Tag: ABC

CFP ABC: Diversity & Culture in Business Communication (USA)

ConferencesAssociation for Business Communication 2018 Annual Conference: Celebrating Diversity and Culture in Business Communication, October 24-27, 2018, Miami, Florida, USA. Deadline: April 30, 2018. 

With its culturally diverse history, the city of Miami encourages us to think about inclusion in ways that can enrich our lives and   work. As ABC members, a culturally diverse group ourselves, we are working hard to make our classrooms and workplaces more diverse, culturally inclusive, and ethical. Let us use this conference as a way to generate these important conversations in order to pave new paths to follow as we return to our home institutions.

We invite proposals addressing (but not limited to):

  • Creating a culturally inclusive environment for students and stakeholders
  • Developing diverse teaching tools used to better prepare students on topics in business communication
  • Using specific delivery modes, such as online classes, hybrid classes, and face-to-face classes, in innovative ways to serve students’ needs that contribute to retention and engagement
  • Addressing the effects of culture and diversity on ethics in the classroom and the workplace
  • Creating a balance between recognizing individual cultural identity and promoting best business practices in a multicultural environment
  • Responding to challenges created by diversity and cultural (mis)understanding(s)
  • Devising cutting-edge approaches and strategies to shape and expand business communication and teaching
  • Designing and/or responding to innovative and emerging trends in the use of technology and visual communication

ABC Cape Town Regional Conference (South Africa)

Association for Business Communication 2016 Cape Town Regional Conference
Dates: 6 to 8 January 2016
Host: Terri Grant, Head, Professional Communication Unit (PCU), School of Management Studies (SMS), University of Cape Town (UCT)
Location: University of Cape Town, South Africa

Cape Town, on the tip of the African continent at the foot of the iconic World heritage site, Table Mountain, is proud to host the first ever Association for Business Communication (ABC) conference in Africa.

As a country with both first and third world conditions, characterised by pockets of world-class infrastructure and democratic institutions as well as huge inequality and poverty, South Africa grapples with the challenges faced by many developing nations.

The Professional Communication Unit in the School of Management Studies in the Commerce Faculty at the University of Cape Town is your official host. From the above, four major areas of interest emerge which underscore this conference: professional communication, management studies, business and commerce as well as education and scholarship.

With the advent of new media where, for instance, hundreds of YouTube videos and millions of tweets are posted every minute globally, companies and institutions struggle to control and manage their messages, both positive and negative. Viral communication allows every echelon of society access to environmental, social and financial data that in the past companies could control, gate keep and manage. Negative messages, in particular, could be delayed, re-scripted, even suppressed.

This so-called openness, however, did not warn many powerful constituents of the financial crash of 2008 (let alone contribute to its prevention), and the results of this meltdown are still being globally felt many years later. The conference seeks to be a meeting place for both scholars and workplace practitioners to discuss and debate a wide range of communicative and numerate topics.

Business/Professional Comm Quarterly: Reviewers/Submissions call

The Business and Professional Communication Quarterly has had a change of name and scope. BPCQ is published by Association of Business Communication, and ABC is one of the organizations making up the Council of Communication Associations, the parent organization of the Center for Intercultural Dialogue. ABC has international members, including one serving on the CID Advisory Board, so they are definitely open to international responses.

 

 

 

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Rosanne Teniente Micro Grant Award

Teniente

Rosanne Teniente has been awarded a micro grant for international travel, funded by the Association for Business Communication through the Center for Intercultural Dialogue. The following is her description of herself and the project. You can also read the main article describing all award winners.

I am a Rhode Island native who has been transplanted around the world. As an undergraduate at Simmons College in Boston, MA, I studied economics and international relations, focusing on development economics and Middle Eastern politics.  After my undergraduate studies, I moved to Egypt for several years as a Gilman Scholar at the American University in Cairo studying Arabic and interned with the US Foreign Commercial Service, and then worked as an English instructor at an international school.  I am now a master’s candidate in the public administration program at Northeastern University, while working in the field of social services.  I currently reside in Southwest New Mexico with my husband who is serving in the US Air Force.  I embrace new adventures, foreign languages, and cross-cultural learning experiences.

With the support of the CID grant as well as Northeastern University, I will be traveling to Baar, Switzerland to attend a ten-day conference in August hosted by the Institute for Peace and Dialogue, a nongovernment organization that is dedicated to strengthening institutional dialogue between civil societies, international peace and state institutions. The conference is IPD’s International Summer Academy in Peace-building & Intercultural Dialogue, which will feature experts and practitioners in the field of conflict resolution and peace building. Through different workshops, lectures, interactive group work, and negotiation activities, the knowledge gleaned with help me to build upon my past empirical research on the effect of conflict on GDP per capita in developing countries.

September 2014: This project is now complete, and Teniente’s final report is now available.

Olena Zelikovska Micro Grant Award

Olena ZelikovskaOlena Zelikovska has been awarded a micro grant for international travel, funded by the Association for Business Communication through the Center for Intercultural Dialogue. The following is her description of herself and the project. You can also read the main article describing all award winners.

Dr. Olena Zelikovska is an Associate Professor in the Department of English for Economic Specialties at the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine (NULESU). For the last 10 years she has been working as a focal point in developing curriculum of “Business English” and ‘Translation of Commercial Correspondence and Business Communication’ for undergraduate and graduate students majoring in Economics, Management of International Affairs and Linguistics as well as in supervising students’ research projects with the focus on intercultural communication issues.

In 2010, Zelikovska defended the thesis: ‘Developing intercultural competence in the students of higher economic educational institutions’ (adopted by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine). She has been chairing the Student’s Research Group “Business Environment and Intercultural Communication” since 2011.

Zelikovska has been constantly seeking for international cooperation to provide the students with valuable practical experience. She is interested in project-based programs designed to connect American and Ukrainian students in a distance learning opportunity that is grounded in intercultural dialogue and exchange.

Project background: The growing importance of English as an instrument of international communication on the global scale and its increased use in Ukraine has triggered research about improved methods to develop university students’ intercultural competence (ICC). This has promoted changes in both the teaching and learning process. However lack of students’ cross-cultural communication experience has resulted in low sensitivity of intercultural issues. The initial discussion has shown that the NULESU students majoring in Management of International Affairs or in Linguistics have very little idea about intercultural communication (IC). For instance, they are unaware of the privacy zone character of the American culture and can easily use the patterns of direct language imposing their ideas and feelings on the interlocutor as they commonly do in Ukrainian culture with higher power distance and no privacy space. Moreover English classroom communicative behavior of the majority of faculty staff unfortunately does not often correlate with such behavior of their American colleagues. That is why the traditional teaching practice does not achieve the expected results on developing ICC.

The key to the solution may be the application of the 3-component intercultural development model that provides knowledge (cognitive element of the model), foster awareness (affective element of the model) and develop skills (behavioral element of the model). The proposed project seeks to assess the interrelated issues: How to fill each component of the model with the intercultural communication content tailored to the particular needs of the individual student? How do these components correlate with each other? What issues should be submitted for Student’s Research Group? How to launch distant projects between American and Ukrainian students to enrich each other with learning by experience? The development of classroom communicative behavior of the department staff is the issue of special importance. The project will provide the unique opportunity for the grant holder to study all these processes as a system at the Californian State University by classroom observation, students and faculty staff surveying and discussions with further analysis of the data collected. The ultimate goal of the research is to empower Ukrainian students with intercultural awareness enabling them to develop empathy, tolerance and mutual understanding with their American peers.

More ABC Micro Grants available!

UPDATE May 12, 2014: This round of micro grants has been completed – see the results. As further micro grants become available, they will be described on the website.

The Center for Intercultural Dialogue will distribute micro grants for intercultural dialogue from a pool of $5000 made available by the Association for Business Communication. These micro grants are intended to support either or both of the two types of activities described in the mission of the Center: study of intercultural dialogues by Communication scholars, and/or participation in intercultural dialogue through academic interactions between Communication scholars based in different countries, or different linguistic and cultural regions. Thus, you do not have to be studying intercultural dialogue as your topic – putting intercultural dialogue into practice through collaborative research is also eligible for funding. These grants are sufficient to provide seed funding only: no more than $1000 maximum can be awarded to any one individual. The goal is to encourage international, intercultural, interlingual collaborative research by giving enough funding to offset the cost of airfare only, while providing opportunity (and cause) for matching grants from universities. Past experience shows that even these small grants help researchers obtain matching funds from their departments, or administration.

ABC logo
If you already have multiple international connections, this grant is not for you – obviously you don’t need it. But if you are at a small college, or if you are a new scholar, or have not yet established significant international connections related to research, or if your university has recently cut back its budget for travel, you are the intended audience for this competition. If you have been reading publications by an international scholar on a topic of potential relevance to your own research, consider a short trip to discuss ways to collaborate on a future project. If you do not know who has been doing relevant work, check the sources you’ve been reading lately, ask your colleagues, and/or think about who you know from graduate school or who you have met (or heard present an intriguing paper) at a conference. Find someone with similar interests but who takes a different theoretical or methodological stance by virtue of being based in a different cultural context.

The intention is to support the development of new intercultural, professional connections. Thus continuing collaborations are ineligible. Those based in the US are expected to propose travel outside the country. International scholars currently living outside their country of origin are asked to establish a new affiliation in a different region rather than proposing a return to their homeland. We recognize that much interesting work can be done within a country between cultural groups, however this grant program focuses on connecting researchers who are not yet connected, across cultural regions that are typically disconnected. This rationale of cross-cultural connection must be explicit in the project description.

The ABC Micro Grants Application requires applicants to describe their project, provide a brief resume, a short note from their department chair documenting their current status, and one from the host scholar expressing interest in holding conversations related to research. The deadline is April 15, 2014. Membership in ABC is required, but they have decided to consider this a recruitment opportunity, meaning that you may join and be eligible immediately.

The National Communication Association set aside similar funding for micro grants in 2012-13. Those projects have already been completed, and have been described in sufficient detail that they may serve as models for this year’s applications.

Contact the Center’s Director, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, with questions.

Reminder: ABC Micro Grants available

UPDATE May 12, 2014: This round of micro grants has been completed – see the results. As further micro grants become available, they will be described on the website.

The Center for Intercultural Dialogue will distribute micro grants for intercultural dialogue from a pool of $5000 made available by the Association for Business Communication. These micro grants are intended to support either or both of the two types of activities described in the mission of the Center: study of intercultural dialogues by Communication scholars, and/or participation in intercultural dialogue through academic interactions between Communication scholars based in different countries, or different linguistic and cultural regions. These grants are sufficient to provide seed funding only: no more than $1000 maximum can be awarded to any one individual. The goal is to encourage international, intercultural, interlingual collaborative research by giving enough funding to offset the cost of airfare only, while providing opportunity (and cause) for matching grants from universities.

ABC logo
If you already have multiple international connections, this grant is not for you – obviously you don’t need it. But if you are at a small college, or if you are a new scholar, or have not yet established significant international connections related to research, you are the intended audience for this competition. If you have been reading publications by an international scholar on a topic of potential relevance to your own research, consider a short trip to discuss ways to collaborate on a future project. If you do not know who has been doing relevant work, check the sources you’ve been reading lately, ask your colleagues, and/or think about who you know from graduate school or who you have met (or heard present an intriguing paper) at a conference. Find someone with similar interests but who takes a different theoretical or methodological stance by virtue of being based in a different cultural context.

The intention is to support the development of new intercultural, professional connections. Thus continuing collaborations are ineligible. Those based in the US are expected to propose travel outside the country. International scholars currently living outside their country of origin are asked to establish a new affiliation in a different region rather than proposing a return to their homeland. We recognize that much interesting work can be done within a country between cultural groups, however this grant program focuses on connecting researchers who are not yet connected, across cultural regions that are typically disconnected. This rationale of cross-cultural connection must be explicit in the project description.

The ABC Micro Grants Application requires applicants to describe their project, provide a brief resume, a short note from their department chair documenting their current status, and one from the host scholar expressing interest in holding conversations related to research. The initial deadline for review of proposals is February 1, 2014. If funds remain after the initial set of grants have been awarded, April 15, 2014 will be the second deadline.

The National Communication Association set aside similar funding for micro grants in 2012-13. Those projects have already been completed, and have been described in sufficient detail that they may serve as models for this year’s applications.

Contact the Center’s Director, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, with questions.

CFP ABC Asia-Pacific conference 2014

The 13th ABC Asia-Pacific Conference: Dao of Business Communication
March 27 – 29, 2014
Shanghai, China

ABC logo

The 13th Asia-Pacific Conference of the Association for Business Communication will be held on March 28-30, 2014, in Shanghai, China. ABC Asia-Pacific 2014 aims to provide a high-level international forum as well as a workshop for researchers, teachers, students, and industry practitioners to present and discuss recent advances in the applications of traditional thoughts in modern business communication.

Abstract Deadline:
Please submit a 300-500 word abstract (APA style, Times New Roman 12 point font and double spaced) as an email attachment no later than January 1st, 2014. Authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by February 1, 2014, and will then be invited to submit a full paper ranging from 5000 to 12000 words by March 1st. All submissions will be carefully reviewed. High quality articles will be selected for publication.

In an increasingly globalizing world, international business has developed more and more without national borders and human communication assumes in more complex and technology-oriented ways. The conference hopes to focus on the diversity and complexity of communication in international business across national boundaries.

Conference Chair: Guanglin Wang

CFP ABC discourse conference Italy 2014

ABC International Symposium on the Ins and Outs of Professional Discourse Research
March 6 – 7, 2014; Modena, Italy

ABC logo

Conference scope
Researching professional discourse is an exciting multi-faceted enterprise, from gaining access and collecting data  to feeding these results back in the form of recommendations to practitioners. This two-day symposium invites contributions which explore these two extreme ends of the scholarly process , investigating written, oral, non-verbal and digital communication in professional settings as both input and output or: the “ins and outs” of business discourse research.

Day  One –  6 March: THE INS (Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali – Modena) focuses on issues of access and data collection: how can we convince practitioners to let us observe, record, interview, survey etc? And what counts as data? How much do we need ? In what shape and form? And how does our research interfere with what we study?

Day Two  – 7 March: THE OUTS (Dipartimento di Comunicazione ed Economia – Reggio Emilia) looks at how results can be fed back to the field in the form of recommendations: how can business discourse research be applied to help shape practice? How do we translate our methods and concepts for the communities that we investigate, including industry, government and non – profit organizations?

The symposium offers an all-plenary format, with ample time for discussion. On both days we welcome data- and case-based, empirical talks, presenting best practices, self-reflections or meta-analyses, drawing on a wide range of qualitative, quantitative and critical perspectives on  professional and business discourse, from ethnography, corpus studies and sociolinguistics to interaction analysis, genre studies and document design.

The symposium language is English.

Symposium contact:: abceuropesymposium AT unimore.it or glenmichael.alessi AT unimore.it

Registration
ABC Members and students: 75 Euros (Late registration: 100 Euros)
Non-members: 100 Euros (Late registration: 150 Euros)

Micro Grants for Intercultural Dialogue Available!

UPDATE May 12, 2014: This round of micro grants has been completed – see the results. As further micro grants become available, they will be described on the website.

The Center for Intercultural Dialogue will distribute micro grants for intercultural dialogue from a pool of $5000 made available by the Association for Business Communication. These micro grants are intended to support either or both of the two types of activities described in the mission of the Center: study of intercultural dialogues by Communication scholars, and/or participation in intercultural dialogue through academic interactions between Communication scholars based in different countries, or different linguistic and cultural regions. These grants are sufficient to provide seed funding only: no more than $1000 maximum can be awarded to any one individual. The goal is to encourage international, intercultural, interlingual collaborative research by giving enough funding to offset the cost of airfare only, while providing opportunity (and cause) for matching grants from universities.

ABC logoIf you already have multiple international connections, this grant is not for you – obviously you don’t need it. But if you are at a small college, or if you are a new scholar, or have not yet established significant international connections related to research, you are the intended audience for this competition. If you have been reading publications by an international scholar on a topic of potential relevance to your own research, consider a short trip to discuss ways to collaborate on a future project. If you do not know who has been doing relevant work, check the sources you’ve been reading lately, ask your colleagues, and/or think about who you know from graduate school or who you have met (or heard present an intriguing paper) at a conference. Find someone with similar interests but who takes a different theoretical or methodological stance by virtue of being based in a different cultural context.

The intention is to support the development of new intercultural, professional connections. Thus continuing collaborations are ineligible. Those based in the US are expected to propose travel outside the country. International scholars currently living outside their country of origin are asked to establish a new affiliation in a different region rather than proposing a return to their homeland. We recognize that much interesting work can be done within a country between cultural groups, however this grant program focuses on connecting researchers who are not yet connected, across cultural regions that are typically disconnected. This rationale of cross-cultural connection must be explicit in the project description.

The ABC Micro Grants Application requires applicants to describe their project, provide a brief resume, a short note from their department chair documenting their current status, and one from the host scholar expressing interest in holding conversations related to research. The initial deadline for review of proposals is February 1, 2014. If funds remain after the initial set of grants have been awarded, April 15, 2014 will be the second deadline.

The National Communication Association set aside similar funding for micro grants in 2012-13. Those projects have already been completed, and have been described in sufficient detail that they may serve as models for this year’s applications.

Contact the Center’s Director, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, with questions.