Joshua B Barbour
Biographic Data
| ID | 296522 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joshua B Barbour |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joshua B |
| FAMILY NAME | Barbour |
| SIGNATURE | BARBOUR J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8384-7175 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Perceptions of Pandemic Messaging Across 36 Weeks
To understand public perceptions of pandemic messaging, we surveyed U.S. adults for 36 consecutive weeks starting on March 12, 2020. Using a repeated cross-section design, we tracked intentions to engage in protective behaviors, demographics, and four message perceptions: exhaustion, overload, repetition, and exaggeration. Exhaustion increased over time and became negatively related to intentions (rising negativity model). Exaggeration was stable…
Broadening the Study of Warning Message Effectiveness
Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the editorial board of the journal
Aspen Collective for Engaged Communication Scholarship statement
Since 2002, a collective of communication scholars and practitioners has gathered in Aspen, Colorado, and cities nearby, to share their experiences and challenges collaborating with communities and
Join this conversation
An important facet of the organization of the Aspen Engaged Communication Scholarship Collective is that it tries to communicate in ways that embody its commitments. The conference organized by the Collective is an example. Principles of engagement guide the selection of conference topics as well as the practice of communication at the conference. In this essay, I describe a conference format, the projects-in-progress session, to illustrate this …
Political Party Collective Norms, Perceived Norms, and Mask Wearing Behavior
The theory of normative social behavior (TNSB) postulates that people are influenced by others’ behaviors, which they observe from messages and experience. In addition to focusing on perceived (i.e., descriptive and injunctive) norms, the TNSB was expanded to include collective norms, which represent what people actually do. Testing this expanded theoretical model, the current study examined whether two types of collective norms – collective poli…
Quantifying the self with others
Self-trackers collect personal data for many reasons, including generating insight about their bodies, habits, productivity, and wellbeing. Self-tracking may expose intimate facets of daily life, raising important questions about surveillance, privacy, and data ownership. In this study, we investigated an online community of self-trackers and their weekly “show-and-tell” presentations through observations of their meetings and interviews with mem…
Hostile knowledge performances
Struggles over meaning are inherent to knowledge performances – the communicative accomplishment of knowledge. This study analyzes an interdisciplinary team's communication as they designed a novel information technology. It focuses on hostile knowledge performances, which are comprised of behaviors that steer group knowing by dominating communication. That communication included flooding the interactive space with monologues and interminable ema…
An Experimental Study of Message Strategies for Mobile Alerts and Warnings
Dr. Dennis Mileti devoted his career to the study of public warnings disseminated through mass media, word of mouth, and, later, mobile technologies. To date, research on mobile public warnings has focused on standardized elements of messages (e.g., the common alerting protocol). During this same period, however, a variety of private, public, and governmental organizations have adopted mobile alert technologies to disseminate a diverse variety of…
Social media narratives can influence vaccine intentions
Substance, discourse, and practice
Echoing past waves of transformation, the public sphere is awash with anxiety about automation now driven by the rise of intelligent machines. Emerging technologies encompass a wider and wider range of work, and the disruptions that will accompany the transformation of work involve pressing problems for research and practice. Communication scholarship is distinctively well equipped for the study of automation today because communication itself is…
Signaling and meaning in organizational analytics
The future of work will be measured. The increasing and widespread adoption of analytics, the use of digital inputs and outputs to inform organizational decision making, makes the communication of data central to organizing. This article applies and extends signaling theory to provide a framework for the study of analytics as communication. We report three cases that offer examples of dubious , selective , and ambiguous signaling in the activitie…
Examining the role of individuals’ perceptions of likelihood of sustained commitment in corporate-nonprofit partnership CSR advertisements
Effective corporate social responsibility (CSR) advertising depends on the nature of the partnership and how it is communicated in messages about CSR initiatives. Guided by the Symbolic Sustainability Model (SSM), this study investigates the effects of communication about CSR initiatives comparing differing CSR approaches through a 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial experiment. After viewing a hypothetical CSR-based advertisement, participants (N =…
Managing Uncertainty for and With Family
The management of uncertainty is integral to health and illness. Individuals manage uncertainty about their health through communication enmeshed in family systems, but existing theorizing focuses on individuals without accounting for family processes. An iterative qualitative analysis of 42 dyadic, family interviews ( N = 84) revealed (a) moments in the context of hereditary cancer that involved individual-centered and familial uncertainty appra…
Risk communication infrastructure and community resilience
The community resilience needed for effective disaster response and recovery depends in part on robust cross-sector, interorganizational networks, but differences among networked stakeholders can make building community resilience difficult. Local emergency planning committees (LEPCs) may help by acting as risk communication infrastructure. LEPCs help conduct emergency chemical hazards planning and support the public's right-to-know about those h…
"How do we rally around the one who was positive?" Familial uncertainty management in the context of men managing BRCA-related cancer risks
Organizational Communication Design Logics
Theorizing communication as design can support the development of theories of intervention by focusing attention not just on how groups, organizations, and communities communicate, but also on how they make and try to enact choices about their communication. We posit a theory of organizational communication design logics aimed at clarifying how collectives intervene in their own communication. We argue that collective communication design (CCD) i…
Analytics and expert collaboration
Analytics is heralded as an important, new and increasingly widespread organizational function, and one that promises new approaches for generating value from organizational knowledge. What is not yet clear is how analytics may affect how organizations work with data, or how organizations can realize the benefits of analytics. Analytics, envisioned as not just a technical skill but a reconceptualization of data’s place in the organization, may im…
Questioning as regulatory work practice
The safety of high hazard systems depends on the organizations that monitor and regulate them, but theorizing of these organizations tends to gloss over the specific communicative practices that comprise organizing for reliability and safety. This article investigates nuclear power plant inspectors’ communicative work practices by studying how asking and answering questions organizes their work. The data include interviews (N = 29) and shadowing …
Shadowing in/as work
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide practical recommendations for shadowing as a method of organizational study with a focus on the situated processes and practices of shadowing fieldwork. Design/methodology/approach – This paper reflects on the shadowing experiences of three researchers – in a hospital emergency department, nuclear power plants, and entrepreneur workspaces – to generate recommendations by identifying and synthesizi…
The Message Design Logics of Organizational Change
This study investigated the influence of context in the production of messages by stakeholders about organizational change. We analyzed messages produced in response to hypothetical organizational change scenarios. The message production task was implemented within a 2×2 experimental design (N = 1,205) fielded at three different organizations. We included multiple replications for each manipulation, and multilevel structural equation modeling all…
Avoiding Health Information
This study investigated why and how individuals avoid health information to support the development of models of uncertainty and information management and offer insights for those dealing with the information and uncertainty inherent to health and illness. Participants from student (n = 507) and community (n = 418) samples reported that they avoided health information to (a) maintain hope or deniability, (b) resist overexposure, (c) accept limit…
Revisiting the Worksite in Worksite Health Campaigns
This article advances the beginnings of a general theory of organizational features to aid in understanding why health campaigns that work well in one organization may be ineffectual in another organization. The physical, social, and information structures of organizations are theorized to create an interaction environment that is distinct to each organization and that influences health campaigns. To test this argument, an organ donation campaign…
An Institutional Theory of Organizational Communication
For many years, reviewers have argued that organizational communication research is overly concentrated on microphenomena to the neglect of macrophenomena, but macrophenomena have generally remained unspecified. An institutional theory of organizational communication is proposed to fill that gap. Drawing on institutional theory in organizational sociology and on concerns in organizational communication, we define institutions as constellations (i…
An Institutional Theory of Organizational Communication
For many years, reviewers have argued that organizational communication research is overly concentrated on microphenomena to the neglect of macrophenomena, but macrophenomena have generally remained unspecified. An institutional theory of organizational communication is proposed to fill that gap. Drawing on institutional theory in organizational sociology and on concerns in organizational communication, we define institutions as constellations (i…
Organizational Communication Design Logics
Theorizing communication as design can support the development of theories of intervention by focusing attention not just on how groups, organizations, and communities communicate, but also on how they make and try to enact choices about their communication. We posit a theory of organizational communication design logics aimed at clarifying how collectives intervene in their own communication. We argue that collective communication design (CCD) i…
"How do we rally around the one who was positive?" Familial uncertainty management in the context of men managing BRCA-related cancer risks
Analytics and expert collaboration
Analytics is heralded as an important, new and increasingly widespread organizational function, and one that promises new approaches for generating value from organizational knowledge. What is not yet clear is how analytics may affect how organizations work with data, or how organizations can realize the benefits of analytics. Analytics, envisioned as not just a technical skill but a reconceptualization of data’s place in the organization, may im…
Questioning as regulatory work practice
The safety of high hazard systems depends on the organizations that monitor and regulate them, but theorizing of these organizations tends to gloss over the specific communicative practices that comprise organizing for reliability and safety. This article investigates nuclear power plant inspectors’ communicative work practices by studying how asking and answering questions organizes their work. The data include interviews (N = 29) and shadowing …
The Message Design Logics of Organizational Change
This study investigated the influence of context in the production of messages by stakeholders about organizational change. We analyzed messages produced in response to hypothetical organizational change scenarios. The message production task was implemented within a 2×2 experimental design (N = 1,205) fielded at three different organizations. We included multiple replications for each manipulation, and multilevel structural equation modeling all…
An Institutional Theory of Organizational Communication
For many years, reviewers have argued that organizational communication research is overly concentrated on microphenomena to the neglect of macrophenomena, but macrophenomena have generally remained unspecified. An institutional theory of organizational communication is proposed to fill that gap. Drawing on institutional theory in organizational sociology and on concerns in organizational communication, we define institutions as constellations (i…
Revisiting the Worksite in Worksite Health Campaigns
This article advances the beginnings of a general theory of organizational features to aid in understanding why health campaigns that work well in one organization may be ineffectual in another organization. The physical, social, and information structures of organizations are theorized to create an interaction environment that is distinct to each organization and that influences health campaigns. To test this argument, an organ donation campaign…
Avoiding Health Information
This study investigated why and how individuals avoid health information to support the development of models of uncertainty and information management and offer insights for those dealing with the information and uncertainty inherent to health and illness. Participants from student (n = 507) and community (n = 418) samples reported that they avoided health information to (a) maintain hope or deniability, (b) resist overexposure, (c) accept limit…
The Message Design Logics of Organizational Change
This study investigated the influence of context in the production of messages by stakeholders about organizational change. We analyzed messages produced in response to hypothetical organizational change scenarios. The message production task was implemented within a 2×2 experimental design (N = 1,205) fielded at three different organizations. We included multiple replications for each manipulation, and multilevel structural equation modeling all…
Shadowing in/as work
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide practical recommendations for shadowing as a method of organizational study with a focus on the situated processes and practices of shadowing fieldwork. Design/methodology/approach – This paper reflects on the shadowing experiences of three researchers – in a hospital emergency department, nuclear power plants, and entrepreneur workspaces – to generate recommendations by identifying and synthesizi…
Questioning as regulatory work practice
The safety of high hazard systems depends on the organizations that monitor and regulate them, but theorizing of these organizations tends to gloss over the specific communicative practices that comprise organizing for reliability and safety. This article investigates nuclear power plant inspectors’ communicative work practices by studying how asking and answering questions organizes their work. The data include interviews (N = 29) and shadowing …
Organizational Communication Design Logics
Theorizing communication as design can support the development of theories of intervention by focusing attention not just on how groups, organizations, and communities communicate, but also on how they make and try to enact choices about their communication. We posit a theory of organizational communication design logics aimed at clarifying how collectives intervene in their own communication. We argue that collective communication design (CCD) i…
Analytics and expert collaboration
Analytics is heralded as an important, new and increasingly widespread organizational function, and one that promises new approaches for generating value from organizational knowledge. What is not yet clear is how analytics may affect how organizations work with data, or how organizations can realize the benefits of analytics. Analytics, envisioned as not just a technical skill but a reconceptualization of data’s place in the organization, may im…
"How do we rally around the one who was positive?" Familial uncertainty management in the context of men managing BRCA-related cancer risks
Risk communication infrastructure and community resilience
The community resilience needed for effective disaster response and recovery depends in part on robust cross-sector, interorganizational networks, but differences among networked stakeholders can make building community resilience difficult. Local emergency planning committees (LEPCs) may help by acting as risk communication infrastructure. LEPCs help conduct emergency chemical hazards planning and support the public's right-to-know about those h…
Examining the role of individuals’ perceptions of likelihood of sustained commitment in corporate-nonprofit partnership CSR advertisements
Effective corporate social responsibility (CSR) advertising depends on the nature of the partnership and how it is communicated in messages about CSR initiatives. Guided by the Symbolic Sustainability Model (SSM), this study investigates the effects of communication about CSR initiatives comparing differing CSR approaches through a 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial experiment. After viewing a hypothetical CSR-based advertisement, participants (N =…
Managing Uncertainty for and With Family
The management of uncertainty is integral to health and illness. Individuals manage uncertainty about their health through communication enmeshed in family systems, but existing theorizing focuses on individuals without accounting for family processes. An iterative qualitative analysis of 42 dyadic, family interviews ( N = 84) revealed (a) moments in the context of hereditary cancer that involved individual-centered and familial uncertainty appra…
An Experimental Study of Message Strategies for Mobile Alerts and Warnings
Dr. Dennis Mileti devoted his career to the study of public warnings disseminated through mass media, word of mouth, and, later, mobile technologies. To date, research on mobile public warnings has focused on standardized elements of messages (e.g., the common alerting protocol). During this same period, however, a variety of private, public, and governmental organizations have adopted mobile alert technologies to disseminate a diverse variety of…
Social media narratives can influence vaccine intentions
Substance, discourse, and practice
Echoing past waves of transformation, the public sphere is awash with anxiety about automation now driven by the rise of intelligent machines. Emerging technologies encompass a wider and wider range of work, and the disruptions that will accompany the transformation of work involve pressing problems for research and practice. Communication scholarship is distinctively well equipped for the study of automation today because communication itself is…
Signaling and meaning in organizational analytics
The future of work will be measured. The increasing and widespread adoption of analytics, the use of digital inputs and outputs to inform organizational decision making, makes the communication of data central to organizing. This article applies and extends signaling theory to provide a framework for the study of analytics as communication. We report three cases that offer examples of dubious , selective , and ambiguous signaling in the activitie…
Political Party Collective Norms, Perceived Norms, and Mask Wearing Behavior
The theory of normative social behavior (TNSB) postulates that people are influenced by others’ behaviors, which they observe from messages and experience. In addition to focusing on perceived (i.e., descriptive and injunctive) norms, the TNSB was expanded to include collective norms, which represent what people actually do. Testing this expanded theoretical model, the current study examined whether two types of collective norms – collective poli…
Quantifying the self with others
Self-trackers collect personal data for many reasons, including generating insight about their bodies, habits, productivity, and wellbeing. Self-tracking may expose intimate facets of daily life, raising important questions about surveillance, privacy, and data ownership. In this study, we investigated an online community of self-trackers and their weekly “show-and-tell” presentations through observations of their meetings and interviews with mem…
Hostile knowledge performances
Struggles over meaning are inherent to knowledge performances – the communicative accomplishment of knowledge. This study analyzes an interdisciplinary team's communication as they designed a novel information technology. It focuses on hostile knowledge performances, which are comprised of behaviors that steer group knowing by dominating communication. That communication included flooding the interactive space with monologues and interminable ema…
Broadening the Study of Warning Message Effectiveness
Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the editorial board of the journal
Aspen Collective for Engaged Communication Scholarship statement
Since 2002, a collective of communication scholars and practitioners has gathered in Aspen, Colorado, and cities nearby, to share their experiences and challenges collaborating with communities and
Join this conversation
An important facet of the organization of the Aspen Engaged Communication Scholarship Collective is that it tries to communicate in ways that embody its commitments. The conference organized by the Collective is an example. Principles of engagement guide the selection of conference topics as well as the practice of communication at the conference. In this essay, I describe a conference format, the projects-in-progress session, to illustrate this …
Perceptions of Pandemic Messaging Across 36 Weeks
To understand public perceptions of pandemic messaging, we surveyed U.S. adults for 36 consecutive weeks starting on March 12, 2020. Using a repeated cross-section design, we tracked intentions to engage in protective behaviors, demographics, and four message perceptions: exhaustion, overload, repetition, and exaggeration. Exhaustion increased over time and became negatively related to intentions (rising negativity model). Exaggeration was stable…
Computer Science (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Political science (9 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Engineering (6 works) · Knowledge management (6 works) · Medicine (6 works) · Public Relations and Crisis Communication (6 works) · Public relations (5 works)