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Professional Communication Consultancy Advocacy Activism 1St Ed Edition Louise Mullany Full Chapter PDF
Professional Communication Consultancy Advocacy Activism 1St Ed Edition Louise Mullany Full Chapter PDF
Professional Communication Consultancy Advocacy Activism 1St Ed Edition Louise Mullany Full Chapter PDF
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COMMUNICATING IN
PROFESSIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS
Professional
Communication
Consultancy, Advocacy, Activism
Series Editor
Jonathan Crichton
University of South Australia
Adelaide, SA, Australia
This ground-breaking series is edited by Jonathan Crichton, Senior Lecturer
in Applied Linguistics at the University of South Australia. It provides a
venue for research on issues of language and communication that matter to
professionals, their clients and stakeholders. Books in the series explore the
relevance and real world impact of communication research in professional
practice and forge reciprocal links between researchers in applied linguistics/
discourse analysis and practitioners from numerous professions, including
healthcare, education, business and trade, law, media, science and technology.
Central to this agenda, the series responds to contemporary challenges to
professional practice that are bringing issues of language and communi-
cation to the fore. These include:
Professional
Communication
Consultancy, Advocacy, Activism
Editor
Louise Mullany
School of English
University of Nottingham
Nottingham, UK
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Abigail and Tommy, in the hope that you will enter professions that will
treat you well and bring fulfilment to your lives in the years to come.
Preface
The last time that I saw Ronald Carter in person, we discussed the gap in
the market for a volume of this nature and as always he approached the
topic with his infectious enthusiasm, passion and encouragement.
Although he is no longer with us, his influence runs deeply throughout
this book. I will remain forever grateful to him for his mentorship, friend-
ship and for being the best senior colleague that anyone could ever wish
to work with. The book is dedicated to his memory.
I also wish to express my sincere gratitude to all of the contributors
who have made this volume possible. It has been a genuine pleasure to
work with you all. As professional communication research reaches an
important juncture in its development, it is a real positive that we have
such a vibrant community of innovative researchers, consultants and
practitioners who are not afraid to push the boundaries of the discipline
forward. I feel very privileged to be part of this global interdisciplinary
network. A particular mention to all of the practitioners who have con-
tributed here—this volume is much richer for your insight and engage-
ment. Working more closely on publications is certainly a productive way
to ensure that professional communication research makes its way into
everyday applied practice.
Many thanks also to Cathy Scott, Beth Farrow and Alice Green, who
have been an excellent team to work with at Springer Palgrave and to the
Series Editor Jonathan Crichton, for including this volume as part of the
xi
xii Acknowledgements
and resilience in life, work and Aikido. Lastly and most importantly, I
could not do any of this without the love, support and belief of Matthew,
Abigail and Tommy—you are my world.
xvii
xviii Contents
Part II Healthcare 127
Part IV Epilogue 325
Index343
Notes on Contributors
Charlene Pope, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN, is Chief Nurse for Research
at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center, USA, where she conducts
health services research on health disparities, patient-provider communi-
cation and health literacy. She is Co-PI of the Carolinas Conversation
Collection, an NIH-funded web portal for researchers to several hundred
conversational interviews with impaired/unimpaired older persons.
xxix
List of Tables
xxxi
1
Rethinking Professional
Communication: New Departures
for Global Workplace Research
Louise Mullany
1 Professional Communication:
Changing Landscapes
The socio-political importance of conducting professional communica-
tion research in contemporary societies cannot be under-estimated. Over
20 years ago, Gunnarsson et al. (1997: 1) pointed out that efficient com-
munication in the professions ‘is absolutely vital for society to function
properly’. Since the time of this publication, in the highly digitised, glo-
balised world, effective professional communication is arguably even
more critical to the robustness of social, political and economic functions
of societies worldwide. But how do professional communication research-
ers feed their research findings into professional contexts? At what stage
in the research process should this happen? What is the relationship
between the researcher and researched? What happens to the identity of
the ‘researcher’ in such a process? What topics and professions should be
L. Mullany (*)
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
e-mail: louise.mullany@nottingham.ac.uk
those who are not in any position to pay for research consultancy or public
engagement work. Alternative funding could be provided by government-
based research councils (Lumala and Mullany, this volume), charities (Boyd
et al., this volume), NGOs or via in-kind or pro-bono contributions.
Indeed, it is one of the aims of this volume to illustrate the wide variety of
approaches that can be taken to producing research consultancies, and
engaging in advocacy and activist work. As a part of this consideration, it is
essential that, as well as being collaborative and reciprocal with those who
are being researched/consulted, researchers also need to be given an inde-
pendent space to question the status quo, expose power imbalances and
exploitation, and report on unfavourable findings if they are discovered.
This includes being able to resist pressures that may be imposed by consul-
tancy clients who wish for a particular version of findings to be told, which
may be at odds with the findings of the empirical research itself and/or the
political and moral views of the researcher (see Mullany 2008).
In terms of differing practical routes through which research consul-
tancies can be carried out and how this affects researcher identities, there
are authors in this volume who retain their academic role within their
own universities, whilst also being contractually employed as an official
external research consultant by a particular organisation (Handford; File
and Schnurr); this can include academics taking on separate, external job
contracts by becoming official employees of an external consultancy, as in
Koller’s collaborative work and employment with Ereaut’s innovative
company, Linguistic Landscapes (see Koller and Ereaut); another model is
of academics continuing in their own university role but having a sepa-
rate consultancy business set up in its own right, where they acquire con-
sultancy contracts in collaboration with other consultancy firms or
individuals, separate, yet interrelated to their academic role (Darics). A
further approach is where academics leave academia completely and set
up independent business consultancies (Mooneeram). This model is par-
ticularly interesting as it enables an individual to draw on contemporary
knowledge and skills of academic research in consultancy delivery, given
credibility due to their previous academic researcher identity, with the
freedom to operate without the constraints of an academic employer.
Other practitioner consultancies in this volume are from authors who
have addressed specific socio-cultural problems through professional
8 L. Mullany
independently of any sponsors’ desires and needs and that they stand up
to the rigour and robustness of disciplinary standards. This point is par-
ticularly important with consultancy work where the boundaries between
the researcher and researched blur, and it becomes essential for reflexive
approaches to be taken throughout the research consultancy process.
Silberstein (2016) discusses the degree to which researchers have a politi-
cal responsibility to circulate their research results as widely as possible in
public spheres by engaging in a variety of dissemination activities, for
example, actively seeking out media coverage, publishing editorials and
creating joint collaborative events with communities who have been
researched. There is variation in what this work looks like in practice in
this volume, though many contributors are unified by the desire to work
towards social equity to enhance human behaviour in a variety of profes-
sional settings; some researchers and practitioners directly engage in
advocacy and activist work quite explicitly to achieve these goals.
3 Professional Domains
This collection has been split into three different sections to represent, in
my view, the most important domains where socio-cultural problems
have been investigated in professional communication research in recent
years, and where consultancy, advocacy and activism can be most usefully
drawn upon: Businesses, healthcare and institutions. Whilst all three
terms will be clearly defined, it is worth pointing out at this stage that the
category of ‘institutions’ is being used in this volume in a narrower sense
than other researchers have previously (e.g., Sarangi and Roberts 1999)
to focus on studies of professional communication in public sector occu-
pations of politics, education and law enforcement. Digital communica-
tion is present across all three sections, representing its increased
importance in everyday communicative practices within professions (dis-
cussed above in Sect. 1). Across these three categories, a wide range of
domains are examined from the perspectives of consultancy, advocacy
and activism, representing a variety of relationships between participants,
differing power relationships and differing contexts.
12 L. Mullany
3.1 Businesses
3.2 Healthcare
resource has been designed for trainees and for those already established
in clinical posts. Finally, the third case study focuses on a research angle
that became emergent during case study 1, that some patients were
unaware that they were overweight and thus more at risk of developing
diabetes. It focuses on the development of an innovative communicative
tool for primary care providers to engage patients in conversations about
healthy weight, breaking current socio-cultural problems around conver-
sations on ‘taboo’ topics, facilitating the way for patients to be more fully
informed of their own health and lifestyle choices. Given the global epi-
demic of diabetes and the growing demands for treatment in primary
care, the findings of Stubbe et al.’s work have broad applicability in
healthcare domains across multiple countries where diabetes has emerged
as a significant health issue for primary care providers and their patients.
Additionally, Stubbe et al. point out the inability to have appropriate
conversations about obesity, being overweight and lifestyle choices in pri-
mary care is an internationally-recognised problem, which can be
addressed through the development of innovative interventions such as
their lifestyle tool.
Moving from New Zealand to the US, in Chap. 8, Boyd et al. present
a set of healthcare case studies, this time investigating emergent ‘tele-
health’ practices. ‘Telehealth’ practices are defined as technology driven,
non-face-to-face interactions, involving either live audio-visual confer-
encing, remote monitoring of patients in the home via a technological
device or an e-health interface via mobile phone, tablet or another form
of technology. They argue that all work on telehealth actively incorpo-
rates advocacy for the mode of delivery, as well as some form of activism
by researchers on behalf of patients/clients and their particular health
condition. Their focus is on improving the well-being of ageing popula-
tions, particularly ‘lower-income’ older adults located in the Southeastern
US. They investigate the potential value of using telehealth practices as
effective communication tools to increase physical activity to reduce falls
and cardio-vascular disease in their research population. They investigate
whether telehealth interventions can make positive differences to the
health and well-being of older residents, and what their roles as advocates
or activists should be, as such interventions enable residents to stay in
semi-independent accommodation complexes for longer—all
1 Rethinking Professional Communication: New Departures… 19