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Will Professional Communication Be the Deatli of Business Communication? Kitty 0. Locker The Ohio State University, Columbus

IN THE LAST 15 YEARS, business and technical communica- tion, once separate courses and areas of study in US universities, have increasingly, though incompletely, merged into a field called "professional communication." The reasons for this merger are largely political but are facilitated by a common base in theory and research. 1 believe that business communication is in danger of being buried by professional communication and needs to pre- serve its own identity as a field.

In this paper, I will first review the growth of business and tech- nical communication courses as college courses in US universities, then document the move to "professional" communication in English departments and explain why technical communication dominates "professional" communication. Finally, I argue that fac- ulty who teach business communication in business schools should care about terminological practices in English departments and show why "business" communication needs to retain an identity separate from "professional" communication.

The Emergence and Growth of Business and Technical Communication as College Courses As Figure 1 suggests, it is possible to see many parallels in the emer- gence and growth of business and technical communication as col' lege courses. The two fields emerged at about the same time, in both cases in response to the move, starting with the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1877, to create land-grant universities and to transform college education from a humanistic curriculum preparing students for ministry and gentility to a curriculum in agriculture, mechanics, and business, preparing students to enter organizations as managers or engineers. In both fields, college courses predated texts explicitly written for college students. In time, both fields developed journals.

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A final similarity, not revealed by the time line, is that both business and technical communication instructors have been mar- ginalized. Both lack departmental homes of their own, existing, sometimes uneasily, in departments of English, Communication, Business Administration, or Organizational Behavior; both have been seen by colleagues in these fields as academically weak. In 1959, reports from the Ford and Carnegie Foundations attacked the quality of business and business writing courses. Virg Harder, president of ABC {then ABWA) in 1965, recalls

many business faculty favored gettitig rid of the courses. "Business writing" faculty had to adapt, or they could expect being sent to Siberia, so to speak. (Some wound up there, anyway.) To avoid winding up In Siberia, writing fac- ulty broadened their research interests and activities. New subjects and courses began appearing here and there. Organizational communication, information management, communication theory, etc. found their way into presentations at professional meetings, and into curriculums. ABWA became ABCA. (personal communication, September 18, 1996)

In the 1960s, technical communication was also seen as voca- tional (Estrin, 1996) and, according to Joe Harris (1996), "at the same level of prestige as dumbbell English or English for foreign students. In several large universities, English departments did not want to soil their hands with trade, and refused to offer technical writing courses at all" (p. 133).

In spite of this disdain, courses in business and technical com- munication grew, albeit slowly and unevenly. This growth was fueled by the demands of industry for graduates who could write and by requirements from accrediting associations for instruction in workplace communication. It was also nurtured by a burgeon- ing research base which led to tenured positions for at least some of the faculty teaching these courses.

The Move to "Professional" Communication For most oi the twentieth century, "business" writing or communi- cation focused on persuasion and communication with customers; "technical" writing or communication focused on exposition. Business writing assumed that the central challenge was motivat-

130 Business Communication Quarterly 66:3 September 2003

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ing readers to want to do something; technical writing assumed that readers were already motivated but needed good writing to understand how to do what they wanted to do. "Professional" writing, if the term appeared at all—and it rarely did for the first three-quarters of the twentieth century—meant writing in the professions: medicine, law, and religion. In the last 15 years, how- ever, professional communication has more frequently come to mean any communication in the workplace, principally business and technical communication.

The first textbooks to use "professional" to mean "business or technical" (not journalism or writing for the professions) were Malra Treece's 1978 Communication for Business and the Professions and Michael Keene's 1987 Effective Professionai Writing. Treece's text is similar to other business com.munication textbooks, but Keene brings more sophisticated units on correspondence (previ- ously the province of business communication) into an otherwise traditional technical writing text.

The first articles to use the term "professional communication" in journals of business and technical communication seem to have been Kathryn Riley's 1988 articles in The Technical Writing Teacher (1988a, 1988b). She did not use the term in a 1986 article in the same joumai. The reason is perhaps that her 1988 articles exam- ine letters of request and negative messages, documents associated with "business" communication, while Riley was at the time an assistant professor in an English department teaching linguistics and "technical" communication.

In the following years, the use of the word "professional" in our joumais mushrooms. Sometimes, the context makes clear, it applies to business or technical communication—not both—but more often it replaces "business and technical" with the single word "professional."

Combining business and technical communication seems to make sense since they draw on a common theoretical base and overlap so much, particularly once one gets past the foundational service course in each field. The term "professional" is short—an advantage given the space limits of college transcripts. More

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important, the term is acceptable to English departments who associate "business" with filthy lucre. In 1977 in the English department at Texas A&M University, I was told that we couldn't use any textbook with the word "husiness" in the title. The term "professional" also provides flexibility, allowing a faculty to shift focus among various aspects of workplace communication without constantly having to change the name and identity of programs.

"Professional" has won the terminological debate in English departments and in the literature, at least for now. The founda- tionai service courses are still called "business" and "technical" communication; the earliest established programs often retain their designations as programs in "technical" or "scientific and technical" writing; in 1987, ]BTC was created as the Iowa State Journal of Business and Technical Communication. But programs established in the last 10 years—such as Iowa State's MA and PhD In Rhetoric and Professional Communication—are much more likely to use the single word "professional."

Why 'Technical" Communication Dominates "Professional" Communication In general, I support the move to the term "professional"—indeed, I myself used the term in creating Ohio State University's new undergraduate minor in Professional Writing. I'm in favor of any- thing that gives us more courses, more students, more programs, and a larger political presence in the academy. However, I fear that business communication risks being erased in this new term: we risk using "professional communication" as a more sexy term for a discipline that is, to all intents and purposes, merely the old "technical" communication.

The dominance of "technicar over "business" communication is most clear when one looks at graduate courses and degrees. Gradu- ate courses in business communication date from at least 1948 ("The whole January 1948 Bulletin presents Professor Aumer's report on graduate work in husiness writing" [Wilkinson, 1984, p. 25]). But if graduate courses in technical communication started a , bit later, such courses grew much faster. By 1958, Renssalaer Poly-

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technic Institute established the first Master's degree in technical and scientific writing in the US (Connors, 1982). In 2003, the STC Website lists 54 US universities which offer Master of Arts programs in technical communication, 35 US universities offering Master of Science programs, and 24 US universities offering PhD programs. (A university in Canada, one in the Netherlands, and rwo in the UK also offer graduate programs in technical communi- cation.) The ABC Website, in contrast, lacks an academic data- base—perhaps because there would be no graduate programs to list on it. The high point of graduate courses in business communica- tion may have come in the 1970s. In 1971, ABC's Graduate Stud- ies Committee identified 14 schools offering "majors, minors or substantial concentrations in graduate Business Communication" (Hatch, 1973, p. 35), and in 1977 and 1978 ABC's Graduate Stud- ies Committee proposed MBA and PhD programs in business com- munication (Hildebrandt, 1977, 1978). Today, however, the pic- ture is bleaker. The 1996 ABC Graduate Studies Committee identified only two MBA programs with four or more courses in business communication: Michigan and Notre Dame. No PhD pro- grams in business communication now exist. A lone program at the University of Texas was officially instituted, but it has died and most of its faculty have left for other universities.

Many of the programs listed on the STC Website bear the newer title "professional" communication. But a review of course titles and sample syllabi makes it clear that these courses are pre- dominantly "technical" rather than "business" communication. Courses in document design, in usability, in writing for the Web and other new media focus on exposition, even though documents would benefit from business communication concepts such as you attitude, reader benefits, and central selling points. Technical editing textbooks usually have a chapter on working with subject matter experts, raising but hardly developing fully the issue of political savvy. Even chapters on ethics in technical communica- tion texts rarely deal with the ways in which organizations create and enforce norms for language and actions. Discussions of inter- national and intercultural communication focus on differences in

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denotation and connotation, rarely dealing with the larger issues of bow values, attitudes, and beliefs affect not only preferred Strategies for style hut even what warrants and patterns of organi- zation seem "logical."

The primacy of "technical" communication in professional com- munication arises, I believe, from technical communication's advan- tages in scholarly research, workplace jobs, and national attention.

Research in technical communication is more extensive and more mature than research in business communication. Several factors contribute to the immaturity of research in husiness com- munication (Locker, 1998); arguably the most important of these is the lack of a disciplinary and geographic focus. The overwhelm- ing majority of technical communication courses and degrees are in English departments; even those located in Colleges of Engi- neering or Agriculture usually have faculty with degrees from Eng- lish departments. Business communication courses, in contrast, lack a consistent departmental home in US colleges and universi- ties. In the early 1990s (the most recent survey data available) business communication was most often taught in husiness schools (60 percent) but was also to be found in English departments (16 percent), in communication (11 percent), and sprinkled in a vari- ety of other units (13 percent) (Beard & Williams, 1993). Faculty in technical communication are more likely than are colleagues in business communicatioti to he in departments which value the questions they ask and the methods they use. Tenure-track posi- tions in technical communication in English departments abound; in sad contrast, many positions for husiness communication fac- ulty—especially at prestigious universities—are non-tenure-track. For all its faults, the tenure system rewards research and requires that it be published. Much of the knowledge that husiness com- munication faculty have is unpublished and unavailable as disci- plinary building blocks.

The second advantage that technical communication has is that companies hire people for positions titled "technical writ- ers." Students perceive that they can make a living using their verbal and graphic skills, so they seek courses and programs that

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will make them more employable. In contrast, "communication" programs in most companies focus narrowly on employee com- munication, newsletters, and town hall meetings. (See, for example, Williams, 2002.) We in "business" communication see our purview as all of the communication that employees, man- agers, and executives do. Yet, though effective communication may be crucial to a would-be manager's success, communication is at best one of the qualifications desired in the listing; it isn't the job title.

The third reason for the primacy of technical communication is, I believe, because the need for it is more obvious to the general public. Technical writing became a national priority during and after World War II. World War II was the first highly technologi- cal war; weapor\s were complex and required instructions. The survival of the military-industrial complex after the war depended on proposals and reports. Courses came into being to meet the needs of increasingly technological businesses and research facili- ties. Business communication has never been a national or busi- ness priority in the same way. Indeed, given the pent-up demand for US products after World War II, just about any communica- tion strategy seemed to produce success and profits. In the 70s and 80s, recession and global competition suddenly made US busi- nesses aware that the strategies that had worked so well in the post-war years no longer worked when international competitors offered the same products at lower prices and, often, higher qual- ity. In response to this challenge, US businesses have focused on quality, reengineered, downsized, and outsourced. Although the press and public have noted the high social cost of increased eco- nomic competitiveness, the press and puhiic have not indicted poor communication as a component of this social cost. Only a small band of scholars seem to suspect that poor communication contributes to poor decisions, reduced morale, and increased workplace stress. Unreadable instruction manuals produce easy laughs for late-night comics, but few people seem aware that busi- ness communication might offer solutions to bad e-mails and con- fusing Web pages.

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Why Terminology Matters I helieve that all of us in ABC share a common interest in the survival of the term "husiness" communication.

In the late 1970s, Eran Weeks, former executive director of ABC, estimated that half the husiness communication courses in the US resided in English departments. As we have seen, Beard and Williams's 1992 survey showed that only 16 percent of busi- ness communication courses were taught in English departments while fully 60 percent were housed in husiness schools (1993). Perhaps the danger that "professional" communication will he the death of "husiness" communication in English departments simply indicates a continuation of a movement which is of historical interest but no real significance for our field. However, I argue that this threat to business communication matters even to schol- ars who teach in business schools.

First, the terminological shift begun in English departments is occurring more generally in the literature. In business schools, "managerial" and "executive" communication may appear more often as replacements for "business" communication, but "profes- sional" is also a contender. "Professional" carries noble connota- tions that appeal to many business schools.

Second, I suspect that English departments offer a substantial percentage of the tenure-track positions available in business com- munication. Beard and Williams (1993) did not examine job list- ings or attempt to determine the relative proportion of tenure- track and tenured faculty in business schools and other units. My impression based on talking to faculty at ABC meetings is that full-time non-tenure-track positions are most common in husiness schools. So while business schools may offer more positions, these positions may offer neither job security nor the motivation to con- tribute to research. To my knowledge, no one has ever surveyed the departmental homes of authors of articles and books in busi- ness communication. English departments may offer only 16 per- cent of the courses in business communication, but I suspect they house a much larger percentage of the scholars who publish in our journals. Business communication as a field needs more and more

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sophisticated research; any diminution in the number of faculty who do busir\ess communication research burts all of us, whatever our academic home.

The situation would be bad enough if "technical" communica- tion simply played a bigger role in "professional" communication than did "business" communication. But even worse is the con- tempt that many technical communication scholars show for busi- ness communication. In his guest editorial in the first issue of the Iowa State Joumai of Busir^ss and Technical Communication, David Dobrin wrote: ,, ;' .

This joumai, as the title indicates, aims at being cross-disciplinary. (...] Tech- nical writing, after all, has traditionally been writing about scientific or tech- nical subjects. This writing bas generally taken specialized forms (the techni- cal report, tbe technical proposal) not encountered elsewbere. Business writing similarly has bad its own subjects and forms. The assumption on botb sides has been that working with those subjects and those forms requires spe- cial training. . . .

ffbat argument falls apan when we realizel no writer tbinks, "I've got to do a piece of business-writing: I bad better use wbat was taugbt me in business- writing class." A writer tbinks, "I've got to say tbis to those people; 1 bad better say it in tbe best and simplest way possible." {1987, pp. 5-6)

Dobrin breaks down the binary between business and technical writing by reducing "business writing" to exposition, so that it can offer nothing to technical writing, which already understands how to be clear and simple. Even more damning, he goes on to imply that technical writers occupy the high moral ground while busi- ness writers are sleazy:

Perbap5 rbougb, business practices do differ essentially from tccbnical prac- tices. Perbaps, for instance, tecbnical writers are essentially bonest and straigbtforward because tbey're concerned witb facts, wbile business writers are essentially greedy and deceitful because tbey're concerned witb money. On tbe otber band, perbaps business writers are practical and sensible because tbey're concemed witb getting tbings done wbile tecbnical writers can never free tbemselves of tbeir jargon to make tbings clear. Perbaps, but 1 doubt it. (1987, p. 6)

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The fact that these "essential" characteristics arise even to be disputed is remarkable. One would hope that an interdisciplinary

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venture would delight in the synergy to he expected from looking at the intersections of two previously disparate disciplines. Instead Dohrin reveals a deep contempt for and ignorance of what busi- ness communication might offer. Dobrin is not alone in his dis- missal of business communication; his position is notable because he was asked to write the guest editorial for a new joumai explic- itly seeking to merge business and technical communication. His merger would produce not synergy but erasure.

Why "Business" communication Needs to Preserve Its Identity within "Professionai" Communication Business communication has much to leam from and contribute to professional communication, but it also has its own concems, insights, and identity that need to be retained in "professional" communication. Central to these concems and insights is the basic difference between the two disciplines, which is posed most starkly in the foundationai course.

The archetypal problem in technical communication is repre- sented by blinking 12:00s on VCRs across America. People want to record programs, but they don't know how to set the time. So technical writing attempts to explain. Technical communication focuses on exposition. One assumes a motivated but ignorant and perhaps impatient audience. How can one make information clear?

The archetypal problem in business communication, in con- trast, is how to convince people to tum off the lights when they leave the office, or how not to do personal e-mail or Web surfing when they're being paid to work—all without feeling as though Big Brother is monitoring their every move. Business communica- tion focuses on persuasion. The communicator's problem is not primarily exposition—though some business issues can be highly arcane—but motivation: how do you make people adopt common goals? How do you make their commitment to work not merely a matter of mechanically meeting minimum expectations, but rather one of intelligence, creativity, and energy? (We might note that college professors face exactly the same challenge: only part of our job is explaining to students material that is new to them; a

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bigger part, for many of us, is motivating students to think, to revise, to leam.)

The higher one gets, the more the easy binary between exposi- tion and persuasion breaks down. Early technical communication books classified audiences in terms of their technical knowledge, but at least by the late 1970s technical communication books noted that even "technical" decisions can be made emotionally (Mathes & Stevenson, 1978). Experiences such as the Challenger disaster and issues such as nuclear power, stem cell research, and terrorist attacks remind us that attitudes, not just knowledge, shape decisions and actions.

But though that binary breaks down, business and technica] communication still differ, I believe. Business communication focuses on context. What role does the document play in the cre- ation, maintenance, ot transformation of the organization and its values? What political and cultural pressures in the organization account for decisions and communications? How is power inscribed and reproduced? How is marginalization enforced or ameliorated? These are research questions suggested by the "busi- ness" part of "professional" communication.

Many of our colleagues, and perhaps some of us, distrust busi- ness, seeing it as a source of many of the problems in our society. We might rememher that husinesses are not the only organizations whose effects have sometimes been malign: schools, universities, and even churches have also supported repressive status quos and hurt groups and individuals. Certainly businesses have done horri- ble things. Many of us are particularly conscious of the recent frauds which have devastated university endowments and our own retirement accounts. But lest we use that fact to assume that "tech- nical" is somehow purer than "business" communication, remem- ber that science too has done horrible things: gassing human beings in Nazi concentration camps, watching African-American men die slowly of untreated syphilis, and creating ever-more lethal technology for war. Moreover, many—perhaps most—of the horri- ble acts of science have been done at the behest of organizations, either business or govemment. Many people who would not under-

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take dubious or illegal actions on their own will do so at the behest of supervisors or in a culture that rewards or seems to demand such

behavior. Organizations affect the way people act and interact, and business communication studies just these interactions.

We who teach and study discourse in organizations can affect public policy, business practice, and scientific practice only though language—primarily language in organizations. Where are the pres- sure points? How does one persuade someone who disagrees? How does one find allies? How does the culture of the organization make it harder or easier for people to behave ethically? All of these are crucial questions not merely for our research programs, but for our students and our society. They are questions that are more likely to be asked by people who focus on "business" communica- tion. We need to ask these questions—and we need to retain the perspective and areas o( expertise that professional communication finds developed and ready at hand in "business" communication.

References ABC Graduate Studies Committee. (1996, December). Graduate programs in

business and professional communication. Retrieved July, 1997 from www.public.iastate.edu/~nizachrv/abc/abc_gp.htm; no longer available on this site.

Beard, j . D., & Williams, D. L. (1993). A professional profile of business commu- nication educators and their research preferences: Survey results. The Joumai of Business Communication, SO, 269-295.

Connors, R. J. (1982). The rise of technical writing instruction in America. Jour- nal of Technical Writing and Communicaiion, 12, 329-352.

Dobrin, D. (1987). Guest editorial: Writing without discipline(s). Iowa State Joumai of Busiriess and Technicai Communication, 1, 5-8.

Estrin, H. S. (1996). Guest editorial. Joumai o/Technicai Wnting and Communica- tion, 26. 129-130.

Harris, j . S. (1996). Looking backward. JouTnoi o/Tec/inical Writing and Communi- cation, 26, 131-137.

Hatch, R. A., et al. (1973, Winter). Graduate-level business communication classes. Thejoumal of Business Communication, /0(3): 29-37.

Hildebrandt, H. W., et al. (1977, March). Proposal for a Master of Business Administration in business communication. ABCA Buiietin, 40(1), 3-7.

Hildebrandt, H. W., et al. (1978, March). Proposal for a Ph.D. program in busi- ness communication. ABCA BuUetin, 4 i ( l ) . 1-4.

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Keene, M. (1987). Effective professimuil writing. Lexington, MA: Heath. Lcxiker, K. O. (1998). The role of the Association for Business Commutiication

in shaping business comtnunication as an acadetnic discipline. The Jourrml of Business Communication, 35, 14-49.

Mathes, J. C , &. Stevenson, D. (1978). Technical reports: Designing information in organizations. Cincinnati: Bobbs-Merrill.

Riley, K. (1986). Pragmatics and technical communications: Some firther con- siderations. The Tec/inica/Wrtting Teacher, J3, 160-170.

Riley, K. (1988a). Speech act theory and degrees of directness in professional writing. The Technical Writing Teacher, 15, 1-29.

Riley, K. (1988b). Conversational implicattire and unstated meaning in profes- sional communication. The Technical Writing Teacher, 15, 94-104.

STC. (2002-2003). Academic database. Retrieved June 30, 2003, from http://www.stc.org/academic_database.asp

Treece, M. (1978) Communication for business and c/ie professions. Boston: AUyn

& Bacon. Wilkinson, C. W. (1984, December). ABWA and ABCA: The growth of an

organization. ABCA BuUetin, 47, 24-28. Williams, A. (2002). The rhetoric of corporate communication: A case study of

an employee communication program. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, the Ohio State University. . ,

Address correspondence t o the author. Department of English, 156 W. 17th Avenue, The Ohio State University, Columbus OH 43210 (e-tnail: fix;ker. [email protected]).