SANE SOCIETY. By Erich Fromm. New York: Rinehart and Company, Inc., 1955; pp. 370. $5.00.

SPEECH IN THE ELEMENTARY CLASSROOM. By Charles Van Riper and Katherine G. Butler. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955; pp. 150. $2.50.

HEARING THERAPY FOR CHILDREN. By Alice Streng, Waring J. Fitch, LeRoy D. Hedgecock, James W. Phillips, and James A. Carrell. New York: Grune and Stratton, 1955: pp. 371. $6.75.

LISTENING FOR SPEECH SOUNDS. By Empress Y. Zedler. New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1955; pp. xi+145. $3.00.

THE ART OF COMMUNICATING. By Thomas Pollock, Marion Sheridan, Frances Ledbetter and Ronald Doll. New York: Macmillan Company, 1955; pp. ix+438. $2.88.

SPEECH AND YOUR PERSONALITY. By Theodore F. Nelson and W. Kirtley Atkinson. Chicago: B. H. Sanborn &; Company, 1955; pp. vii+454.

ORAL COMMUNICATION IN BUSINESS. By David C. Phillips. New York: The McGraw‐Hill Book Co., 1955; pp. x+223. $3.75.

HOW TO WIN THE CONFERENCE. By William D. Ellis and Frank Siedel. New York: Prentice‐Hall, 1955; pp. x+214. $3.95.

THE STAFF ROLE IN MANAGEMENT. By Robert C. Sampson. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955; pp. xii+226. $4.00.

GROUP‐CENTERED LEADERSHIP. By Thomas Gordon. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955; pp. 366. $5.00.

SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SHAKESPEARE. By Ernest Marshall Howse. New York: Abingdon Press, 1955; pp. 148. $2.50.

SENT FORTH TO PREACH. Studies in Apostolic Preaching. By Jesse Burton Weatherspoon. New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1954; pp. 182. $2.50.     

Seeding subversion and the Christian reformed church’s study report on “homosexuality”

ABSTRACT

This essay develops and uses a critical lens of “seeding” to read the Christian Reformed Church’s 1973 report on “homosexuality.” Although the report maintains a seemingly conservative stance and has been used to marginalize GLBTQ people, it contains and promotes affirming beliefs about same-sex relationships that constitute the groundwork necessary to argue for denominational transformation. The report invites and empowers resistance against its own ostensible conclusions. This essay deepens understanding about how evasive rhetorics enable change and how critics can intervene to promote the transformation invited by subversive seeds.     

Cultivating consubstantiality with the land institute: Organizational rhetoric and the role of place-making in generating organizational identification

This essay examines the organizational rhetoric of the Land Institute in order to address the ways place-making contributes to the inducement of organizational identification (OI). In addition to defining place-making as a practice of cultivating arrangements, the essay unpacks two ways in which a strategically arranged place facilitates OI: (a) materializing the places and times imagined in textual materials, and (b) generating encounters with OI targets. By analyzing the Land Institute’s Prairie Festival alongside discursive materials, the essay also demonstrates how organizations take control of place’s inherently inventive character and thoroughly distributed rhetoricity in order to achieve organizational ends. In order to make these arguments, the essay employs a critical method that operates through both field immersion and textual criticism.     

“More alike than different”: learning about diversity from people with disabilities

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Health Communication, Intercultural Communication

Objectives: After completing this semester-long activity students, should be able to (1) apply course concepts (i.e., stereotypes, identity, listening, language, and conflict) to diverse real-world scenarios; (2) explain the utility of intergroup contact theory in relationship to communication and social diversity; (3) critically reflect on social diversity explored through communication behaviors; and (4) develop communication competence toward diverse others, specifically persons with disabilities (PWDs).