ABOUT THE JOURNAL
Management Communication Quarterly (MCQ), peer-reviewed and published quarterly, is an essential resource for scholars of organizational and managerial practice and offers valuable and timely insights for professionals, consultants, and trainers.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Rebecca J. Meisenbach
Department of Communication, University of Missouri
meisenbachr@missouri.edu
JOURNAL STATUS
Impact:
- 2.340: most recent ISI one-year impact factor
- 2.570: five year impact factor
Submissions:
- 182: submissions in 2022 (so far)
- 291: submissions in 2021
- 351: submissions in 2020
- 268: submissions in 2019
- 234: submissions in 2018
Acceptance:
- 11%: acceptance rate for 2021
- 8.7%: acceptance rate for 2020
- 7.7%: acceptance rate for 2019
FEATURED IN THE FALL 2022 NEWSLETTER
- From the Editor's Desk: Dr. Rebecca Meisenbach
- Introducing our new MCQ Editor-in-Chief: Dr. Matthew Koschmann
- Inside the August Issue: Take a peek at our August issue
- Inside the November Issue: Take a peek at our most recent scholarship
- 2021 Article of the Year Award
- Special Issue Call for Papers: CSR Communication in an Age of Digitalization and Polarization
- Q&A with Dr. Mahuya Pal about the August Forum: Decolonizing Organizational Communication
- Editorial Board Member Spotlight
- (Surprise) Farewells and Thank Yous for Dr. Meisenbach
- Our Associate Editors & Editorial Assistants
FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK
Rebecca J. Meisenbach, Editor in Chief
Hello for the last time from the Editor’s chair! Getting to know our field, its research foci, and its people better through this role has been a true pleasure. Over the past few years, we’ve revamped the MCQ newsletter you are reading right now; we’ve implemented a new book review analysis feature run by Rebecca Gill; we’ve expanded the number of pages MCQ publishes each year in its four issues (which allows us to accept more of the outstanding work submitted to us); we’ve tested out a Ph.D. student as reviewer mentor program; we’ve formed an IDEA committee; we’ve published forums on researcher positionality, IDE concerns, COVID-19, coloniality in the field, ethnography, and research involving vulnerable populations. We’ve also published special issues on feminism and nonprofit and voluntary organizing. Right now we are accepting submissions to a special issue on CSR. Due to several individual requests, the guest editors have extended the submission deadline to January 16, 2023.
MCQ’s rankings have held steady, with the predicted slight dip in ISI ranking based on the new calculations I discussed in a prior newsletter. The most interesting thing is the significant dip in the number of submissions right now. I have two theories about this: a) we are seeing the impact of the pandemic in fewer new pieces and b) we saw a similar drop off toward the end of the last editor’s tenure at MCQ, suggesting people may be waiting to submit to the new editor after January 1. Whatever the case, we continue to welcome your submissions.
Next up, we are pleased to share with you all some details about our 2021 Article of the Year. This year our finalists were:
- Challenging the discourse of leadership as knowledge: Knowing and not knowing by Vijayta Doshi, Paaige K. Turner, & Neharika Vohra
- An outcome-centered comparative analysis of counter-human trafficking coalitions in the global South by Kirsten Foot, Helen Sworn, & Annjanette Alejano-Steele
- High reliability collaborations: Theorizing interorganizational reliability as constituted through translation by Rebecca M. Rice
- Emergent organizing in crisis: US nurses' sensemaking and job crafting during COVID-19 by Surabhi Sahay & Maria Dwyer
Thanks to Alaina Zanin who organized our award committee this year and evaluated the finalists along with committee members: Angela Gist-Mackey, Dron Mandhana, & Stacey Wieland
Congratulations to Doshi, Turner, and Vohra on being selected as the MCQ 2021 Article of the Year! Check out the winning piece and read more about this piece and its authors later in this newsletter. **One minor award thing we are working on right now that needs your help is creating a full list of our past MCQ article of the year winners. So if you know of any past winners (or are one yourself), please take a moment to help us fill in this google sheet this week with the years and articles that have won.**
Over the past few years we have worked to consider how the journal, its people, practices, and structures address issues of equity and inclusion. This work was particularly inspired by the award winning forum put together by associate editor Dawna Ballard. If you have not yet read it, I strongly encourage you to do so and have asked SAGE to again make this particular piece open access. I offer my sincerest thanks to the following individuals for their work on an ad hoc IDE committee over the past year: Brenda J. Allen, Karen Ashcraft, Cerise Glenn, Shiv Ganesh, and Astrid Villamil. A key initial outcome from this work is a proposed revision to the aims and scope of the journal that more clearly centers communication and IDEA concerns.
I offer a huge thanks to SAGE and particularly Martha Avtandilian and Amy Quon for entrusting me with MCQ over the past four years. Thanks also to the University of Missouri, the communication department, and the intrepid group of graduate students who have worked as editorial assistants during my years at MCQ: Darvelle Hutchens, Anna Valiavska, Rikki Roscoe, and Maddy Pringle. I’ve also been privileged to work with a tremendous group of associate editors during my tenure. Thank you as always to Boris Brummans, Vernon Miller, Keri K. Stephens, Dawna Ballard, Amy O’Connor, Ryan Bisel, Guowei Jian, Suzy D’enbeau, and book review editor Rebecca Gill for your work and support. Finally, thanks to the editorial board and all of you, the MCQ community. It’s been an honor.
Sincerely,
Rebecca
Introducing MCQ's Incoming Editor-in-Chief: Dr. Matthew Koschmann
Dr. Matthew Koschmann is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on nonprofit organizational communication, with an emphasis on civil society collaboration and emergent community groups. He was also a Fulbright Scholar and visiting research professor at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. He teaches classes on organizational communication, persuasion, collaboration, group communication, and qualitative research methods.
Currently, he is involved in two major research projects focusing on civil society collaboration and housing recovery after natural disasters: one in the Philippines investigating networks of diaspora communities that respond to typhoons, and a second in Colorado exploring citizen recovery groups that arise after wildfires. His past research studied authority, collective identity, and agency in a variety of nonprofit and civil society contexts.
Prof. Koschmann is the author of Understanding Nonprofit Work: A Communication Perspective (with Matthew Sanders), as well as dozens of peer-reviewed research articles, book chapters, and invited essays. His research is published in leading journals such as Academy of Management Review, Journal of Communication, Communication Monographs, and the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. He has also secured over $1.3 million in grant funding to support his research and other projects. He has been on the editorial board of MCQ for several years, as well as the editorial boards for Communication Research and the Western Journal of Communication.
Prof. Koschmann is the creator of the CommProf Productions YouTube channel that showcases several popular animation videos about organizational communication, which have over half a million views from 100+ countries. He is also the creator of the Group Communication and Decision-Making Simulation: Wildfire Mitigation, a multi-player online simulation that has been used by thousands of students and industry professionals across the world.
Beyond academia, prof. Koschmann enjoys outdoor adventures in the mountains of Colorado with his wife, two teenage sons, and their two dogs (boxer-lab mix and Alaskan malamute)...hiking, camping, back-country skiing, and trail running. And when recovering from all that he'll be in his favorite living room chair enjoying a good book or cheering on his beloved Green Bay Packers and Wisconsin Badgers.
Q&A with Dr. Koschmann
Q: What drew you to academia and organizational communication?
Dr. Koschmann: As an undergraduate student, I took several economics classes and thought I wanted to be an economics major. But when I met with a professor and learned that I'd have to go to grad school to have a good career in economics I thought, "Well, I'm never going to grad school so I'll be a business major." Yet I was continually drawn to the world of ideas and thinking critically about the world we live in...plus I was fascinated by all the communicative dynamics of organizational life I was learning about as a business student.
I started a master's program with no intention of pursuing a PhD, but after a year of teaching and research, I realized this was the career for me. I entered a PhD program with no particular affinity for organizational communication, but the professors and topics I connected with the most were involved with organizational communication, and after about a year I realized I was becoming an organizational communication scholar. As I embraced that development and pursued more things related to organizational communication (classes, conferences, projects, publications, etc.) I recognized that I had become an organizational communication scholar and this was my niche. Plus, my interest in nonprofit organizations and collaborative work solidified my place in the field of organizational communication. But none of this would have lasted if not for all the wonderful people I've met and worked with in our field over the years--that's what keeps me motivated and engaged after all these years.
Q: What led you to apply to be the next Editor of MCQ?
Dr. Koschmann: No particular ambition, but I'm at the point in my career where I'm up for a new challenge and want to be more involved in shaping the trajectory of our field. And when I heard that several people recommended me for the editor position I felt a tremendous sense of obligation and responsibility--if respected colleagues thought I was a good fit for this position I wanted to live up to those expectations.
Q: What goals do you have for MCQ?
Dr. Koschmann: In my application letter, I said that my editorial strategy would be to preserve and expand...to maintain the traditions of the institution and the high standards of quality that have led MCQ to become the flagship journal for organizational communication scholarship, while also building upon this foundation to make MCQ even more responsive to contemporary needs and developments. I recognize that a scholarly journal is a living social system that requires growth and adaptation to survive and thrive.
Accordingly, a key goal of mine is to create and promote more ways for new and junior scholars to get connected to and involved with the journal. This may involve things like junior reviewing opportunities, an expanded book review section, and opportunities to submit research proposals for initial review. Additionally, my goal is to explore alternative formats for scholarship and data reporting, such as case studies and multimedia presentations. And all of this depends on a diverse and responsive editorial team, so my first priority as editor is to assemble a great team of associate editors that represent the many perspectives, approaches, and topics of organizational communication scholarship.
I'm not sure how it will all work out, but I'm honored to be entrusted with this responsibility and I will always be working to preserve and expand the quality of MCQ.
ARTICLES
The Impact of Daily Emotional Labor on Health and Well-Being by Sarah E. Riforgiate, Satoris S. Howes, & Mathias J. Simmons
Keywords: emotional labor, communicating emotions, health, burnout
Overview: Is faking that smile at work taking its toll on your health? Find out what Riforgiate, Howes, and Simmons discovered when they examined the emotional labor of employees at a website development company.
An Empirical Study of the Effect of Communication Visibility on Innovation Behavior by Liang Liang, Xue Zhang, Guyang Tian, Yezhuang Tian
Keywords: communication visibility, innovation behavior, voice behavior, promotion focus
Overview: Communication visibility is important in the workplace for the use of enterprise social media. How communication visibility relates to employee innovation behavior? Find out what Liang et al. discovered.
The Social and Political Significance of Technology-Driven Organisational Change: Discursive Battles to Frame, Define, and Decide in 'a Space of Points of View' by Jette Ernst
Keywords: consultant doctors, discursive struggles, electronic health record, framing, ideology, politicians, public media, a space of points of view
Overview: How is technology embedded in social forces and relations of power that reach beyond individual organizations? Jette examined the ongoing discursive struggles in public media outlets between consultant doctors and regional actors concerning a controversial electronic health record (EHR) system, which was implemented in 20 Danish hospitals.
"The Enabling Role of Internal Organizational Communication in Insider Threat Activity - Evidence From a High Security Organization' by Charis Rice and Rosalind H. Searle
Keywords: crisis and risk management, employee misconduct, interpretive case study, organizational communication
Overview: How might internal communication enable organizational crisis? Rice and Searle explore the impact of communication on insider threat activity in a high-security organization.
The Interpellated Voice: The Social Discipline of Member Communication by Emma Christensen and Lars Thøger Christensen
Keywords: member voicing, ventriloquism, interpellation, social discipline
Overview: Extant formulizations of ventriloquism fail to conceptualize how organizational members’ voicing is informed and disciplined by social norms and expectations. Thus, E. Christensen and L. T. Christensen question how “organizational” organizational communication is and what is being constituted when members voice their organizations.
Disciplined Into Hiding: Milk Banking and the "Obscured Organization" by Sarah E. Jones and Sarah J. Tracy
Keywords: obscured organizations, hidden organizing, concealment, discipline, milk banking
Overview: Some organizations are obscured from view because discourses deem them filthy, suspicious, or inadequate. Sarah Jones & Sarah Tracy's ethnography explores how milk banking members are disciplined to conceal the important activity of sharing human breast milk for needy babies.
Decolonizing Organizational Communication by Mahuya Pal, Heewon Kim, Kate L. Harris, Ziyu Long, Jasmine Linabary, Elizabeth Wilhoit Larson, Peter R. Jensen, Angela N. Gist-Mackey, Jamie McDonald, Beatriz Nieto-Fernandez, Jing Jiang, Smita Misra, Sarah E. Dempsey
Keywords: decolonization, social justice, rest, violence, hierarchy, whiteness, hegemony, settler colonialism
Overview: In this forum, a group of scholar-teachers committed to addressing various critical social issues came together to challenge dominant ideas, paradigms, and structures within and beyond organizational communication.
ARTICLES
How Volunteer Commitment Differs in Online and Offline Environments by Jennifer Ihm and Michelle Shumate
Keywords: organizational-volunteer relationship, volunteering for nonprofit organizations, communication ties, volunteer identity
Overview: Are virtual volunteers different from traditional volunteers? Ihm and Shumate compare their communication networks and identities to explore how and why.
Authorial Incongruity and Organizational Presence(s): A Ventriloquial Analysis of Shadowed Organization by Rebecca A. Costantini and Anna Wiederhold Wolfe
Keywords: organizational presence, authority, ventriloquism, hidden organizations, relational ontology
Overview: How do contradictory sources of authority manifest the organizational presence of a crisis pregnancy center in the southeastern region of the United States? Find out what Costantini & Wolfe found in their ventriloquial analysis.
Storytelling Networks that Build Community Power: Urban Equity Advocacy From a Communication Infrastructure Lens by George Villanueva
Keywords: communication infrastructure, organizational communication, community organizing, equity, social justice activism
Overview: How do organizers from social change-focused organizations activate community storytelling network actors to advocate for equity? Learn more about how Villanueva theorizes urban equity advocacy through communication infrastructure theory.
Workplace Bullying in Academia: A Conditional Process Model by Alan K. Goodboy, Matthew M. Martin, Carol B. Mills, and Cathlin V. Clark-Gordon
Keywords: workplace bullying, job demands, control, social support, job stress, conditional process analysis
Overview: How do college professors experience workplace bullying? Goodboy et al. used the job demand-control-support model of workplace strain to find out.
The Link Between Supervisor-Subordinate Computer-Mediated Immediate Behaviors and Organizational Identification in U.S., English, and Australian Organizations by Stephen M. Croucher, Stephanie Kelly, Malcolm Green, Dini M Homsey, Joanna Cullinane, Kenneth T Rocker, Thao Nguyen, Kirsty Anderson, Hui Chen, George Guoyu Ding, Douglas Ashwell, Malcolm Wright, Nitha Palakshappa
Keywords: COVID-19, organizational identification, immediacy, supervisor-subordinate, cross-cultural communication
Overview: What’s the link between supervisor-subordinate immediacy and organizational identification in online communication? Croucher et al. explored this question in the U.S., England, and Australia.
Why and When Negative Workplace Gossip Inhibits Organizational Citizenship Behavior by Jun Xie, Ming Yan, Yongyi Liang, and Qihai Huang
Keywords: perceived negative workplace gossip, organizational identification, collectivism, organizational citizenship behavior
Overview: How does informal and negative evaluative communication in organizations influence employees’ behavior? Find out what Xie et al. discovered when drawing on the social identity perspective.
Exploring Collective and Multi-Audience Dissent in Organizational Meetings by Johny T. Garner
Keywords: organizational dissent, meetings, workgroups, nonprofit organizations, longitudinal research
Overview: Garner observed bi-weekly meetings in the fundraising department of a nonprofit organization for two years to explore organizational dissent across time. Learn more about the nuanced ways in which dissenters express disagreement.
Armed with History: Themes in Global Revolutionary Organizing Works by Dani R. Soibelman (Book Review)
Overview: In MCQ’s second piece in our new book review format, Soibelman discusses violent globalism, socio-material entanglement, and organizational learning as “Armament.”
Announcing the Winner of the MCQ 2021 (vol. 34) Article of the Year Award
Challenging the Discourse of Leadership as Knowledge: Knowing and Not Knowing by Vijayta Doshi, Paaige K. Turner, & Neharika Vohra
Overview: Leadership and knowledge are often paired together. Yet, certain forces that operate on businesses and individuals are often unknowable. In this study, we consider leaders’ perceptions of the consequences of not knowing and how leaders discursively cope with a sense of not knowing. Based on interviews with 33 participants working in multinational companies in India, we find that leaders perceive negative consequences of not knowing and engage in discursive tactics such as posing, delaying, clarifying, admitting, being silent, and stating “I don’t know,” that sustain and are sustained by the Discourse of leadership as knowledge. The findings contribute to the discursive leadership literature by demonstrating tactics leaders use as they attempt to balance the discursive construction of leadership as knowledge and lived experiences of not knowing. We discuss how the Discourse of leadership as knowledge will hamper knowledge extension as it undermines not knowing and privileges knowing over not knowing.
Q&A with the Authors
MCQ: What inspired you to write this piece?
Authors: This article is based on the extension of the thesis work of Dr. Doshi, supervised by Dr. Vohra. As a professor who worked with training and mentoring lot of leaders Dr. Vohra noticed that the leaders were very uncomfortable with accepting that they did not know something. Also, those who were able to easily accept that they did not know were among the ones who did well and showed a certain growth orientation. In her reading of the literature she was inspired by the concept of ‘negative capability’, coined by John Keats. Negative capability essentially means being in uncertainty without anxiety. Dr. Doshi, during her thesis, deconstructed it as a phenomenon of ‘not knowing’ and aimed to study how ‘not knowing’ plays out in the context of leadership since the societal discourse of leadership creates a grandiose image of a leader as one who knows. Later on, as a faculty member at IIM Udaipur, while teaching leadership, interacting with corporate leaders, and serving in leadership positions, including the vision committee of her institute, Dr. Doshi was inspired to continue to pursue and extend the phenomenon of not knowing. Upon meeting Dr. Doshi and hearing about the work she would like to do, Dr. Turner was inspired by the times as a leader of multiple national organizations and currently as a Dean that she is expected to know what to do. This resonated for her with Heidegger’s work on Dasein or being-in-the-world and the discursive turn in communication literature. The times she has forgotten or feels pulled towards a state of knowledge that exists outside of the world are often the times she feels that she has failed as a leader. As a senior professor at IIMA, Dr. Vohra, also resonated that in her role as a leader, she has so often been able to create value when space has been created by accepting vulnerability.
MCQ: What are you hoping will follow from this work? What is the main value of it to you?
Author: When we presume knowledge is a state held by a single individual, knowledge is limited to that individual’s experiences, identities, and capacity. We hope this work will make leadership and expectations of leaders more humane, open to possibilities, vulnerable, and effective at meeting the needs of their roles. When scholars and practitioners recognize and challenge the tactics identified in this research to negotiate knowing and not knowing we can expose the limitations. This has the potential to shift our patterns of interaction and open a space for organizational members to contribute and lead by: i) normalizing not knowing as integral to the experience of leadership, ii) debunking the negative connotation attached to not knowing, and iii) embracing not knowing as an essential constituent of interactive and dialectical knowing. This work suggests the importance for scholars to study the manifestation and implications associated with other societal expectations.
Comments from the 2021 Awards Committee
"This insightful piece considers how leaders discursively cope with not knowing vis a vis cultural expectations of leaders as knowledgeable. Doshi, Turner, and Vohra contribute to our understanding of discursive leadership by considering the interplay of micro-discourses in situations of not knowing with macro-Discourses of leadership and knowledge. What I love about this piece is that it suggests the value of normalizing individual uncertainty: The results show that recognizing a lack of knowledge is a crucial step in moving toward greater knowledge. As a result, the authors make the case for interrogating our Discourses of leadership to enable leaders to recognize and admit what they do not (yet) know."
"This research article immediately sparked my interest after reading only the first paragraph. The article's focus on the challenges leaders face in admitting not knowing something and the discursive strategies leaders use to tackle those situations is timely and important for organizational leadership studies. The paper is well-written, and the findings are clearly presented. The contextualization of the findings on the discursive strategies leaders use in relation to the Discourses about leadership is the most significant contribution of the paper. I strongly believe this paper will provide fertile grounds for future research on organizational leadership studies."
"This paper had a clear focus on communication related phenomena and produces a clear contribution with its typology of communicative responses when leaders experience not knowing; I appreciate the context outside of of U.S./Western context; the findings have clear transferability and is well written; what is most important is the paper's ability to critique discourses of leadership and how we have normalized problematic assumptions regarding knowledge and knowing in the context of leadership."
Thank you to our 2021 award committee: Alaina Zanin (chair), Angela Gist-Mackey, Dron Mandhana, & Stacey Wieland
Call for Papers: CSR Communication in an Age of Digitalization and Polarization
Guest Editors: Dennis Schoeneborn, Urša Golob, Hannah Trittin-Ulbrich, Matthias Wenzel, & Amy O'Connor
Submission Deadline (Extended): January 16, 2023
Guest editors welcome submissions that address a broad range of questions and topic areas within the theme of the Special Issue including but not limited to:
- How, why, and with what consequences do certain organizations decide to enter into polarized societal discourses?
- How is CSR communication that draws strongly on fact-based information (as recommended by earlier works, such as Morsing et al., 2008) theorized and evaluated, if we live in a society where some actors do not care much about facts or easily dilute these with "alternative facts" of dubious origin?
- How can fact-based CSR communication be used, if at all, to attain legitimation in an age of polarized communication and disinformation?
- What are the implications of the increased usage of digital and social media for firms engaging in practices of CSR/sustainability reporting?
- How and why do some organizations engage the complexity of polarized discourses in CSR communication, whereas others tend to employ "greenhushing" (Front et al., 2017) or "strategic silence" (Carlos & Lewis, 2018), that is, abstain from CSR communication whatsoever?
Q & A with Dr. Mahuya Pal about the August Issue Forum
Decolonizing Organizational Communication by Mahuya Pal, Heewon Kim, Kate L. Harris, Ziyu Long, Jasmine Linabary, Elizabeth Wilhoit Larson, Peter R. Jensen, Angela N. Gist-Mackey, Jamie McDonald, Beatriz Nieto-Fernandez, Jing Jiang, Smita Misra, and Sarah E. Dempsey
Q: How did you decide to request/put together a forum?
Mahuya Pal (MP): It all started at a daylong virtual National Communication Association pre-conference in 2020, where some of us got together and engaged with ideas of decolonization and social justice. We attempted to theorize, advance, challenge, and complicate our hegemonic understanding of communication as it relates to ideas of organizing in our research practices, theory building, methodological development, scholarly production, curriculum development, teaching practices, and engagement with various publics. We interrogated the colonial underpinnings of a range of organizing practices and principles and explored the potential role of communication in decolonizing the dominant conceptual categories in research and teaching.
We had over fifteen scholar-teachers presenting and around seventy-five in attendance. It was our first virtual convention at the time of the pandemic when we were coping with Covid anxiety and combating virtual meeting fatigue. Yet everyone stayed the entire time and the energy and enthusiasm were palpable. The conversation left us with hope and inspiration. We decided at the pre-conference that we must archive our conversation. We received numerous suggestions and tangible action plans. One such recommendation was to publish the thoughts expressed at the pre-conference as a forum in Management Communication Quarterly. We are grateful to the editor, Dr. Rebecca Meisenbach, for her support and offering a space for our forum entitled Decolonizing Organizational Communication.
Q: How do you feel about the way the forum came together?
MP: I hope the forum offers a sharp provocation to decenter the spaces of theorizing and pedagogical practices in organizational communication and beyond. Our themes revolve around challenging Eurocentric conceptual categories, re-envisioning organizing principles, and dismantling institutional barriers to change. I am grateful to the authors for contributing powerful and thought-provoking essays that raise urgent questions, enable new knowledge, and suggest transformative praxis. I am equally grateful to my co-editor Dr. Heewon Kim for helping me organize the forum.
Q: What would you describe as some important take-a-ways?
MP: For the purpose of the forum, we define decolonization as transformative struggles that grow out of dominant organizational spaces. We hope the decolonial impetus in the forum essays offers an entry point to unsettle dominant ideas and practices and enable different forms of liberation. Mindful of Tuck & Yang’s (2012) concern about seemingly easy adoption of decolonizing advocacy discourse, we strived to advance the understanding that decolonization is an ongoing struggle for social justice at every level.
Q: What is the ideal outcome of this forum?
MP: The ideal outcome of the forum is to provoke systematic analyses of oppressive conditions involving a critique of extractive neoliberal institutions and enable a praxis for inclusion. In particular, as members of the academy, it is important we recognize how our universities are complicit with settler colonialism. Our field has remained impervious to growing calls to decolonize universities. That’s the thought we conclude our forum with (see Jiang, Misra & Dempsey’s essay entitled Decolonizing American Universities: Land, Labor, and Community Relations). I hope to see more scholars respond to the call and join the ongoing efforts in engaging with colonial histories and their legacies.
Editorial Board Member Spotlight:
Dr. Angela Gist-Mackey (PhD, University of Missouri) is an Associate Professor of organizational communication at the University of Kansas. Angela's research explores issues of power and social mobility related to the workforce and education. Much of her research is done in partnership with local non-profits working with underserved communities. Angela does mosaic artwork in her spare time and has two dogs named Kujo and Gizmo who keep her busy playing fetch.
Dr. Alaina C. Zanin (Ph.D., University of Oklahoma) is an associate professor of organizational and health communication at Arizona State University-Tempe. Her research interests include structuration, sensemaking, and positioning theories as well as issues related to identity, power, and resistance in non-traditional organizational contexts. Outside of work, Alaina enjoys spending time with her partner and her pup Gertie, especially when they are camping, hiking, or running together.
Dr. Kerk Kee is an Associate Professor in the College of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University, USA. His research focuses on using the diffusion of innovations theory to understand the adoption and implementation of big data technologies in scientific organizations. In his free time, Kee enjoys taking a long walk in the park.
Dr. Heewon Kim is an associate professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on organizational justice and inclusion, institutional violence, and participation and voice, with particular attention to minoritized groups and individuals. She loves working and playing with queer activists, reading poetry, and translating her research into public-facing work in her mother tongue.
Farewells & Thank yous!!
Surprise!! The MCQ team thought a special thank you was necessary for Dr. Meisenbach (without her awareness, of course). Enjoy a few 'farewells' and 'thank yous' from our current Associate Editors:
Dr. Guowei Jian: Dear Rebecca: In your opening essay as EIC in the February issue of MCQ (Meisenbach, 2019), you prophetically cited The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and stated, “We are all in this together, and I can’t wait to play this part in understanding, critiquing, and transforming our bizarre universe” (p. 5). Looking back at the three-year journey, I realize that it is such an understatement of the part that you have played and of the nature of our universe we’ve experienced. Guiding MCQ through this tumultuous and “bizarre universe” requires dedication, wisdom, and an exceptional sense of collective leadership, all of which you have demonstrated brilliantly. Thank you so much for your outstanding contribution to MCQ and for the opportunity you afforded me to share this journey. Best wishes! (Oh, by the way, you’re already at the top of my reviewers list for MCQ :) )
Dr. Dawna J. Ballard: It was such a joy to work with you, Rebecca, over these past few years. There is certainly no other editor-in-chief with whom I’d rather navigate a global pandemic—when reviewers were overloaded and reviews were often slow coming. Your steadfast vision, commitment to inclusivity, thoughtful insights, and deep compassion were hallmarks of your tenure as EIC and remained through it all. Both your leadership and your friendship were precious gifts for which I am ever grateful.
Dr. Amy O'Connor: Congratulations, Rebecca! Your leadership and dedication have continued the long tradition of excellence in editorial leadership at MCQ. I feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with and learn from you. You are a thoughtful, developmental, and encouraging editor-in-chief. Thank you so much for all you have done for me, the many MCQ authors and the organizational communication discipline. My life is better and fuller because you are in it.
Dr. Suzy D'Enbeau: I have been so honored to work under Rebecca’s leadership. She is a true mentor in terms of providing the structure, support, and thoughtful autonomy for the associate editor team. I have learned a great deal under her guidance and I will forever be grateful.
Dr. Ryan Bisel: Rebecca: Thank you for your valuable service to MCQ over these past three years! I enjoyed working with and learning from you. Organizational communication owes you a debt of gratitude for your leadership and stewardship. Congratulations on a job well done!
Thank You to Our Associate Editors
- Dr. Guowei Jian, Cleveland State University
- Dr. Dawna J. Ballard, University of Texas at Austin
- Dr. Amy O'Connor, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
- Dr. Suzy D'Enbeau, Kent State University
- Dr. Ryan Bisel, University of Oklahoma
Thank You to Our Editorial Assistants
- Rikki A. Roscoe, Fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate, University of Missouri