Kristen Lucas

University of Louisville | UL · Management & Entrepreneurship Department

In 2010, a cluster of suicides at the electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn Technology Group sparked worldwide outcry about working conditions at its factories in China. Within a few short months, 14 young migrant workers jumped to their deaths from buildings on the Foxconn campus, an all-encompassing compound where they had worked, eaten, and sl...

People generally possess a strong desire to construct positive, dignified work identities. However, this goal may be more challenging for some people, such as blue-collar workers, whose occupations may not offer qualities typically associated with workplace dignity. Interviews with 37 people from a blue-collar mining community reveal three central...

Extant research on dignity at work has revealed conditions that contribute to indignity, employees' responses to dignity threats, and ways in which employees' inherent dignity is undermined. But while dignity—and specifically indignity—is theorized as a phenomenon subjectively experienced and judged by individuals, little research has privileged wo...

As organizational scholars have become critically attuned to human flourishing in the workplace, interest in workplace dignity has grown rapidly. Yet, a valid scale to measure employees’ perceptions of dignity in the workplace has yet to be developed, thereby limiting potential empirical insights. To fill this need, we conducted a systematic, multi...

Despite a growing body of literature focused on understanding experiences of workplace dignity, attention has centered almost exclusively on employees with lower-level jobs. As a result, little is known about how workplace dignity and indignity are experienced by employees with middle- and upper-level jobs and how their experiences differ from thos...

Courses: Public speaking, business and professional communication, group communication Objectives: This activity will introduce Monroe's Motivated Sequence as a way to organize persuasive arguments; improve students’ ability to deliver presentations with consistent content, voice, and style; and improve team-based delivery skills.

As organizational scholars have become critically attuned to human flourishing in the workplace, interest in workplace dignity has grown rapidly. Yet, a valid scale to measure employees’ perceptions of dignity in the workplace has yet to be developed, thereby limiting potential empirical insights. To fill this need, we conducted a systematic, multi...

Despite increased efforts by more organizations to be seen as “gay-friendly,” workplaces remain challenging sites for LGBTQ employees to navigate. We examine the ways in which LGBTQ employees experience dignity threats in the workplace and the protection strategies they use to deflect those threats. Interviews with 36 LGBTQ working adults revealed...

Mobility refers to the ability of people to traverse through different social spaces, including geographic spaces, workspaces, organizational hierarchy, and social classes. Key dimensions of mobility include whether mobility is voluntary–involuntary or upward–downward. Several organizational communication processes are embedded in the experience of...

Workplace dignity is the self-recognized and other-recognized worth acquired from engaging in work activity. Grounded in philosophy and sociology, workplace dignity is a multifaceted phenomenon that reflects multiple and overlapping meanings: dignity as recognition of inherent human value, respect, autonomy, contribution, and status. These differen...

While there has been a growing body of research on workplace dignity, the majority of studies tend to focus on how dignity is experienced by organizational members, paying considerably less attention to consequences for organizations. In this study, we explore the influence of workplace dignity on employee work behaviors that affect organizational...

http://bized.aacsb.edu/articles/2017/01/toward-better-business-communication

Research problem: Entrepreneurial passion has been shown to play an important role in venture success and, therefore, in investors' funding decisions. However, it is unknown whether the passion entrepreneurs personally feel or experience can be accurately assessed by investors during a venture pitch. Research questions: (1) To what extent does entr...

Guided by a feminist communicology of organization framework, we examine generational growing pains by analyzing discourses appearing in HR Magazine at three different points in time, which approximately mark the midpoint of Baby Boomers’, Gen Xers’, and Millennials’ initial entry into the workplace. We reconstruct historically situated gendered di...

Dignity is widely considered to be an essential element of decent work. However, the extent to which people are able to derive a sense of worth and value from their work roles and the extent to which they are treated respectfully while on the job can vary greatly. One social identity that is particularly salient for understanding the achievement of...

In this article, we outline a competency-based approach to teaching business communication. At the heart of this approach, classroom instruction, assignments, and evaluation center on a goals-oriented and receiver-centric understanding of communication in which students are taught strategies for meeting five core competencies of business communicat...

Courses: Public speaking, business, and professional communicationObjectives: To improve students' ability to use storytelling elements in presentations; to improve students' ability to design visually appealing slides; to improve students' ability to be concise in oral presentations.

Dignity is widely considered to be an essential element of decent work. However, the extent to which people are able to derive a sense of worth and value from their work roles and the extent to which they are treated respectfully while on the job can vary greatly. One social identity that is particularly salient for understanding the achievement of...

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...

For 15 years, former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky used his Penn State University perquisites to lure young and fatherless boys by offering them special access to one of the most revered football programs in the country. He repeatedly used the football locker room as a space to groom, molest, and rape his victims. In February 2001, an eye...

Teaching novice qualitative researchers how to move beyond first-cycle themes is a challenging endeavor. In this essay, we articulate four harmful habits that tend to impede our success: moving too quickly, privileging product over process, providing cursory coverage of analytic technique and artistry, and overlooking the role of synthesis in quali...

Abstract As the movement to capitalize on unique affordances of video games for learning continues to grow, relatively, little research in that area has examined how formal features, such as genre and game mechanics, draw and hold children's attention. This study examines which genres children prefer and the reasons why children prefer those genres...

Choice is foundational to contemporary careers. Yet, it often is constrained and contested in imperceptible ways. We reposition Ciulla's (2000) four reasons for work--meaningful work, leisure, money, and security--as discursive frames whereby people make career choices, craft their choice-legitimizing stories, and overemphasize the rhetoric of indi...

We take a communicative and life course theory approach to understanding how resilience is constructed in families. Drawing upon interviews with 20 fathers, 16 mothers, and 23 children who dealt with financial hardship during the 1980s recession, we analyze the messages families communicated about finances when their children were young and how the...

In-depth interviews with 62 people with working class ties (blue-collar workers and adult sons and daughters of blue-collar workers) reveal a social construction of working class that imbues it with four core, positively valenced values: strong work ethic, provider orientation, the dignity of all work and workers, and humility. This constellation o...

The purpose of this activity is for students to examine systematically gendered scripts and stereotypes about romantic relationships. As a secondary purpose, the activity demonstrates the value of communication research in seeking dependable answers to important questions

This study explicitly links processes of anticipatory socialization to social mobility and reproduction. An examination of the socializing messages exchanged between blue-collar parents (n = 41) and their children (n = 25) demonstrate that family-based messages about work and career seldom occur in straightforward, unambiguous ways. Instead, messag...

Unquestionably, food and the way we communicate about it are important markers of identity. Like other chapters in this volume that illuminate connections to cultural, social, and gendered identities, food also is inherently linked to social class. Dougherty, Dixon, and Chou (2009) explain that people from different social classes have distinct rel...

Communication teachers spend considerable time instructing students how to organize and deliver professional oral presentations, design effective PowerPoint slides, answer interview questions, and communicate effectively in problem-solving teams. Yet considerably less time is spent systematically teaching them the communication skill they will use...

Questionnaires were completed by 5th-, 8th-, and 11th-grade public schools students in rural and suburban school districts and by undergraduates at two universities in the United States (n = 1,242). They were asked about their orientation to video games—the amount of time they played, their motives for doing so, and the game types they preferred—to...

An analysis of interviews with mining families reveals that gender identity construction is a collaborative process that draws upon broader community discourses. Male miners and non-mining women created a generalized other for women as “unfit to mine” (i.e., women are physically too weak to mine, are easy prey, and are ladies who do not belong in t...

The daunting challenges of making ends meet can have serious implications for members of the working class, particularly in terms of dignity. The ability to provide is tied inextricably to personal dignity; threats to the ability to make ends meet are threats to dignity. For example, Riggs explains that, by and large, society imposes a mandate upon...

Few studies have focused on disadvantaged men's efforts to seek a second chance to remake their lives. In this article, we examine expressions of generativity in life history interviews with a diverse sample of 77 Black and White low-income fathers. We explore what constituted "the difficult past" of men's failures as providers, partners, students,...

Gendered stories of career: Unfolding discourses of time, space, and identity At a conference sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January 2005, Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard University, sparked national attention when he addressed the issue of the underrepresentation of women in tenured faculty positions in science...

During the recession of the early 1980s, the United States experienced a massive industrial downturn. More than 3 million blue-collar jobs permanently vanished from the economic landscape, altering the structure and availability of once-viable career paths. Therefore, the goal of this project was to learn about the experiences of the sons and daugh...

This study examined underground iron ore miners' occupational narratives to uncover how their stories socialize miners into blue-collar careers and reinforce their work identities. Through the root theme of sisu (Finnish for inner determination), underground miners create a status hierarchy that is used to construct a sense of pride around their wo...

In this study, we examined gender differences in video game use by focusing on interpersonal needs for inclusion, affection, and control, as well as socially constructed perceptions of gendered game play. Results of a large-scale survey (n = 534) of young adults’ reasons for video game use, preferred game genres, and amount of game play are reporte...

In today’s technologically advanced business world, organizations are increasingly relying on computer-mediated communication (CMC) in their day-to-day operations. Employees are teleworking instead of commuting to the office, business travel is being replaced by videoconferencing, and problem-solving sessions are moving from conference rooms to com...

Thesis (M.A.)--Purdue University, 2002. Bibliography: leaves 86-95.