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A significant issue for any academic field is how key theories are represented in textbooks. Textbooks are important institutional artifacts that organize entire subject areas, and thus key sites for assessing how scholarly ideas are developed and understood. However, the field of communication studies has done little to investigate how the key theories of our discipline are represented in our textbooks. This critical essay seeks to remedy this shortcoming with an exemplar investigation from the field of organizational communication and CCO Theory. We summarize the current state of CCO thinking and explore how this theory is portrayed in organizational communication textbooks, while also discussing implications of textbook representations for the broader field of communication studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The incorporation of safer building practices into shelter after disasters continues to plague recovery efforts. While limited resources are one potential cause, evidence from case studies suggests that poor adoption of safer construction may stem from a knowledge deficit. Despite these shortcomings, previous research has done little to examine the current state of construction education and training in post-disaster shelter and housing, and there is lacking evidence to support how households acquire new knowledge of construction practice. Examining nineteen shelter projects in the Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan, training methods were categorized using Kolb's experiential learning theory poles. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was then used to analyze the impact of these methods on community construction knowledge. Findings reveal that households acquired knowledge either through a combination of formal training methods that encompassed reflective observation, active experimentation, and concrete experiences or alternatively through observation of on-site construction activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A hallmark of today’s civil society sector is the prevalence of collaborative interorganizational networks. The purpose of this study is to investigate how collaborative interorganizational network structures affect interactions within client networks, and how this in turn impacts assessments of collaborative interorganizational network effectiveness. In particular, we focus on recommendations as key indicators of collaborative interorganizational network effectiveness in relation to client networks. We identify client networks of phantom populations as an important but unexamined aspect of collaborative interorganizational network effectiveness that warrants further research. We present an empirical investigation of a collaborative interorganizational network of social service agencies working to address the problem of homelessness in Boulder County, Colorado (USA). Findings indicate that organizations with a greater number of connections with other organizations generate more recommendations within client networks. Our study demonstrates a relationship between the degree of connections within a collaborative interorganizational network structure and the recommendations generated with a phantom population. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prisoner reentry is one of the main criminal justice challenges confronting the United States, es-pecially as the costs of recidivism and incarceration take increasing tolls on city and state budgets, and the effects of criminal activity are felt by families and local communities. Our goal in this article is to develop an alternative approach to prisoner reentry. Our contention is that many reentry ef-forts focus mainly on the visible effects of recidivism (e.g., parole violations, criminal behavior, and treatment compliance) but do not get at the underlying causes that lead to recidivism in the first place. While traditional methods of surveillance and control focus on the observable problems of recidivism, we argue that the underlying cause is a communication breakdown of being cut off from networks and meaningful relationships that provide the necessary social capital needed for successful reintegration. Therefore, we propose reframing prisoner reentry from a communication perspective, and developing subsequent communication solutions. We suggest that mentoring is one such com-munication solution, and we present a case study of a successful reentry mentoring program. Our case study uses a mixed research methodology, including quantitative data from a third-party assess-ment and qualitative data from in-depth interviews. Our key conclusions are that mentoring provides important communication links to enable coordinated service delivery for ex-prisoners, and that mentoring is a valuable conversational resource to help socially construct a favorable postrelease environment for successful reentry. Our target audience are those interested in prisoner reentry and reforming the overall criminal justice system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, human rights collaboration involves faith-based organizations whose members see social activism as an extension of their religious identities. This raises an immediate tension because collaboration requires negotiation of identities, challenging the convictions that motivate religious believers' involvement. Thus human rights collaboration offers an important context to explore tensions of identity and religious faith. This study reports on a human trafficking collaboration in Mexico, with a particular emphasis on the communicative tensions of integrating a distinct religious identity while collaborating with others. Grounded Practical Theory is used to identify practical challenges, communicative responses, and situated ideals that constitute this problem domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building capacity for disaster risk reduction requires integrating local and scientific knowledge. We focus on local and scientific knowledge of the safety of housing in typhoons' wind, focusing on roof and wall systems. To identify alignments and misalignments between household and engineering understanding of safe housing, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 170 households that received new houses from organizations following Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines. We qualitatively coded and analyzed these interviews to identify what housing components households expect to fail first, their preferred failure, and how they plan to modify their house to be safer in typhoons. We compared these responses to three results from engineering assessments: the governing failure mode, the failure mode that best meets safety performance objectives, and the quantified impact of design modifications. Household perceptions and engineering assessments were well-aligned when focusing on the damage expected to a single component and how to improve the performance of a single component. However, perceptions and assessments were misaligned at the housing level as households did not consider how housing components worked together as a system to influence performance. Households often did not recognize that modifying one component, such as the roof, would have an adverse impact on the performance of other components, such as the wall. This study is one of the first to systematically compare perceptions and assessments of housing safety and advances understanding of alignment, or misalignment, of local and scientific knowledge of safe building practices. We recommend that future post-disaster training programs incorporate discussions of a house's load path to focus on how components work together, enabling design and modification decisions that support improved housing performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]