About Joshua B. Barbour, Ph.D.: Joshua Barbour is Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where his research focuses on organizational communication, health communication, and communication in high-risk contexts such as nuclear sites and toxic waste management. His scholarship is applied, engaged, and collaborative, as exemplified by his grant-funded research projects with National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, among many other organizations.
Dr. Barbour is a prolific scholar, whose work has appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Communication Monographs, Qualitative Health Research, Management Communication Quarterly, and Journal of Applied Communication Research. He has contributed research to several collected volumes, three of which have received Outstanding Edited Book Awards from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association (NCA). Additionally, he has won the Bill Eadie Distinguished Scholarly Article award from the NCA’s Applied Communication Division multiple times.
Dr. Barbour has also been honored with the NSF’s prestigious CAREER Award. As part of his work with the NSF, Dr. Barbour founded the Automation Policy and Research Organizing Network (APRON), and currently directs the APRON Lab, which is focused on developing empowering and equitable communication strategies for workers and organizations facing automation. His doctoral dissertation won the Charles Redding Dissertation Award from the Organizational Communication Division of the International Communication Association, and he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Midwest Center for Health Services and Policy Research, now named the Center of Innovation for Complex Chronic Healthcare.
Dr. Barbour received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and his B.A. from the Department of Communication at The George Washington University. Prior to joining the faculty at UIUC, Dr. Barbour was Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Interview Questions
[MastersinCommunications.com] May we begin with an overview of your academic and professional background? How did you become interested in the connections between organizational communication, health communication, and crisis communication?
[Dr. Joshua Barbour] I came to communication as someone who was interested in solving practical problems. Even as an undergraduate student, what was so compelling to me about communication is that it is a practical discipline. Now, as a faculty member, I get to teach students things about communication that can make them more effective at work, at home, and in the public sphere.
I was drawn to organizational communication early in my career, and it quickly became the central area where I wanted to make my academic contributions. I work with organizations to this day, both through my consulting and through my research. As I think about my career, I notice that I have been attracted to problem spaces where I think communication makes a real difference. Probably the most important work that I have done is in healthcare organizations, in high-hazard organizations like toxic waste storage facilities and nuclear power plants, and in disaster response.
There are common threads that run through those contexts. For example, they involve folks with technical expertise. These people are very good at their jobs, but sometimes having a great deal of knowledge about a subject area can actually make communicating with others, both in times of crisis and outside of crisis, more difficult. In general, I believe that organizations are trying to be safe. My work at the intersection of organizational, health, and crisis communication is focused on helping organizations run reliably in order to keep people safe. There are inherent tensions and trade-offs that we navigate in our communication. Being safe and reliable in high-risk contexts involves disciplining communication to work effectively in the way that it needs to at that moment.
Disciplining communication is like exercising or brushing your teeth. It refers to the idea that we practice more effective ways of communicating, over and over, until they become a habit, so that our day-to-day communication works in more effective ways in the aggregate. Good communication is about what we do every day. It is a discipline.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Would you discuss your more recent interest in exploring the significance of automation to each of these areas?
[Dr. Joshua Barbour] I turned to automation at a stage of my career when I was figuring out what was going to happen next. I looked around and tried to think about where the disruptions to workplaces would be coming from. Automation seemed to me like it was poised to significantly impact all of the contexts where I had been doing research. Again, these are high-stakes contexts. In fact, when I was working with a safety professional in nuclear power, they described their work to me by stressing that it would never be automatable. There were many safety mechanisms and oversight tools that could be driven by machines, but you always had to have humans in the loop to understand what the systems were telling you. I became aware of automation in that context, in the early days of my career.
My interest in automation grew with the rise of artificial intelligence and intelligent machines, especially in the healthcare organizations I was studying. These organizations were grappling with how to use these tools to make space for more patient contact and do so in a way that is still safe. One of the biggest drivers of medical error is miscommunication. That means, if what we are automating in these spaces is communicative, then there are real implications for reliability and safety. That has driven my focus on automation more recently.
[MastersinCommunications.com] One important theme across your scholarship in these areas is “communication as design.” Would you introduce us to what it means to conceptualize communication from a design perspective and how this shapes your scholarly approach?
[Dr. Joshua Barbour] Communication design is a concept that I encountered during my research, mainly in the work of Sally Jackson and Mark Aakhus. They articulated communication design as a framework for thinking about design that happens in everyday communication all the time.
As you and I are making messages, we are producing speech at a cognitive, often automatic level. There are mechanisms in our minds that are making choices about the language we use. I am not thinking about every word I am saying at the moment, but these choices are still designed in the sense that they are strategic and goal-oriented. I have a mental model that has been honed over the years about what effective communication is and how I ought to be communicating. In that sense, communication design is something that happens constantly, as an intrinsic part of communication.
In other cases, I am more thoughtful or intentional about my design choices. The example I use with my undergraduate students is having to call home from school to ask your family for a loan to go see a concert that you cannot afford on your college budget. You think about which family member to ask, when to call, and how to make your case.
Communication design is also something that organizations do. Inside organizations, individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole make choices about communication. Sometimes they do that with a lot of awareness. Putting together a public relations campaign, recruiting new members to the organization, and redesigning safety processes are moments where everybody involved knows that they are producing communication together, and they are trying to do it well. But people in organizations also sometimes communicate without much awareness about the decisions they are making. This is often the case with seemingly low-stakes communication choices. When should we have this meeting? How are we going to interact with one another as we undertake this project?
Those choices are frequently made without a lot of mindfulness or meta-communication [communication about how we communicate with each other]. Sometimes that means we fall into automatic scripts that exist inside organizations or the communication patterns of a leader. If we have differing beliefs about communication, we can end up in conflicts that are spurred by issues as seemingly trivial as how we want to use technology in a project, or how meetings ought to be structured.
I consider the study of communication design in an organizational context to be focused on helping organizations and teams think about their communication, make different communication choices, and then try to carry those choices out. Understanding communication requires that we pay attention to each of these three levels — the choices that we make about communication, our efforts to realize those choices in practice, and the effects that those choices have over time — and how they are intertwined. For example, how might the way we have been structuring our meetings impact how we communicate, and as a result, our workplace satisfaction, engagement, or productivity?
Generally speaking, I think about the scholarship as divided into empirical, describing what is, and critical, describing what should be. To me, design work is prospective. It is about what might be. It is imaginative. You are trying to think about approaches to communication that might not exist or that have not been tried in a particular context.
[MastersinCommunications.com] You have applied your interest in communication as design to the study of organizational communication, health communication campaigns, and crisis communication. Are there key commonalities in effective communication design you have located across these areas of application — for example, the importance of narratives — or ways you have found these contexts to be importantly unique?
[Dr. Joshua Barbour] There are three factors I would highlight in an effective communication design. The first is awareness of the way we ought to be communicating. What kind of design is called for? People may understand, for example, the communication research that says that, when providing emotional support, communicating information is less important than being present for the person, asking them questions, and encouraging them to engage or share their own emotions. At the same time, they may not be aware that this is a moment that calls for social support. One aspect of getting communication as design right is knowing when the right moment is to employ a certain form of communication.
If we worried about every single communication decision that we made as much as nuclear regulators worried about safety processes, we would go crazy thinking about every communication choice. But there are some choices and moments you need to get right. It is important to cultivate your ability to know when those moments arise: when safety is at stake or when our friend really needs help.
Second, people who make effective choices about communication understand that doing so involves more than selecting what to say and the right way to say it. Some people think of communication as a game, where we just have to learn what the rules are in a particular context like professional life and follow them. An even higher level of sophistication is recognizing that the rules themselves are up for grabs. We can make the rules and we can change them through the way we frame the communicative moment itself. Effective communicators are aware of context and the contingent expectations around communication, but they also understand that those structures are mutable. For example, in a disagreement, I might start by saying that I think it is most important that we remain friends, shifting what communication success in that moment looks like from just winning the argument to sustaining the relationship.
Finally, our only way to think about communication is to communicate. Effective communicators are people who can cultivate their ability to meta-communicate: to talk about talk and, in doing so, highlight the communication choices being made for everyone else involved to see and become involved in.
The studies that I have done on narrative are a particular subcategory of my design research focused on the design of particular messages. Part of the reason that narratives have such an effect is because they transport people. People get sucked into the story. At the same time, in the research I have done on narratives, including a project led by a former graduate student of mine, Dr. Melissa Murphy, I have found that what makes a message a narrative is somewhat ambiguous.
We have intentionally designed non-narrative messages — pieces of exposition, for example, where there is not a story structure with a beginning, middle, or end, or a cast of characters — but when we evaluated responses from audiences, we saw there was actually quite a bit of variation. Our research affirms that audiences are moved by narratives, but finds that what audiences perceive as a story does not necessarily depend on the message having the formal features of a narrative. This reflects how, when making choices about communication design in any context, it is important to think about the audience. The researcher using themselves as a proxy for the audience is likely going to be very insufficient.
[MastersinCommunications.com] You have also frequently described your theoretical approach, especially with respect to organizational communication, as “macromorphic.” Would you define macromorphism for our readers, and discuss how it informs, or exists in conversation with, your understanding of communication as design?
[Dr. Joshua Barbour] Often what makes communication difficult in organizations is not located solely in the moments when people are communicating. Especially in settings like nuclear power or medicine, part of what we are navigating is the communication baggage that we bring with us by virtue of the professions that we are representing. The classic dyad that is studied so often in healthcare is the nurse-physician dyad, where professional identities bring with them certain beliefs or assumptions about how communication ought to happen and what roles the communicators are intended to play. The same thing is true in nuclear power, where there is a division between the regulator and the operator of the plants, and there are different kinds of engineers who are working together and see communication differently, partly because of their specialized backgrounds.
The “macro” in macromorphic refers to the structural level of communication. In an organizational setting, this may mean the way that an organization structurally requires bringing together these different specialized forms of communication. It may also be what is happening in an industry: the economic or market forces, the regulatory frameworks, existing and potential competitors, cultural stereotypes, and power structures that cut across different types of organizations.
The “macro” influences what happens between us in everyday organizational communications at the “micro level” — for example, our interpersonal relational dynamics. The “mezzo level” is where the macro and the micro come together in teams, groups, and organizations where these micro and macro forces are interacting with each other. What I am interested in naming with the term macromorphic is how micro-level and mezzo-level communication practices and dynamics are shaped by macro-level, structural phenomena. They are a source of scripts or repertoires that we draw upon in our interactions, and which also constrain those interactions.
A great example of this is patient-provider communication. The average amount of time a physician spends with a patient is less than 15 minutes long. This is partly because of the ways that insurance companies finance reimbursements for the provider’s billing and partly because private healthcare organizations often have to process a certain quota of patients a day in order to keep the lights on. As such, patient provider interaction is macromorphic in the sense that even how much time we get to talk is shaped by these outside, structural forces.
Even those practitioners who do not strictly abide by these demands are impacted by them. If something comes up in the conversation that needs more time, many doctors will just take that time, but that means that then they are behind for their next patients, and so on. This type of micro-level dynamic that originates from and is shaped by the structural level is what I am interested in exploring through the concept of macromorphic communication.
[MastersinCommunications.com] One of your most recent publications is the co-authored piece “Hostile Knowledge Performances,” which explores organizational communication strategies that seek to create knowledge through domination. Would you explain what a hostile knowledge performance is and what this piece helps us understand about the potentially exclusionary or detrimental ways knowledge production can take place in organizational contexts?
[Dr. Joshua Barbour] I collaborated on this project with Drs. Jared T. Jensen and Shelbey R. Call. We drew the phrase “knowledge performance” from the work of Timothy Kuhn and Michele H. Jackson to describe what might be otherwise understood as the communicative accomplishment of knowledge. In contrast to thinking of knowledge as information that is simply transmitted from a communicator to their audience, this describes the production of knowledge as a collaborative process through which, as a group, we cultivate an understanding of a problem and become mutually engaged in producing the information to solve it.
This publication grows out of something we observed during fieldwork. One common approach to problem-solving involves airing different ideas and doing our best to pick the one that is going to work best. We were watching a team try to implement a new piece of information communication technology, and we observed this was not at all what was happening. The communication dynamics of the group were not functioning in a way that would optimally solve their collective problem. Instead, one team member was communicating in such a way that their view of the problem dominated the interaction.
We tried to articulate specific communication practices through which that domineering knowledge performance was enacted. For example, this team member monopolized the communication and undermined things that other people were saying. This communication was not violent, but had similarities to, for example, forms of communication discussed in research on bullying. It was forceful communication. Research also tells us, in group settings, people will often mistake charisma for knowledge — confidence for competence — and we think that might partly explain what we observed.
The reason we call these hostile knowledge performances is that they defy the assumption that everyone involved in a decision will work to ensure the organization generates the most value from the knowledge that is available. Anyone who has worked in an organization knows human beings are not so simple or rational. They do not always have the best interests of their colleagues or the organization at heart. Even when they do, sometimes they do not know how to communicate differently because their training tells them that to be a good communicator is to be forceful and get their way.
Of course, these hostile knowledge performances do not happen in a vacuum, so we also worked to identify communication practices through which people acquiesced to, contributed to, and in some cases pushed back against these hostile knowledge performances. One way we saw people push back was by asking questions that disarmed the dominating communicator by shifting the topic or by asking a different person to weigh in.
[MastersinCommunications.com] With respect to your interest in automation, you are founder of the Automation Policy and Research Organizing Network (APRON) and direct the APRON Lab — ventures supported by the National Science Foundation grant, “CAREER: The Future of Work in Health Analytics and Automation: Investigating the Communication that Builds Human-Technology Partnerships.” Would you provide us with some background on APRON and the APRON Lab?
[Dr. Joshua Barbour] APRON is a collective of folks who are interested in the future of work and automation’s place in it. Automation has been around for a long time. In fact, many of the same discourses that we see in the public sphere and certain industries around automation — that it is going to solve all our problems, or, conversely, take our jobs — often accompany technological change at a societal level.
Our goal is to try and understand the conversations taking place surrounding automation, which, in my work within healthcare industries, range from “high-technology” automation like machine learning, to diagnostic aids powered by machine vision, to old-fashioned automation systems used to assign and track the cell-phones checked out to charge nurses.
The data so far suggests that automation does not replace work but rather transforms it. That transformation can be disruptive. There can be winners and losers in that process. Pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, for instance, have real concerns about the implications of introducing pharmacy robots into hospital settings for their jobs, for their work with one another, and for their relationships with other healthcare providers.
The work of the APRON Lab is focused on how to engage in effective deliberations about the future of work and automation that ensure these measures are adopted equitably. Our research considers automation more broadly — we have, for instance, looked at examples of personal automation like our use of Apple Watches. We have largely focused on healthcare because of the power of the industry and potential life-and-death consequences of automation therein, but we also think it is crucial that the disruptions of automation will be the most negatively impactful for those who are already marginalized across industries.
Large-scale technological changes tend to hit marginalized communities harder because it is members of these communities that are more often structurally incentivized to do the work that becomes a target of automation, precisely because it is deemed quote-unquote “low-skill.” We see this, for example, with gig labor or truck driving. Workers in these industries are also not ordinarily afforded a seat at the table in the way that professionals in other industries are. Further, when their jobs are affected, they do not necessarily have the resources to pivot to something else the way that an attorney or doctor might. We need to consider how to make choices about automation that minimize its disruptions for marginalized people and occupations.
[MastersinCommunications.com] You have participated in a number of collaborative, grant-funded initiatives that demonstrate your commitment to applied, engaged research in communication. This is a dimension of your work you have reflected on in “Making Time/Making Temporality for Engaged Scholarship.” Would you tell us more about your understanding of engaged scholarship, and how you think about the important distinction between time and temporality as it pertains to pursuing this form of scholarly praxis?
[Dr. Joshua Barbour] There are probably as many forms of engaged scholarship as there are researchers. Often my research has gone hand-in-hand with an effort to try and help organizations change how they are communicating or organizing. I take an engaged approach to this research in that, if I am partnering with an organization, then I want them to be at the table as we design the study, collect the data, analyze and interpret the data, and report what its findings and insights are.
This process of co-designing and co-enacting research is integral to my approach. It is also especially important when you are studying safety processes. As a researcher, you want to ensure that you are not going to make anything worse by making a recommendation that unintentionally undermines the process. My job in these spaces is to be a mirror that reflects what the organization is doing to give them an opportunity to refine their own practice as experts. It is to highlight their interactions with internal and external stakeholders to help them to make choices about how they may want to communicate differently.
The project that we did with the National Science Foundation [discussed above] was based on a years-long effort of reaching out to healthcare organizations and basically giving them a pitch to work with us. We had a partner that was very well networked in healthcare technology in Texas who helped make introductions for us. We presented what we were interested in researching to them but also worked with them to mold the project. When we began to work with these organizations, part of our engagement involved holding workshops with participants as we collected data. We shared what we were seeing and asked them to amplify, challenge, or modify our observations. We asked them to draw from deliberations with each other to identify actions that they wanted to take as an organization. They were involved in the design and the analysis of data.
I have also done engaged research where a partner with knowledge of my research expertise has come to me and said, “We have this question, will you help us?” This type of project is a process of ensuring that you understand their question and brainstorming what communication frameworks might be relevant to answering it. The work that we did with the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] is a good model of engaged work in this vein. That grew out of the Aspen Engaged Communication Scholarship Conference that I have been involved with for the last decade or so. The professionals from the CDC came, and they shared the issues that they were facing, then we pitched projects that could help them. My team ended up working with them as partners and conducting research that was relevant to their questions, as well as ours.
Common between these examples is an emphasis on the shared sense-making practice that you are engaging in with a partner. You are co-creating a question and then identifying research methods and specific strategies to approach that question together. Part of engaged research is certainly about access and networking; it requires getting yourself in front of someone who is a decision-maker and can approve your project. But, once you are in front of that person, the most important part is understanding the problems of their organization and how communication theory and research can be marshaled to address these challenges. That way, you can help generate a project that both helps the organization and lets you learn something fundamental about how communication works.
Time is an important dimension of engaged scholarship for two important reasons. First, engagement takes time. If you want to understand the organizational context and generate something valuable with that organization, you cannot just do it in a semester. It is a years-long effort. There is a deep problem with community-engaged research where people will work with non-profit organizations or community groups for very short periods of time. They will come in, do a quick project, get what they need, and get out. That kind of extractive model is counterproductive. You have to be willing to dedicate the time.
Second, time is often an important piece of engaged scholarship because partners often have different conceptions of how long things will take or what the key moments in the execution of a project are. As academics, we have the rhythms of the academic semester and publishing. Sometimes our rhythms and the pacing of our work is a lot faster or slower than that of our partners. Sometimes you have to explain to your partner, “No, I can’t go into the field this week. I need to make sure that we have IRB [Institutional Review Board] approval, which takes time.” It is a negotiation.
This is a moment when meta-communication comes in handy again. Different partners will have different views of how the process should work, and you have to be able to identify and communicate about and across those differences.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Based on your experience and expertise, do you have advice you would give to students who are interested in organizational communication, health communication, or automation, and who are considering pursuing a graduate degree in communication?
[Dr. Joshua Barbour] They should come to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There you go. That was easy [laughs].
More seriously, I would recommend students become invested in a particular problem, setting, or context, and let that drive the questions you ask, the theory you read, and the projects that you do. If you are considering graduate school, I think it is valuable to try to identify the problem space you are interested in, then research communication scholars who are already studying those things. Once you have identified what drives you as a scholar, identify who else is trying to tackle those problems in the academy.
If you are an undergraduate and do not yet have a map of the researchers working in that problem-space, go talk to your faculty members and ask them for recommendations. Look at the websites of the scholars they suggest to see where they are teaching, where they went to graduate school, and other faculty they might be collaborating with whom you may also want to work with. Then, apply to the programs these scholars teach in, and go work with them.
I would also recommend students interested in graduate school attend the NCA conference held every year in November. This is a great place for students to meet with faculty. I have met undergraduates there who, though early in their careers, had a good sense that they wanted to study how to help people communicate more effectively in hospitals, and I could offer them guidance on programs where they could study precisely that. Look at the scholarly divisions and associations at NCA and other conferences to understand the different areas of the field and the scholars doing work in those specializations. These are the scholars whom you should reach out to for advice on where you might apply to graduate school in order to work on the problems that you are passionate about.
Thank you, Dr. Barbour, for sharing your insight on applied and engaged communication research in health and high-risk contexts, the macromorphic nature of communication, the significance of automation, and more!
Please note: Our interview series aims to represent the diverse research being pursued by scholars in the field of communication, which is often socially and politically engaged. As a result, all readers may not agree with the views and opinions expressed in this interview, which are independent of the views of MastersinCommunications.com, its parent company, partners, and affiliates.
