Debbie S. Dougherty

• Doctorate, Professor of Communication
• University of Missouri

About one in eight U.S. high school students in Grades 9 to 12 report experiencing teen dating violence (TDV) in the form of physical, sexual, or psychological dating violence in the past year in person, on school grounds, and online. Compared with their urban counterparts, rural teens face nearly double the rate of physical dating abuse and an ele...

Scholars have recognized dating violence as a public health and social justice issue among youths. Between one in four to one in eight teens in the United States report being a victim of dating violence, including physical, psychological, sexual violence, and online/school bullying. As it turns out, teenagers residing in rural areas are two times m...

As the United States has become increasingly polarized, policymakers have had difficulty gaining bipartisan support for policy proposals. Political polarization can lead to the othering of individuals, a process characterized by the tendency to construct members of an opposing party in negative ways. In this article, we examine the creation and dis...

Introduction Rural youth are twice as likely as urban youth to experience some forms of teen dating violence (TDV), and significant barriers to accessing support services for physical, psychological, sexual violence. However, rural youth remain understudied and undersampled. Rural young men, in particular, are at risk for experiencing or perpetrati...

Discrimination against Black workers in the United States workplace is an ongoing problem. This study explores one understudied type of discrimination—the paradoxes and contradictions that create untenable situations for Black professionals who work in largely white-dominant organizations. Through in-depth interviews with self-identified Black prof...

Using the ontological lens of sociomateriality with the theoretical notion of struggle, this critical ethnography explores interactions within an unemployment support organization run by white collar workers who train working class populations for skilled blue collar occupations. Results illustrate how sociomaterial struggle is enacted in two ways:...

#MeToo has breathed new life into the women’s movement and especially into understanding and rectifying sexual harassment, abuse and assault. It has galvanized activists around the globe. And it has placed thousands of stories of the harassed in full view of the public. Sexual harassment, abuse and assault may occur within the organizational contex...

Sexual harassment remains a persistent workplace problem. The 2017 #Metoo movement and what-have-come-to-be routine news stories about sexual hostility, sexual assault, and sexual harassment in American organizations have opened wounds and reinvigorated public commentary. Although the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sets forth guidelines fo...

Using a discursive-material framework, this study explored the complex ways in which food security and food insecurity are expressed and experienced by people who are unemployed. A Photovoice study of 21 individuals from across the social class spectrum revealed the way jobless individuals navigate the discursive-material dialectic regarding their...

Studies that suggest an increased number of bachelor's prepared nurses (BSNs) at the bedside improves patient safety do not stratify their samples into traditional bachelor's and associates (ADN) to BSN graduates. This qualitative study investigated potential differences in patient safety meaning among BSNs and ADN to BSN graduates. Guided by the t...

How human beings think about, talk about, and organize around sexuality is changing. Growing social legitimization for sexual minority relationships and a more fluid social understanding of sexual identities has shifted how we bound “normal” sexuality. In the workplace, these shifting norms affect employees of all sexual identities who must make se...

Western economies have seen a shift away from a model of job security to a model of work precarity. Cycles of unemployment are a defining feature of the new precarious economy. Given these cycles of unemployment, it becomes imperative to explore the barriers to reemployment. The present study uses stigma communication to explore the intersection of...

Church organizations provide a unique perspective from which to study participation and paradox. While participatory paradoxes to date focus on paradoxes created by leaders for members, it is important to remember that organizing is co-constructed between leaders and members. It is, therefore, also important to study how members create paradoxes fo...

Feminist research has played a key role in the development of organizational communication theorizing. This entry explores the history of feminism in organizational theorizing, placing a particular emphasis on the hidden influence of feminism on the broader field. Different forms of feminism are discussed, followed by examples of feminist organizat...

Sexual harassment within organizations is a persistent and destructive communication problem. Sexual harassment is a complex phenomenon with ties to issues of gender, power, and the culture of the organization. By acknowledging the issue of sexual harassment on three levels, organizational, individual, and observer, organizations can better manage...

Although workplace policies are written in neutral terms that give the appearance of rationality, research shows that policy meanings are in fact constructed and negotiated through discursive practices. Sexual harassment policies illustrate this phenomenon. Sexual harassment is a highly complex and fluid phenomenon that is dependent on context and...

Workplace sexual harassment is a communication phenomenon that negatively impacts people and organizations. Negative health implications as well as decreased productivity are frequent outcomes of this behavior. Sexual harassment is not about sex, it is about power. As a result, unwelcome sexual overtures are simply one means through which perpetrat...

The forum guest editor Ryan Bisel in this issue takes on the topic of big data and presents a round table that grew out of a conference panel. Five scholars engage in a discussion of the social and cultural trend of big data and implications to qualitative organizational communication research. The contributors respond to questions and delve into a...

As policies such as the Family and Medical Leave Act expand what it means to be a family, human resource managers are increasingly tasked with navigating work/family balance with employees whose families lie outside of normative expectations. This qualitative research study used Dougherty et al.'s Language Convergence/Meaning Divergence Theory to e...

Increased demands at both work and home make it necessary for individuals and families to negotiate an increasingly precarious work-life balance. Managerialist discourse is one popular means of managing work-life balance by using corporate discourse to construct home life. This article uses the lens of corporate colonization to examine the often po...

Retirement is an expected phase of life that is made meaningful through social discourses such as master narratives. This study identified and explored a master narrative of retirement. Eighty-four individuals were interviewed representing four work experience phases. A thematic analysis revealed a master narrative of retirement that shaped expecta...

This qualitative study applies an intergroup communication approach to examining the lived experiences of nurses who were sexually harassed by their patients. Twenty-eight interview transcripts were thematically analyzed; results illustrated how a combination of self-categorization and stereotyping functioned both constructively and destructively i...

Meaning lies at the core of intercultural communication. The ways in which meanings are made and the differences in meanings form a core problematic for intercultural communication. Yet intercultural communication theorists have yet to systematically explore the processes by which language and meanings converge and diverge within and across particu...

Kuhn reminds us that although collaborating researchers in different disciplines may observe the same phenomena and use similar terms to describe it, their articulation of their findings can be radically dissimilar. Pointing out that what we see is largely dependent on what we have been trained to see, Kuhn cautions that individuals from two academ...

Some communication theories have explored the processes of language convergence, but comparatively little attention has explored the ways meaning systems diverge while converging on the same set of symbols. To examine this process, a grounded theory study of social-sexual behavior in the workplace was conducted. The Language Convergence/Meaning Div...

The most awkward moment at that faculty meeting occurred when a certain senior colleague in the department replied, "Well, when my wife was pregnant, she gave birth during spring break and didn't miss a day of class." Despite backstage reassurances that these were unrealistic expectations, those who were pregnant experienced an unspoken pressure th...

A qualitative study using same-sex and mixed-sex focus groups and stimulated recall interviews was designed to identify and explore gendered constructions of power during discourse about sexual harassment. It was discovered that the men tended to construct power as hierarchically held by individuals with formal authority. Consequently, they tended...

Organizations tend to be guided by a rationality=emotionality duality in which rational behaviorisprivilegedoveremotionalbehavior.Consequently,emotionsinorganizationshave historically been undervalued in favor of rationality. Despite the privileging of rationality, however, organizations are emotion-laden environments. The present study uses sensem...

Ethical research communities provide important guidance for those conducting communication research projects. However, researchers face serious ethical dilemmas when their memberships in multiple ethical communities create conflicting ethical obligations. The present study explores conflicting demands between competing ethical communities to provid...

This study examined the performances of social justice activists who were audiences of alternative media - media that are defined by their resistance to social and corporate power structures. Contemporary performance-oriented audience paradigms do not take into account power and ideology, which are integral to the content of alternative media. Thro...

Using the concepts of paradox and dialectics, this qualitative study examines the tension that contradictions bring to nurses’ narrative construction of their roles as caregivers. The nurses in the study reveal that they negotiate their roles as caregivers within the dialectical poles of closeness and distance in relation to their patients. The sex...

In recent years, institutional review boards (IRBs) have become an increasingly significant part of the research process for communication scholars. This essay provides a rationale for scholarly examination of IRBs. Using the review process for this special issue as a case study, it identifies a number of ironies that provide justification for this...

In this essay, we respond to the narratives and essays in this issue by examining organizational power issues related to researchers and institutional research boards (IRBs). Rather than taking a singular perspective on power, we use multiple perspectives and suggest that the cumulative analyses provide the best understanding of IRBs and organizati...

While EEOC guidelines for managing sexual harassment prescribe a strong sexual harassment policy and aggressive remedial action following complaints, a communication approach suggests a need for a more complex understanding of sexual harassment as diffused throughout an organizational culture. The present case study uses a sensemaking approach to e...

This study examined pilots' (N at T1 = 140; N at T2 = 126; N at T3 = 104) reactions to communication and uncertainty during the acquisition of their airline by another airline. Quantitative results indicate that communication helped to reduce uncertainty and was predictive of affective responses to the acquisition. However, contrary to expectations...

Organizational scholars tend to operate under the assumption that power is domination. This assumption may spring from the fact that domination is the primary form of power used in U.S. organizations. Given the pervasiveness of the power-as-domination assumption guiding both researchers and practitioners, it is important to understand how power-as-...

A large volume of research on emotions in organizations has been produced in the last number of years. This important body of literature has one major limitation: There is no recognized framework from which the literature can be viewed in a holistic manner. This article creates such a framework by reconceptualizing emotional intelligence using a co...

Researchers have approached the study of sexual harassment as though it were dysfunctional. However, a feminist standpoint theory analysis would suggest that it functions differently for men and women. A study using discussion groups and stimulated recall interviews was conducted in a large health care organization. A thematic analysis revealed a p...

Despite the established personal, organizational, and social costs of sexual harassment, it continues to be a persistent problem in organizations. One reason for the ongoing nature of the problem may be the interaction of the gendered standpoints about sexual harassment during discourse. The present study used feminist standpoint theories as a guid...

Feminist standpoint theories are seldom used by researchers. One possible reason is the ongoing debate between postmodern theorists and feminine standpoint theorists. The debate has been constructed in bipolar terms such that the issues are perceived as mutually exclusive. However, bipolar assumptions are damaging to women, both in general and in o...

It is important to rethink sexual harassment by addressing the following question: Because most men do not harass women, why do men tend to be resistant to admitting the breadth and depth of sexual harassment in organizations? The author posits that because men and women do not understand each other’s standpoints on sexual harassment, a gap exists...