Patricia Riley

• University of Southern California

North Korea began its metamorphosis from a desperately poor “Hermit Kingdom” in 2011 and evolved into a major proliferator of nuclear weapons by 2017. As the United States and its allies demanded a halt to its missile testing, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump began tossing word grenades with an intensity that alarmed many around the world. In 2018, Kim...

Anthropogenic Climate Change (climate change or global warming that is caused by human activity) is considered to be one of the key global concerns moving forward this century. The ongoing flow of communication around an issue can be seen as a co-production of strategic messaging that encompasses the voice of multiple stakeholders who have differin...

The conduct of diplomacy in the West has changed dramatically over the last few decades. During the Cold War, diplomats negotiated largely in secret and if their strategic goals and objectives were shared with the public at all, they were simply announced by leaders or their representatives. Media outlets reported on these diplomatic discussions an...

In Exploring Argumentative Contexts Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen bring together a broad variety of essays examining argumentation as it occurs in seven communicative domains: the political context, the historical context, the legal context, the academic context, the medical context, the media context, and the financial context. These essay...

Organizations differ considerably in their rate of performance improvement. Since any improvement trajectory is the fruit of a series of improvement projects, the proximate cause of this variation among organizations lies in the varied ways these projects are managed. The success of these projects depends, however, not only on the goals and efforts...

Although the development of relationships on the Net may be seen as “community,” the increasing global presence from commercial media such as online newspapers suggest that another metaphor may be jousting for preeminence – colonization. Findings from an on-going case study of online newspapers suggest the early ideals of democratic community-build...

What organizational conditions set the stage for business process reengineering success or failure? Line managers and IS executives can assess their organizations against the positive and negative preconditions identified in this article.

Most information technology (IT) “fit” literature has taken a structural contingency approach to studying the alignment of IT to organizational characteristics. The research has focused on internal fit, and assumed placid and stable environments. ...

Responds to topics addressed in several essays in the same journal issue. Offers thoughts about ideology as alternatives to some of the provocative arguments/positions in those essays. (SR)

“Toughlove” is a network of parental support groups designed to aid families with delinquent children. The program urges parents to use strict discipline to control their children's behavior and denies that parents are to blame for the failings of their offspring. Using the perspectives suggested by dramatism and Walter R. Fisher's “narrative parad...

This essay reports on systematic observation and analysis of arguments by untrained advocates in court. The small claims court was found to be a unique argument field: there, untrained arguers must participate in the structured and rule-governed setting of the courtroom. The study revealed that most of the litigants relied on their skill as story-t...

The theory of structuration is proposed as a means of studying organizational culture. This paradigm is used to investigate one of the most significant and fascinating aspects of culture - organizational politics. This study compares organizational political symbols from two professional firms - one routinized and one nonroutinized - in order to in...

as well as the Senior Editor and reviewers. We thank the Packard Foundation and the Institute for Knowledge Management (now known as the Institute for Knowledge-Based Organizations) for generous financial support. They bear no responsibilities for the opinions expressed here.