Researchers and practitioners are challenged to understand what can move our study, teaching, and practice (for postmodernism's contributions to these ends, see Toth, 2002). In this endeavor, our work can productively rest on systems theory, the rhetorical heritage (including a humanistic and social scientific interest in persuasion as a way of understanding how people make decisions and engage in social influence), and premises espoused by social exchange theory that guide our understanding of relationships. A rhetorical perspective is vital (or for some, a European sociological perspective) because we must have a theory-based systematic way to understand, research, and critique the role of public relations in forming and responding to ideas—competing and convergent shared social realities that can broadly be interpreted as zones of meaning. In public relations, communication is about something; ideas and meaning count.

Onward Into More Fog: Thoughts on Public Relations' Research Directions

What is the role of interaction, or, more generally, orality, in multiple-audience analysis and adaptation? How does orality relate to literacy in the evolution of corporate documents? A qualitative study of how seven engineers in two divi sions of a large corporation wrote for multiple audiences revealed that, in the more rhetorically successful cases observed, interaction was the central means of analyzing and adapting discourse to multiple audiences, fulfilling rhetorical and social goals, and building and sustaining a corporate culture; and orality was more potent than literacy in the engineers'composing behavior and the au diences' acceptance of the engineers' ideas and documents.

Orality and Literacy in the Workplace: Process- and Text-Based Strategies for Multiple-Audience Adaptation.

Rhetoric has traditionally been associated with philosophy and politics, with social and institutional good. Scientific and technical communication was originally so associated in the works of Francis Bacon but became disassociat ed from politics for historical reasons reflected in the works of Herbert Spencer and John Dewey. Because of changes in science and technology symbolized by Albert Einstein, however, science itselfhas become more political. In response to these changes, technical communication ought to reestablish its traditional association with politics. Specifically, it ought to adopt a rhetorical approach to communication about scientific and technological problems that affect the social and institutional good.

Rhetoric and Technical Communication: An Argument for Historical and Political Pluralism:

The driving idea behind our work has been the concept of going public with the goal of supporting the emerging work practices of multidisciplinary teams. In this chapter, we outline the theoretical basis for going public, describe the underlying architecture of a public collaborative system and introduce two embodiments, the Design Conference RoomTM and the Collaborative ClassroomTM. The underlying architecture of a public collaborative system, overlaid with lines of view, sight, and control, provides system-sharing functionality via the Reconfigurable Collaboration NetworkTM, supporting fully collaborative conversations, with their trajectory of work processes from private, to public, and back again. Innovations are described in the disciplinary domains of architecture, computer science, and communication.

Going Public: Collaborative Systems Design for Multidisciplinary Conversations

This article compares three rhetorical approaches to accident analysis: materialist, classical, and constructivist. The focal points for comparison are the two accident reports issued by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)—reports that attempted (and failed) to persuade the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) to change a problematic policy about rail communication alongside its technology for rail communication. The central question the article asks is, How can rhetorical theory help explain the CTA”s inaction, which ultimately led to property damage, injury, and death? Classical and constructivist approaches, emphasizing rational deliberation between equals, on one hand, and the social construction of technical knowledge between professionals, on the other, offer plausible explanations for what went wrong. But only the materialist approach appears capable of discerning the ideological nature of the CTA”s resistance to the NTSB”s recommendations.

Don M. Burks

Papers

Rhetoric, philosophy, and literature : an exploration