Communication
Studies is a lens of understanding that investigates, analyzes, and uncovers
information regarding messages between people. How and what we communicate to
one another is researched and expanded by scholars of this discipline. In exploring
texts of the interpersonal and organizational branches of Communication
Studies, I came across articles regarding how socialization takes place in the
workplace and the effects of newcomers assimilating in specific ways. Eventually,
the journal article Socialization of as a
Predictor of Employee Outcomes written by Paul Madlock and Rebecca Chory
appeared in the search.
Chory
is a professor of Communication Studies at West Virginia University while
Madlock holds an assistant professor position at Texas A&M in Psychology.
Their article was published in one of the 2014 issues of the Journal of
Communication Studies. The Central States Communication Association, which is
located at Bethel University, owns this journal and publishes it five times a
year. The journal focuses primarily on topics of interpersonal communication
and states that:
Communication
Studies (CS) is committed to publishing high-quality original scholarship
focused centrally on human communication processes. Articles published in Communication
Studies should represent the diversity of scholarship that composes the study
of human communication, regardless of philosophical, theoretical, or
methodological underpinnings. Published essays and reports of studies should
make important and noteworthy contributions to the advancement of human
communication scholarship. Communication Studies supports research and writing
free of sexism and other biases.
With this mission
statement in mind, it can be assumed that those interested in human communication
processes would be the intended readers, as well as journal subscribers and
scholars of interpersonal and organizational Communication Studies. As a
student of this discipline, I would like to make the argument that this article
in the field of Communication Studies, as do many social science texts, uses Official
Style strategies to make themselves and their research sound smarter.
In
order to grasp a better understanding of the text itself, I decided that I
would enter a portion of the introductory paragraph of this article into a
readability calculator and see how the numbers would represent the text. The
introduction of the article scored an 11.1 on the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease
and an average grade level of 17.1. These scores represent the level of
difficulty when it comes to reading and understanding the Socialization as a Predictor of Employee Outcomes in its entirety.
Ideally, the scores are representative of the readers’ ability to comprehend
the information that the article will expand on. Already, the average grade
level is ten grades over the reading level of the average American, eliminating
the majority of the public. To further the investigation into the Official Style,
I searched for specific prose strategies that were used by Madlock and Chory.
In textual analysis, I noticed that
the authors used coordination frequently. Here is a specific sentence that uses
coordination:
Organizational
socialization has been defined as the process by which an individual acquires
the attitudes, behavior, and knowledge required to participate as an
organizational member (Van Maanen & Schein, 1979) and involves both the
organization and the employee, with an ultimate outcome being mutual acceptance
(Wanous, 1980).
This sentence ties together major ideas into one statement. This
strategy allows for readers to jump to another idea within the same sentence,
increasing the ideas that readers have to process after reading it. With two
thoughts working together, the reader is left to combine the ideas for their
own interpretation and understanding.
Another strategy
present in this article is the usage of jargon from the field of Communication
Studies. Socialization is an interdisciplinary term, meaning it may have
different definitions across opposing fields of study. By adding organizational
in front of socialization, it is left up to the reader alone to make sense of
what organizational socialization means in the context of this article and
Communication Studies as a whole. It may also be difficult for the reader to
previously understand (unless there is prior knowledge) that organizational
socialization has intricate components to its definition. Without a proper
definition, readers are left to fill in the gaps that the authors created.
There are a few other words that follow this setup, including acculturation,
task ambiguity, and role clarity.
The prepositional
phrase “according to…” is used three times within the introduction of the
article. This phrase is used to reference to previous works that the authors
have researched in order to construct their article. By referencing others, the
authors use this strategy of the Official Style to demonstrate their
credibility through the knowledge that was gained from their research within
the Communication Studies field before adding a research study of their own. The
previous research, in this case, acts as building blocks for Madlock and Chory
to add their findings to as scholars of Communication.
Through this
verbose writing, it almost becomes contradictory to the point of Communication
Studies: Wouldn’t the authors like to communicate clearly to audience members
about the topics in Communication? Social sciences have adopted the Official
Style in writing to add authority to the information they are writing about. Considering
that this article is also present in a journal dedicated to Communication, it
could also be assumed that authors were simply writing in a fashion that their
audience is used to reading, excluding the majority of potential readers that
are not familiar with how social science research studies are written.
The Official
Style used in this article through all of these prose strategies creates
disconnect from those who are not as educated in Communication Studies or other
social science fields. It is written much smarter than it needs to be, catering
to insiders of the social sciences. There is little explanation to jargon used,
alienating outsiders from the information within the article. It was written
for insiders of the field of Communication to read and ultimately build future
knowledge on. This very concept is addressed in the mission statement provided
by the journal. The Official Style was used in Socialization as a Predictor of Employee Outcomes to “make important and noteworthy contributions to the advancement of
human communication scholarship,” whatever that may mean to readers.
Post Written by: Theresa L
Works Cited
Madlock, Paul E., and Rebecca M.
Chory. "Socialization As A Predictor Of Employee Outcomes." Communication
Studies 65.1 (2014): 56-71. Academic Search Complete. Web.
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