For much of human history, “femininity” and “masculinity” were unknown terms. But that does not mean that the concept of gender did not exist. Indeed, many societies in recorded history had conceptions of what it means to be a gendered person—most often noted in the binary of “man” and “woman”—but these conceptions were normative and perceived as intrinsic to human behavior and culture. Masculinity and femininity were naturalized concepts, assumed to be the ways in which men and women should act, look, or communicate.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, scholars and activists noted that femininity and masculinity are social constructions of a gendered society, often denoting the ways in which people, objects, and practices conform to or transgress gendered expectations. Both terms are highly contingent upon the cultural, historical, and geopolitical locations in which they are used, meaning that they can only be accurately understood or defined for a given time or context; it is impossible to define either term in a universal manner. Femininity, as an articulated concept, has a longer history of being visible and enforced by communities. Masculinity, on the contrary, historically elided critique or visibility because its attributes were often the normative and prized values and characteristics of a given social context. However, feminist movements and intellectual projects have brought masculinity to light, showing the ways in which masculinity, just as much as femininity, is a learned and enforced way of viewing actions, people, and things.
In communication studies, current scholarship on masculinity and femininity examine how they circulate in a globalized world, picking up new definitions and often restructuring people’s lives. Even though both terms are abstractions with shifting definitions and applications, they create the conditions for people’s sense of identity and limit or enhance their ability to engage in communicative acts. Differently stated, while abstract concepts, they have material consequences. To understand how an abstract social construction creates material consequences, communication scholars have looked at several research locations where masculinity and femininity most obviously manifest, such as leadership and authority, media representations, rhetorical style and delivery, and interpersonal communications.
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Diffusion of Concepts of Masculinity and Femininity
Rebecca S. Richards
Article
Embarrassment and Health & Risk Messaging
Spring Chenoa Cooper and P. Christopher Palmedo
Embarrassment, according to Fischer and Tangney, is an “aversive state of mortification, abashment, and chagrin that follows public social predicaments.” It is usually related to our perceptions of how others perceive us as well as their judgments of us, and it is associated with a loss of self-esteem when we perceive that others have judged us as inadequate or incompetent. However, even mere exposure or attention publicly placed on someone can elicit embarrassment (think of someone pointing at you and laughing).
Embarrassment is considered a self-conscious emotion. Self-conscious emotions include those that are evoked by self-reflection and self-evaluation: embarrassment, shame, guilt, and pride. Shame, an intense form of embarrassment, also has structural and larger social contexts, while embarrassment is more individually experienced. Self-conscious emotions play an important role in regulating behavior; they assist us in behaving according to social standards and guide us in responding when those rules are broken. While these emotions provide feedback in social situations, they also provide feedback for anticipated outcomes.
Embarrassment can play an important role in health, both in communication and behavior, and occurs through different forms. Primary embarrassment is the first rush of blood to the face and increased heart rate that usually lasts a few moments. Secondary embarrassment is the after-effect that shapes future behavior. Anticipatory embarrassment is the emotion surrounding the potential for embarrassment in an upcoming situation. Solitary embarrassment is the one that no one actually observes.
Three stigmatized areas of health—mental health, healthcare, and sexual health—may be assessed as case studies through which to understand the literature around embarrassment, as both an affect and an emotion.
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Estrangement and Impact on Family Communication
Kristina M. Scharp
Family estrangement occurs when at least one family member voluntarily and intentionally distances themselves from another family member because of an often ongoing negative relationship. Similar to divorce, parent–child estrangement can be an intergenerational issue; this means that adult children who distance themselves from their parents might eventually be distanced from their own children. Although it can be a healthy solution to an unhealthy environment, research suggests that estrangement can be complicated (e.g., marked by on-again/off-again cycles), uncertain, disenfranchised, stigmatized, and unsupported. Considering families are interdependent systems, the impact of family distancing can affect each and every member of the family, regardless of whether a person is directly involved. Nevertheless, parents, children, immediate family members, and siblings have varying and nuanced perspectives. For example, parents often desire reconnection and reconciliation, whereas adult children often do not. Siblings often face a different dynamic considering the power relationships between siblings are more horizontal than vertical. This means that siblings often have the same amount of power (i.e., horizontal) compared to parents and children (i.e., vertical), in which there is a greater power difference. Overall, the study of family estrangement is relatively new regardless of discipline; more research will be needed to characterize this experience and test related outcomes. Indeed, even though there is hardly any research at all, there is even less quantitative research. Continuing the study of family estrangement is important, however, considering it calls into question the inevitability of family relationships, which, albeit concerning to some, opens up the possibility to reconceptualize family to de-emphasize biological ties and emphasize care and communication.
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Family Communication
Michelle Miller-Day
Families shape individuals throughout their lives, and family communication is the foundation of family life and functioning. It is through communication that families are defined and members learn how to organize meanings. When individuals come together to form family relationships, they create a system that is larger and more complex than the sum of its individual members. It is within this system that families communicatively navigate cohesion and adaptability; create family images, themes, stories, rituals, rules, and roles; manage power, intimacy, and boundaries; and participate in an interactive process of meaning-making, producing mental models of family life that endure over time and across generations.
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Family, Culture, and Communication
V. Santiago Arias and Narissra Maria Punyanunt-Carter
Through the years, the concept of family has been studied by family therapists, psychology scholars, and sociologists with a diverse theoretical framework, such as family communication patterns (FCP) theory, dyadic power theory, conflict, and family systems theory. Among these theories, there are two main commonalities throughout its findings: the interparental relationship is the core interaction in the familial system because the quality of their communication or coparenting significantly affects the enactment of the caregiver role while managing conflicts, which are not the exception in the familial setting. Coparenting is understood in its broader sense to avoid an extensive discussion of all type of families in our society. Second, while including the main goal of parenting, which is the socialization of values, this process intrinsically suggests cultural assimilation as the main cultural approach rather than intergroup theory, because intercultural marriages need to decide which values are considered the best to be socialized. In order to do so, examples from the Thai culture and Hispanic and Latino cultures served to show cultural assimilation as an important mediator of coparenting communication patterns, which subsequently affect other subsystems that influence individuals’ identity and self-esteem development in the long run. Finally, future directions suggest that the need for incorporating a nonhegemonic one-way definition of cultural assimilation allows immigration status to be brought into the discussion of family communication issues in the context of one of the most diverse countries in the world.
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Forgiveness Communication and Health
Douglas L. Kelley, Bianca M. Wolf, and Shelby E. Broberg
Research on forgiveness and its health-related effects has steadily increased since the late 20th century. Most of the forgiveness-health literature demonstrates that forgiveness indirectly influences health through a variety of psychosocial affective factors. Common distinctions in this research are reflected in studies focused on reduction of negative affect and, thus, negative health effects, and studies focused on preventative and health-promoting implications of forgiveness (e.g., increased positive affect). While a lack of clarity exists regarding health implications stemming from reductions in unforgiveness (as distinct from increases in forgiving responses), current research supports the notion that forgiveness, as opposed to unforgiveness, affects psychological, physical, and relational health in overridingly beneficial ways. More specifically, forgiveness, and/or the moderation of unforgiveness, is associated with the exhibition of positive affect (e.g., sympathy, empathy, and optimism), improved self-esteem, higher life satisfaction, and better mental health ratings. Physical health effects of forgiveness include enhanced bioregulation in response to transgression stressors, as well as better self-rated health status and the exhibition of positive health behaviors. Limitations in the current literature most commonly relate to disparate definitional, methodological, and interpretative issues typical of transdisciplinary forgiveness and health research. Current trends and future directions for forgiveness-health research include consideration of additional variables thought to be associated with forgiveness processes, including religiosity, empathy, and social support. Additionally, research that focuses on communicative and relational aspects of health and well-being is warranted. Suggestions for research opportunities in forgiveness-health research framed by a communicative lens are offered.
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Foster Family Communication
Lindsey J. Thomas
Humans have markedly long periods of dependency; as such, care for one another—especially adults providing for children’s needs—is a necessity of survival. Most often, this necessary care is provided by immediate family members, and scholars and laypersons alike acknowledge parent–child relationships as foundational. While assumptions of biological connection permeate the ideology of family, not all (biological) parents of origin are able to provide care for (their) children. For hundreds of thousands of youths in the United States who are unable to safely live with their families of origin, the foster care system, of which foster families are a part, provides temporary residential care.
Although youths require care, understandings of and within the foster care system are mixed. Indeed, children in care, caregivers (e.g., foster parents and families), families of origin, and caseworkers and judges carry varied perspectives and goals as well as report on diverse experiences and outcomes. Contributing to efforts to understand and address these variances, communication researchers have begun to examine the foster care system and those it involves and impacts, with research typically focusing on one or more arms of the foster square (i.e., children in care; parents of origin; foster parents and families; and the state via case workers, child welfare departments, judges, etc.). Communication scholars have implemented numerous theories to frame foster square- and foster care-related studies and have focused on varied relationships and experiences within the foster care system and foster families, providing helpful insights into the nuances of foster care. However, extant literature has illuminated avenues for potential future research to expand on the breadth and depth of knowledge surrounding foster care and the foster square and related experiences and relationships.
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The Global Open Society: Dialogue in Communication
Algis Mickunas
Dialogue and its extension to polylogue are presented as an intersubjective basis of communication. The intersubjective aspect cannot be explained by any discipline without a contradiction, since any explanation would require intersubjective awareness. While necessary, dialogue requires a third aspect: dialogue about something, a theme, a subject matter, a problem, a point of disagreement, such that the topic sets a limit to the dialogical partners. This third aspect shifts the discussion away from subject-to-subject encounter as inadequate and moves to the subjects as partners who first are engaged in a dialogue about something. While speaking to someone about something, there is a mutual exchange of awareness and a broadening of horizons of both, with an addition of others who are co-present even if they are not empirically available. To speak to someone of physical laws is also to speak with Newton, Einstein, Planck, and others who form a polylogical field—forming an extension of the awareness of dialogical partners. The issue that arises is whether the individual can form her own position, or whether she is dominated by a historical tradition of interpretation. The dialectical debate between Habermas and Gadamer shows the problem, which is finally resolved by an extension of dialogue through education. The final and most concrete aspect of dialogical communication is present at the level of praxis as bodily activity which is equally intercorporeal. We build our world and thus our history and form a depth of intercorporeal communication of what we can do.
While the dialogical domain is the focus of this research, it also includes suggestions on critical evaluation of specific theories and mutual controversies among theorists, e.g., Habermas and Gadamer. Such controversies are necessary to show how dialogical procedures not only posit different theoretical positions but help such positions to become clearer and more articulated.
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Goals, Plans, and Action Models
Janet R. Meyer
The messages spoken in everyday conversation are influenced by participants’ goals. Interpersonal scholars have distinguished two types of goals thought to influence the wording of a message: instrumental goals (primary goals) and secondary goals. An instrumental goal is related to a speaker’s primary reason for designing the message. Instrumental goals would include goals such as to ask for a favor, seek information, apologize, give advice, or change the other person’s opinion. Secondary goals pertain to more general concerns. They include goals such as to manage one’s impression, avoid offending the hearer, and act consistently with one’s values. The ability to design a message that pursues an instrumental goal effectively while also addressing (or at least not conflicting with) relevant secondary goals is associated with greater communication competence. Considerable research has sought to explain differences in the ability to design messages that effectively address multiple goals. One such factor appears to be the extent to which a speaker can adapt the language of a message to the communication-relevant features of a specific situation or hearer. If a speaker’s primary goal is to seek a favor, relevant situation features may include the speaker’s right to ask, expected resistance, and qualities of the speaker–hearer relationship. A second behavior associated with the ability to produce multiple-goal messages is suggested by research on cognitive editing. The latter research indicates that the likelihood of producing a message that addresses relevant secondary goals will sometimes depend upon whether a speaker becomes aware, prior to speaking, that a planned message could have an unwanted outcome (e.g., the message may offend the hearer). When such outcomes are anticipated in advance, the message may be left unspoken or edited prior to speaking.
The ability to produce a message that achieves a speaker’s goals may also depend on the type of planning that precedes the design of a message. The plan-based theory of strategic communication views plans as hierarchical structures that specify goals and actions at different levels of specificity. The theory holds that a person pursuing a goal first tries to retrieve from memory a preexisting plan that could be modified for the current situation. When that is not possible, speakers must formulate a novel plan. Research employing indicants of fluency suggests that formulating a novel plan (which requires changes at a higher, more abstract level of a plan) makes heavier demands on limited capacity than does modifying an existing plan at a lower level of the hierarchy (e.g., speaking more slowly). Insight into how persons plan what to say has also come from research on imagined interactions, conflict management, anticipating obstacles to compliance, and verbal disagreement tasks. In an effort to better understand the design of messages in interpersonal settings, a number of scholars have proposed models of the cognitive processes and structures thought to be involved in designing, editing, and producing such messages. Action models of this sort, which generate testable hypotheses, draw from work in artificial intelligence, cognitive models of language production, and research on social cognition. Three such models are action assembly theory, the cognitive rules model, and the implicit rules model.
Article
Half Sibling Relationships and Family Communication
Bailey M. Oliver-Blackburn
Half siblings are brothers and sisters who share only one biological parent and are thus, half biologically related. Although half siblings may be the result of extramarital/partnership affairs or post-bereavement, most are the result of a divorce and remarriage. Half sibling research is rare, and existing research and even national and international statistical reporting agencies often incorrectly conflate half siblings with stepsiblings. Research that can be found on half siblings often illustrates a “deficit-comparison” approach where half and stepsiblings are compared to full biological siblings and studied for how they fall short of biological sibling outcomes. Early research speculates that children who reside with half siblings experience poorer educational outcomes, report significantly more depressive symptoms, exhibit poorer coping skills, are more likely to engage in risky behavior such as early sexual activity and drug and alcohol use, and have more strained sibling and parental relationships compared to those with no half siblings or those with only full biological siblings. The challenges that exist for half sibling relationships are often hypothesized as associated with either family structure (half siblings located within a complex stepfamily) or explained through evolutionary perspectives of Darwinian fitness. However, research on half siblings overall is mixed, with studies also positing these outcomes are not due to the presence of half siblings and that there are instead positive implications from having a half sibling on individual outcomes, sibling relationship quality, and overall family functioning. Overall, half siblings can form quality relationships and half brothers and sisters who share a residence, are closer in age, of the same gender, spend more quality time with one another, have parents who prosaically intervene on their behalf, and who emphasize their positive relationship and connection through addressing terms and sharing backstories of their family’s origins are more likely to report a positive relationship.
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Humor in Health and Risk Messaging
John C. Meyer and Steven J. Venette
Humor is ubiquitous in communication and is thus worthy of study as part of messages relating to risks and health. Humor’s widely acknowledged effects invite systematic explanation and application by communication scholars interested in health and risk communication. Humor’s influence upon health and risk messages results from the theories of humor origin (incongruity, superiority, and relief), elements of humor perception (unifying or comic perspectives as opposed to tragic or divisive perspectives), and humor functions in social interactions (identification, clarification, enforcement, and differentiation). Humor can be used in messages to mitigate high ego involvement, high levels of fear, and a low sense of efficacy in terms of ability to respond to risk or health messages. Humor can serve to enhance relationships, allowing for more creative discussion of risks and health improvement, yet also can serve to pointedly tease or express a memorable perspective to capture attention regarding a risk or health issue.
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Humor in Interpersonal Communication
Melanie Booth-Butterfield and Melissa Wanzer
Effective humor enactment has been proven to be beneficial to both senders and receivers of the communication. Use of humor in social interaction has the potential to elicit positive perceptions, improve interpersonal interactions, reduce conflict, aid in coping, and even facilitate health outcomes. In contrast, poorly communicated, ill-timed, or maladaptive humor is often detrimental to both personal perceptions and relationships. Specific factors regarding these bidirectional outcomes are examined in this article.
Humorous enactments are inherently a goal-oriented form of communication that involves social, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral elements. The individual intends to accomplish some goal through communicating humor, no matter how obscure or subconscious the act might seem. Hence the communicator encodes verbal and/or nonverbal messages to achieve this aim. By comparison, genuine responses to humor (whether a trait pattern or situationally immediate) are not goal-oriented, but rather spontaneous reactions to humorous messages. Therefore, laughter, snickering, and the like may be authentic, unguarded amusement responses.
Research and discussion of interpersonal humor entail several foundational premises which must be addressed: productive and unproductive forms of humor, differences between source and receiver approaches, interactional versus presentational perspectives, varying functions and outcomes of humor across different stages of relationship development and decline, as well as attention to some less-often studied contexts. The application of theoretical frameworks such as Incongruity, Instructional Humor Processing, Superiority, Dispositional, and Benign Violations theories help guide our predictions and explanations of humorous messages.
Article
Intercultural Competence
Lily A. Arasaratnam
The phrase “intercultural competence” typically describes one’s effective and appropriate engagement with cultural differences. Intercultural competence has been studied as residing within a person (i.e., encompassing cognitive, affective, and behavioral capabilities of a person) and as a product of a context (i.e., co-created by the people and contextual factors involved in a particular situation). Definitions of intercultural competence are as varied. There is, however, sufficient consensus amongst these variations to conclude that there is at least some collective understanding of what intercultural competence is. In “Conceptualizing Intercultural Competence,” Spitzberg and Chagnon define intercultural competence as, “the appropriate and effective management of interaction between people who, to some degree or another, represent different or divergent affective, cognitive, and behavioral orientations to the world” (p. 7). In the discipline of communication, intercultural communication competence (ICC) has been a subject of study for more than five decades. Over this time, many have identified a number of variables that contribute to ICC, theoretical models of ICC, and quantitative instruments to measure ICC. While research in the discipline of communication has made a significant contribution to our understanding of ICC, a well-rounded discussion of intercultural competence cannot ignore the contribution of other disciplines to this subject. Our present understanding of intercultural competence comes from a number of disciplines, such as communication, cross-cultural psychology, social psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and education, to name a few.
Article
Intercultural Friendships
Elisabeth Gareis
Following the devastation of World War II, policymakers and scholars worked to advance international partnerships and mutual understanding. In the 1940s and 1950s, international student exchange programs were launched to foster international good will; training programs for diplomats were created that focused on intercultural communication competence; and researchers turned their attention on how to optimize intergroup relations. Most prominently, Gordon Allport outlined principles of effective intergroup contact in the contact hypothesis. Scholarship based on the contact hypothesis later determined that the potential for friendship is not only a facilitating but also an essential factor for prejudice reduction and optimal intergroup contact. Focusing largely on the friendship experiences of international students studying abroad, research also identified numerous other benefits of intercultural-friendship formation, including stronger language skills, greater life satisfaction, lower levels of stress, and enhanced perceptions of the host country. Despite these benefits, the lack of friendship between sojourners and host nationals is a common finding in intercultural-friendship research and a concern for the many educational institutions worldwide that are attempting to internationalize, in part by attracting international students. Current research, therefore, often focuses on factors that influence intercultural-friendship formation and, increasingly, on measures for promoting intercultural friendship.
First among the factors affecting the development of intercultural friendships is cultural difference. Cultural similarity provides attributional confidence and reduces uncertainty; that is, interactants can more easily predict and explain behaviors in people who are similar to them. Highly dissimilar cultures often exhibit differences in communication patterns, value dimensions, and friendship styles that can impede relationship development, especially in the orientation and exploratory stages of social penetration, during which cultural complexities are most critical. Another prominent factor is the interactants’ motivation to form relationships across cultural lines. In one of the prime arenas for intercultural contact, international student exchange, for example, sojourners seeking cultural knowledge and personal growth generally have more interest in interaction and friendships with host nationals than students who are task oriented and focus on education for better career prospects after returning home. Similarly, host environment factors, such as host receptivity (ranging from welcoming attitudes to discrimination) influence the likelihood with which intercultural friendships are formed. Other factors affecting intercultural-friendship formation include communicative competence, intercultural sensitivity, and aspects of identity and personality (e.g., cultural versus personal identification, empathy, and open-mindedness). Among measures for promoting intercultural-friendship formation are infrastructures that facilitate proximity and frequency of contact, provide foreign language training, support experience abroad, and offer intercultural education and training to further intercultural competence and the appreciation of difference.
Article
Interpersonal Communication Across the Life Span
Carla L. Fisher and Thomas Roccotagliata
From birth to death, our interactions with others are what inform our identity and give meaning to life. Ultimately, it is interpersonal communication that is the bedrock of wellness. Much of the scholarship on interpersonal communication places communication in the background, characterized merely as a resource, symptom, or contributing factor to change. In the study of our interpersonal experiences, communication must be at the forefront. As a pragmatic lens concerned with real-world issues, a life-span perspective of interpersonal scholarship provides boundless opportunities for bridging science and practice in meaningful ways that improve social life on multiple levels, from families to schools to government to hospitals. Interpersonal communication research that is concerned with life-span issues tends to prioritize communicative phenomena and bring the communication dynamics of our relational lives to the surface. Typically, this scholarship is organized around the various stages or phases of life. In other words, researchers concerned with interpersonal communication often contextualize this behavior based on dimensions of human development and life changes we typically encounter across the life course, those major life experiences from birth to death. Much of that scholarship also centers on how we develop competence in communication across time or how communication competence is critical to our ability to attain relational satisfaction as well as a high psychological and physical quality of life. This research also highlights the influential role of age, human development, and generational differences, recognizing that our place in the life span impacts our goals and needs and that our sociocultural-historical experiences also inform our communication preferences. A life-span perspective of interpersonal communication also encompasses various theoretical paradigms that have been developed within and outside the communication discipline. Collectively, this scholarship helps illustrate the communicative nature of human life across the entire life trajectory.
Article
Interpersonal Communication Processes Within the Provider-Patient Interaction
Maria K. Venetis
The degree to which patients are active and communicative in interactions with medical providers has changed in recent decades. The biomedical model, a model that minimizes patient agency in the medical interaction, is being replaced with a model of patient-centered care, an approach that prioritizes the individual patient in their healthcare and treatment decisions. Tenets of patient-centered care support that patients must be understood within their psychosocial and cultural preferences, should have the freedom to ask questions, and are encouraged to disclose health-relevant information. In short, this model promotes patient involvement in medical conversations and treatment decision-making. Research continues to examine approaches to effective patient-centered communication. Two interpersonal processes that promote patient-centered communication are patient question-asking and patient disclosure. Patient question-asking and disclosure serve to inform medical providers of patient preferences, hesitations, and information needs. Individuals, including patients, make decisions to pursue or disclose information. Patients are mindful that the act of asking questions or disclosing information, particularly stigmatized information such as sexual behavior or drug use, could make them vulnerable to perceived negative provider evaluations or responses. Thus, decisions to ask questions or share information, processes essential to the understanding of patient perspectives and concerns, may be challenging for patients. Various theoretical models explain how individuals consider if they will perform actions such as seeking or disclosing information. Research also explains the barriers that patients experience in asking questions or disclosing relevant health information to providers. A review of pertinent research offers suggestions to aid in facilitating improved patient-centered communication and care.
Article
“keepin’ It REAL”: A Case History of a Drug Prevention Intervention
Michael L. Hecht and Michelle Miller-Day
Adolescent substance use and abuse has long been the target of public health prevention messages. These messages have adopted a variety of communication strategies, including fear appeals, information campaigns, and social marketing/branding strategies. A case history of keepin’ it REAL, a narrative-based substance abuse prevention intervention that exemplifies a translational research approach, involves theory development testing, formative and evaluation research, dissemination, and assessment of how the intervention is being used in the field by practitioners. The project, which started as an attempt to test the notion that the performance of personal narratives was an effective intervention strategy, has since produced two theories, an approach to implementation science that focused on communication processes, and, of course, a school-based curriculum that is now the most widely disseminated drug prevention program in the world.
At the core of the keepin’ it REAL program are the narratives that tell the story of how young people manage their health successfully through core skills or competencies, such as decision-making, risk assessment, communication, and relationship skills. Narrative forms not only the content of curriculum (e.g., what is taught) but also the pedagogy (e.g., how it is taught). This has enabled the developers to step inside the social worlds of youth from early childhood through young adulthood to describe how young people manage problematic health situations, such as drug offers. This knowledge was motivated by the need to create curricula that recount stories rather than preaching or scaring, that re-story health decisions and behaviors by providing skills that enable people to live healthy, safe, and responsible lives. Spin-offs from the main study have led to investigations of other problematic health situations, such as vaccination decisions and sexual pressure, in order to address crucial public health issues, such as cancer prevention and sex education, through community partnerships with organizations like D.A.R.E. America, 4-H clubs, and Planned Parenthood.
Article
Lay Risk Management
Erik Löfmarck
How do individuals relate to risk in everyday life? Poorly, judging by the very influential works within psychology that focus upon the heuristics and biases inherent to lay responses to risk and uncertainty. The point of departure for such research is that risks are calculable, and, as lay responses often under- or overestimate statistical probabilities, they are more or less irrational. This approach has been criticized for failing to appreciate that risks are managed in relation to a multitude of other values and needs, which are often difficult to calculate instrumentally. Thus, real-life risk management is far too complex to allow simple categorizations of rational or irrational.
A developing strand of research within sociology and other disciplines concerned with sociocultural aspects transcends the rational/irrational dichotomy when theorizing risk management in everyday life. The realization that factors such as emotion, trust, scientific knowledge, and intuition are functional and inseparable parts of lay risk management have been differently conceptualized: as, for example, bricolage, in-between strategies, and emotion-risk assemblage. The common task of this strand is trying to account for the complexity and social embeddedness of lay risk management, often by probing deep into the life-world using qualitative methods. Lay risk management is structured by the need to “get on” with life, while at the same time being surrounded by sometimes challenging risk messages.
This perspective on risk and everyday life thus holds potentially important lessons for risk communicators. For risk communication to be effective, it needs to understand the complexity of lay risk management and the interpretative resources that are available to people in their lifeworld. It needs to connect to and be made compatible with those resources, and it needs to leave room for agency so that people can get on with their lives while at the same time incorporating the risk message. It also becomes important to understand and acknowledge the meaning people attribute to various practices and how this is related to self-identity. When this is not the case, risk messages will likely be ignored or substantially modified. In essence, communicating risk requires groundwork to figure out how and why people relate to the risks in question in their specific context.
Article
LGBTQ+ Workers
Elizabeth K. Eger, Morgan L. Litrenta, Sierra R. Kane, and Lace D. Senegal
LGBTQ+ people face unique organizational communication dilemmas at work. In the United States, LGBTQ+ workers communicate their gender, sexuality, and other intersecting identities and experiences through complex interactions with coworkers, supervisors, customers, publics, organizations, and institutions. They also utilize specific communication strategies to navigate exclusionary policies and practices and organize for intersectional justice. Five central research themes for LGBTQ+ workers in the current literature include (a) workplace discrimination, (b) disclosure at work, (c) navigating interpersonal relationships at work, (d) inclusive and exclusive policies, and (e) intersectional work experiences and organizing.
First, the lived experiences of discrimination, exclusion, and violence in organizations, including from coworkers, managers, and customers, present a plethora of challenges from organizational entry to exit. LGBTQ+ workers face high levels of unemployment and underemployment and experience frequent microaggressions. Queer, trans, and intersex workers also experience prevalent workplace discrimination, uncertainty, and systemic barriers when attempting to use fluctuating national and state laws for workplace protections. Second, such discrimination creates unique risks that LGBTQ+ workers must navigate when it comes to disclosing their identities at work. The complexities of workplace disclosure of LGBTQ+ identities and experiences become apparent through closeting, passing, and outing communication. These three communication strategies for queer, trans, and intersex survival are often read as secretive or deceptive by heterosexual or cisgender coworkers and managers. Closeting communication may also involve concealing information about personal and family relationships at work and other identity intersections. Third, LGBTQ+ people must navigate workplace relationships, particularly with heterosexual and/or cisgender coworkers and managers and in organizations that assume cisheteronormativity. Fourth, policies structure LGBTQ+ workers’ lives, including both the positive impacts of inclusive policies and discrimination and violence via exclusionary policies. Fifth and finally, intersectionality is crucial to theorize when examining LGBTQ+ workers’ communication. It is not enough to just investigate sexuality or gender identity, as they are interwoven with race, class, disability, religion, nationality, age, and more. Important exemplars also showcase how intersectional organizing can create transformative and empowering experiences for LGBTQ+ people. By centering LGBTQ+ workers, this article examines their unique and complex organizational communication needs and proposes future research.
Article
LGBTQ+ Marriage: Relational Communication Perspectives
Pamela J. Lannutti and Hilary Wermers
Researchers have examined the relational, social, and communicative aspects of legally recognized marriage for LGBTQ+ people. Legally recognized marriage has been found to affect the experiences of and communication within the relational lives of LGBTQ+ people in a variety of ways. First, LGBTQ+ marriage has been found to have psychological effects for LGBTQ+ individuals and has been found to impact aspects of LGBTQ+ identity. Legal marriage has also been found to impact LGBTQ+ romantic relationships by influencing relationship-related perceptions, marriage-related deliberations for couples, and changes to couples as a result of marrying. LGBTQ+ people also report changes in their family relationships related to legal marriage that marriage has influenced relationships with family-of-origin members and family building for LGBTQ+ people. The current research is limited because of a reliance on samples that are predominantly cisgender and White and identify as gay or lesbian, therefore underrepresenting the experiences of marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ community.
