Verbal Communication Quality In Institutional Contexts

This chapter presents a selective outline of methods for evaluating the quality of verbal communication in the context of institutions. It is based on classroom experience with an interactive master's course, where teams of students were invited to produce and evaluate a business plan (to attract funding), a job posting (to recruit new staff) and a press release (to contain a corporate crisis). The chapter draws attention to how important it is to take the communicative context into account through qualitative, ethnographic inquiry. It is suggested that it pays off to go behind the scenes, backstage in Goffman's terminology, to monitor the complex production and reception processes underlying most verbal communication, including the notion of reuse.