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:
- 80: 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 SPRING 2022 NEWSLETTER
- From the Editor's Desk: A message from Dr. Rebecca Meisenbach
- Call for new MCQ Editor-in-Chief
- Inside the February Issue: Take a peek at our February issue
- Inside the May Issue: Take a peek at our most recent scholarship
- Introducing our new Book Review Essays: Q&A with Dr. Rebecca Gill
- Special Issue Call for Papers: CSR Communication in an Age of Digitalization and Polarization
- Q&A with Dr. Brittany Peterson about the February Forum: Conducting Research in Difficult, Dangerous, and/or Vulnerable Contexts: Messy Narratives From the Field
- Editorial Board Member Spotlight
- Meet our SAGE Editor: Amy Quon
- ScholarOne: Directions to create/update your account
- Our Associate Editors & Editorial Assistants
FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK
Rebecca J. Meisenbach, Editor in Chief
Hello All,
We are delighted to share our Spring Newsletter with you. It’s been a semester of catching up.
To make sure we get your work into print quickly-- even as our online first queue has lengthened, SAGE has provided us with additional pages in our issues this year. Furthermore, as some of you know first-hand, we have been experiencing slower than usual times from acceptance to the generation of proofs the past few months. Some of that is the increased volume of acceptances we’ve seen this year, but SAGE has also recently added additional support to help return the proofs process to prior speeds.
This summer we will be running our 2021 Article of the Year process AND It is time to find our next Editor in Chief of MCQ. The link to the Editor Call is in the newsletter below. Applications are due in June with the intention to select the next editor in August, allowing for a semester to smooth the transition into their official start on January 1, 2023. Reach out if you have any questions for me about this role.
Our February and May issues are now available online and you will see many more pieces that will be published later this year already up in online first. I’m particularly pleased to share that our May issue includes our first Book Review Essay from the new process led by Book Review Editor, Rebecca Gill. Check out the related Q&A with Dr. Gill below, then enjoy Dr. Oana Albu’s piece in the May issue, and be on the lookout for Dani Soibelman’s piece in our online first section soon. Email Dr. Gill and me if you have an idea for a book review essay piece.
Finally, we invite you all to consider submitting to our upcoming special issue on CSR Communication in an Age of Digitalization and Polarization. The submission deadline is in December 2022. So now is the time to read the call and plan your submissions!
Best wishes for a healthy and productive next few months,
Rebecca
Apply to be MCQ's new Editor-in-Chief!
SAGE announces the search for a new editor of Management Communication Quarterly (MCQ). This peer-reviewed, quarterly journal is SSCI-listed and an essential resource for scholars of organizational communication and managerial practice. SAGE is currently accepting editor applications for a three-year term (with potential for renewal) commencing January 1st 2023.
Applications are due June 26, 2022.
ARTICLES
The Paradox of the Black Professional: Whitewashing Blackness through Professionalism by Marcus W. Ferguson Jr. & Debbie S. Dougherty
Keywords: paradox, professionalism, black professionalism, race
Overview: Learn more about the complexities of Black professionalism from Ferguson and Dougherty's analysis of the paradox of the Black professional.
Temporal Dominance: Controlling Activity Cycles When Time is Scarce, Sudden, and Squeezed by Jared T. Jensen, Shelbey L. Rolison, & Joshua B. Barbour
Keywords: time, temporality, engaged research, work, information communication technologies, constant connectivity
Overview: How does temporal dominance affect your organization? How do collectives and managers get stuck in cycles of commotion activity? Jensen, Rolison, and Barbour detail answer these questions in their article.
Navigating the Hierarchy: Communicating Power Relationships in Collaborative Health Care Groups by Allison L. Noyes
Keywords: collaboration, hospitals and health care organizations, communication, power relationships
Overview: Can health care groups with hierarchical power relationships collaborate successfully? Noyes uses the framework of text and conversation to explore this question.
The Impact of the CSR-Embedded Crisis Response: The Role of Values Congruence between Leadership Styles and CSR Motives by Jeesun Kim, Hyun Jee Oh, & Chang-Dae Ham
Keywords: corporate social responsibility, values congruence, transformational leadership, transactional leadership, crisis type, persuasion knowledge model
Overview: Check out how Kim, Oh, & Ham examined the interplay between leadership styles and corporate social responsibility motives in different crisis contexts.
"They Are Nothing More Than His Spies on the Floor": Local Employees' Sensemaking and Interpretation of Expatriates' Roles and Responsibilities by Mizuki H. Wyant & Michael W. Kramer
Keywords: expatriates, local employees, sensemaking, socialization
Overview: Check out how Kim, Oh, & Ham examined the interplay between leadership styles and corporate social responsibility motives in different crisis contexts.
Drawing the Contours of Organizational Culture Through Neoliberal and Colonial Discourses by Eric Karikari
Keywords: neoliberalism, organizational culture, colonialism, discourse, cultural materialism, Ghana
Overview: What exists at the intersection of neoliberalism, colonialism, and organizational culture? Karikari explores how neoliberal and colonial logics are activated in organizations through discourses of professionalism and individualization.
Conducting Research in Difficult, Dangerous, and/or Vulnerable Contexts: Messy Narratives From the Field by Brittany L. Peterson, Oana B. Albu, Kirsten Foot, Darvelle Hutchins, Jack Qiu, Craig R. Scott, Michael Stohl, & Sarah J. Tracy
Keywords: access, fieldwork, ethnography, interviewing, risk
Overview: How do you navigate challenges of emotional harm and physical danger when conducting research? Six scholars share their unfiltered messy narratives as they conduct research in difficult, dangerous, and vulnerable contexts.
ARTICLES
Constituting Intersectional Politics of Reinscription: Women Entreprenuers' Resistance Practice in China, Denmark, and the United States by Ziyu Long & Patrice M. Buzzanell
Keywords: politics of reinscription, resistance and control, intersectionality, women's entrepreneuring
Overview: Power structures can intersect with one another to constrain women’s agency in pursuing entrepreneurship. How to resist stereotypes and discriminations and attain entrepreneurial goals? Drawing from data in China, Denmark, and the United States, Long and Buzzanell examined how women entrepreneurs engaged in situated maneuverings to recontextualize, reformulate, and re-envision their intersectional positions to achieve micro-emancipation.
Social Media Affordances and Transactive Memory Systems in Virtual Teams by Kay Yoon & Yaguang Zhu
Keywords: entrepreneurial communication, leadership communication, employee-startup relationships, psychological need satisfaction, organizational identification
Overview: Are you using the “right” social media technologies when collaborating with your colleagues? How is your work team appropriating social media technologies in remote settings? Yoon and Zhu suggest that virtual teams need to consider various media affordances and their differing effects on knowledge sharing.
A Multi-Level Analysis of Role Negotiation: A Bona Fide Group Approach to Work Team Socialization by Michael J. Tornes & Michael W. Kramer
Keywords: group socialization, teams, bona fide group, meetings
Overview: Tornes & Kramer provide a more complex understanding of information seeking during work team socialization by identifying the importance of nexus or overlap with other internal and external groups.
Membership Matters: Organizing Archetypes, Participatory Styles, and Connective Action by Shiv Ganesh, Cynthia Stohl, & Young Ji Kim
Keywords: collective action, connective action, membership, participation, social movements, technology
Overview: What organizing archetypes proliferate in digital environments? Ganesh, Stohl and Kim tell us how people are engaging with and joining membership groups in a wide range of ways.
Sensemaking by Employees in Essential versus Non-essential Professions During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Comparison of Effects of Change Communication and Disruption Cues on Mental Health, Through Interpretations of Identity Threats and Work Meaningfulness by Ward van Zoonen, Ronald E. Rice, & Claartje L. ter Hoeven
Keywords: sensemaking, change communication quality, essential and non-essential work, identity threat, mental health, meaningful work
Overview: How do workers cope with work disruptions during the pandemic? Learn more about the ways in which the wellbeing of essential and non-essential workers is affected through the interpretation of environmental cues.
Organizational Rhetoric as Subjectification by Jenna N. Hanchey & Peter R. Jensen
Keywords: subjectification, organizational rhetoric, coloniality, racialization, psychoanalysis
Overview: What does #CommunicationSoWhite mean for organizational rhetoric? Find out how we can challenge the racism and coloniality of our theories in Hanchey & Jensen’s “Organizational Rhetoric as Subjectification."
Betwixt and Between: Trends in Transparency and Secrecy Research a book review by Oana Albu
Overview: Datafication has radically transformed the ability of people to see and be seen, and issues of visibility, transparency, and secrecy have become very important. This essay identifies recent trends in transparency and secrecy research as these are key dimensions of social life, in an era where actors are already too visible, often much more than they wish to be.
About MCQ Book Review Essays:
Learn more about MCQ Book Reviews through Q&A with Dr. Rebecca Gill, our book review editor!
Q: What is a book review essay?
Rebecca Gill (RG): A book review essay reviews more than one text and in doing so, synthesizes and highlights key ideas and trends with the goal to provoke critical thought for our discipline. Because it reviews a series of texts, an essay has the potential to make a thematic contribution to the conversations that we are already having as a field through Management Communication Quarterly – or it can inspire conversations that we perhaps should be having. Beyond being a space to review work and engage pressing issues and their implications for our field, book review essays can also offer research agendas, suggest teaching modules, and raise other considerations relevant to our community.
Q: How is it going so far?
RG: It is going well! We have had insightful submissions thus far and I have enjoyed working with our review essay authors. Of course, I would love to see even more interest in the section, and would encourage students and faculty to reach out with ideas for essays based on the work they are currently doing!
Q: What excites you about the first two essays to be published?
RG: Both of these essays introduce or expand ideas in our field that are timely and consequential. The piece by Oana Albu helps capture the different dimensions of research in secrecy and transparency, with particular consideration of what these concepts mean in a world where our social existence is becoming more and more “datafied”. In their piece, Dani R. Soibelman draws scholarship and stories about global revolutions together; I am particularly excited that Soibelman incorporates a photographic anthology and also a podcast into their set of texts, recognizing that information travels through various channels in its journey to the narratives that we tell and experiences we have around organizing.
Q: What is an ideal topic for a book review essay?
RG: There is not much that I would say is *not* an appropriate topic, though I would stress that the texts considered should be recent and indicative of a trend that will be interesting to the field in some way. We want to use the book review essay section to discuss emerging ideas that will challenge, extend, or otherwise provoke the conversations that we are already having or need to have!
Q: What is the process for submitting a book review essay?
RG: It is a fairly straightforward process. I would start by contacting me, the current book review essay editor. We will talk about your idea and the texts that you want to consider. From there, I will invite you to spend some time developing a draft of 3,000-4,000 words and we will likely go back-and-forth through a few rounds of edits. The manuscript does not get sent out to reviewers, so once you and I have gotten the essay into good shape, you will submit it to Manuscript Central for the final editing and formatting process.
Q: Can people contact you if they just want to discuss ideas?
RG: Of course! I am happy to talk through the ideas and texts that people are considering for their essay. You can email me at gillre@wfu.edu.
SOME COMMENTS FROM BOOK REVIEWERS
Dr. Oana Albu: "There is invaluable value in pursuing this kind of book review, not the least because it allows one to take a deep dive into the world of books and experience the elegant unfolding of arguments. In the process of comparing and synthesizing these four wonderful books I have gained a lot of exciting insights as I was able to trace the flow of knowledge across disciplines (organizational communication, sociology and cultural studies), identify common avenues and chart unexplored paths. I am grateful to the editorial team for their help and giving me such a nice experience."
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
Deadline for submissions: December 15, 2022
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. Brittany L. Peterson about the February Issue Forum
Conducting Research in Difficult, Dangerous, and/or Vulnerable Contexts: Messy Narratives From the Field by Brittany L. Peterson, Oana B. Albu, Kirsten Foot, Darvelle Hutchins, Jack Qiu, Craig R. Scott, Michael Stohl, & Sarah J. Tracy
Q: How did you decide to request/put together a forum?
Brittany L. Peterson (BP): This idea for this forum began a few years ago when Craig Scott reached out to a group of scholars with a proposition for ICA 2020 to see if we would be interested in participating in a panel about conducting research in contexts that were difficult to access or potentially dangerous. Our panel was accepted and slotted to take place in Gold Coast, Australia in May 2020, but then instead of traveling down under, our world turned upside down. We pivoted and met virtually; it was an exhilarating session which left us feeling as though we had more to say and much more to learn. Consequently, we invited a few more voices into the conversation and decided to pen this collaborative essay.
Q: How do you feel about the way the forum came together?
BP: Co-authoring this forum with such a prolific group of scholars was an exhilarating and humbling experience. We shared many more pages of stories with one another than could ever end up in print. For me personally, the process of writing about my time in the field, and then seeing the shared substance of our collective stories, was very cathartic. It was heartening to collectively imagine our futures in DDV contexts as scholars, as teachers, and as citizens. In short, I’m incredibly grateful.
Q: What would you describe as some important take-a-ways?
BP: In the forum define what we mean by “difficult,” “dangerous,” and/or “vulnerable” contexts (DDVs) and describe three ethical exigencies inherent in conducting research in DDVs. For each ethical challenge, we offer stories—penned by the authors— where we invite readers to experience the events as we lived them. We also share our strategies for navigating challenges of access, collapsing role boundaries, and the physical and emotional weight of this work.
Q: What is the ideal outcome of this forum?
BP: Ideally, we hope that scholars who conduct research in these contexts will join us in articulating how they have managed to do so, especially for the sake of those who hope to in the future. In addition to scholarly dialog, we also hope to see (and be part of creating) workshops, trainings, and pre- or post-conferences addressing these challenges. Such spaces afford us the opportunity to co-create practical guidelines and allow for more sharing of experiences. Moreover, we hope this forum pushes us forward as a discipline and disrupts our narrow and confined views of what counts as scholarship (see Boyer, 1990) to recognize the value of, and the need for, doing research in these contexts, even if they are viewed as “difficult,” “dangerous,” or “vulnerable.”
Q: Do you have any additional comments for potential readers?
BP: If you are doing work in similar contexts, we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out.
Editorial Board Member Spotlight:
Dr. Dron M. Mandhana (PhD, University of Texas at Austin) is an assistant professor of organizational communication at Villanova University. His research focuses on how everyday communication practices bound by space and time—from communication overload and media choice to unplanned conversations in teams—constitute effective organizing in workplaces. Outside of work, Dron loves spending time with his family, watching cricket, and playing pool.
Dr. Sarah E. Riforgiate (PhD, Arizona State University) is an associate professor of Organizational Communication in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research concentrates on the intersections of paid work and private life, including work-life concerns, leadership, emotions in organizations, conflict, and policy communication. She also enjoys spending time with family, walking by Lake Michigan, creating pottery, and growing plants (despite wildlife interference).
Dr. Mahuya Pal is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her research examines organizing of power and resistance in the neoliberal economy with a particular focus on decolonizing dominant meanings of organizations and enabling different forms of liberation. Outside of work, she loves traveling, watching crime thrillers, and listening to music with her partner and daughter.
Dr. Astrid Villamil (Ph.D., University of Kansas) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Missouri Columbia. Her research examines the complex interplay of institutional DEI practices and demands for social and organizational transformation. Outside work, Villamil enjoys listening to podcasts, solving word games, and building meaningful relationships with friends and family.
Meet Our SAGE Editor:
Amy Quon lives in Los Angeles, CA, USA and is an Editor II at SAGE. This role encompasses a lot of project management and coordination between our peer review, production, editorial support, marketing, finance, and legal teams to support MCQ and its authors. Amy is currently finishing her Ph.D. in Social Sciences and Comparative Education at UCLA, but as often as she can, spends time outside hiking or at the beach.
ScholarOne Account
Stay involved with MCQ by reviewing for us. Sign up for or update your account on ScholarOne for MCQ. Here are some tips courtesy of Dr. Meisenbach:
- If you haven’t ever reviewed for us, the best way to join the fun is to: create your account on ScholarOne, attach a CV in the appropriate field, list your key words, and drop me a quick email introducing yourself.
- When you change institutions, make sure you take a moment to update your account with us rather than creating a new account. Multiple accounts for the same person creates confusion and slows down the review process.
- Update your key words. There is a drop down list, but you can also create your own preferred words if it’s not in the list already. We use these A LOT to find reviewers, and we want to send you reviews on the topics that match your interest and expertise.
- Accept reviews for us and get them done for us in a month. As I think Michelle Shumate likes to say, “the academy runs on goodwill.” We are all susceptible to overworking, particularly during this pandemic, and voluntary reviews are a place where we have every right to say no. But at this point and time, our review process, which I believe can lead to outstanding scholarship and progress even though it has significant problems, asks each of us to contribute. As a community, we all help each other. I am beyond grateful for your service in this capacity, because this journal and the published accounts of our scholarship it offers would not be here without you and your service.
- ** One thing I can offer in return for reviews beyond the typical 25% discount code, is that I invite consistently strong and timely reviewers to join the Editorial Board. Each review is itself being reviewed and rated by the editors for quality and timeliness. (I did not know this until I started associate editing for Culture and Organization. So I think it’s about time this gets mentioned publicly) The kinds of reviewers I’m inviting to join the Board are individuals who have done multiple, high quality, timely reviews for MCQ over at least two years. **
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, Third-year Ph.D. Candidate, University of Missouri
- Maddy Pringle, First-year Ph.D. Student, University of Missouri