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...quiet personality, she can also quietly implacable. I complied. Consequently, I have been a member of the ABC for 20 years now. The ABC--its journals, its conferences, and its members--is unquestionably the forum that has done the most to foster my own research.
Research is inevitably a collaborative effort. As Charie Thralls (1992) concluded, "all writing, whether authored by individuals or groups, is collaborative" (p. 79; see also Rogers, 1993). Research is developed from reading the works of others. It is shaped by conversations with and suggestions from others. The entire peer-review system of our refereed journals is built on the notion that the ideas of others should shape an author's text. Although the support of family and coworkers has been vital to the development of my career, today I would like to reflect on what the ABC as a professional forum has offered me--and continues to offer to others.
Despite multidisciplinary tensions, to which I will allude later, the ABC represents the idea (e.g., Toulmin, 1972) that research is not a disembodied endeavor but a practice embedded in the values of people who come together in sites or forums. To describe how this concept of forum works, I propose to identify a series of lessons I have learned from the people in the ABC. The specific purposes of this somewhat meandering lesson-learned approach is not so much to discuss my own research as it is to (a) demonstrate how one person's research is influenced by the research of others, (b) describe the breadth of research the ABC has fostered, and (c) pinpoint key issues in conducting business communication research.
METHOD
In 1985, following Carol David's orders and my own genuine interest in business communication research, I conducted a quantitative analysis of the relationship between sentence structure and letter type, which I later presented at my first ABC conference. When I asked a colleague in the English Department to give me some feedback on the manuscript, his response on reading it was "Very interesting, but could you take the numbers out?"
Lesson Learned 1: Methodology is discipline based.
THE HUMANITIES PERSPECTIVE
After I had completed that research on sentence structure and letter type, I heard JoAnne Yates and Kitty Locker speak on their separate research, historical analyses of business discourse. JoAnne Yates's analysis of Dupont led to an article in JBC (Yates, 1985) as well as a book (Yates, 1989). Kitty Locker, who talked on the correspondence of the British East India Company, published in JBC an analysis of pre-20th-century dunning letters (Locker, 1985). Both women subsequently won the ABC's Outstanding Researcher Award.
Lesson Learned 2: The humanities perspective can richly inform business communication research.
Like many business communication researchers of my generation, I was trained in literature, and in my graduate program, I specialized in a social historical perspective. When I was introduced to Kitty Locker's and JoAnne Yates's work, I realized that I did not have to abandon that training or interest....
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