Business Communication-Ification at the Capitol Insurrection

Abstract

What is Business Communication?Is it *any* communication by *anyone*, "about", "business"? Is it only communication that is created by a business or takes place "inside" a business? What people can speak as a business? Can those people ever *not* speak as a business? Who decides whether a particular communication is "business communication" or whether it is, simply, "communication"? Can any communication become or be transformed into "business communication"? If it can, who has ability to do that?These questions are perhaps tedious but the consequences of how business communication scholars and educators answereither explicitly or implicitly-are significant. And yet, while there have been many articles over the years seeking to answer the question "What is the field of business communication?", the question "What is business communication?" has been very rarely asked much less answered (Daniel, 1983;Keyser, 1972). In his 1993 article "The Shape of Our Field: Business Communication as a Hybrid Discipline, " Shaw wrote "The difficulty we've had defining the discipline has, more than any other problem in the field, compromised our full acceptance into the broader academic community" (Shaw, 1993, p. 298). For Shaw, defining the field is