Management Communication
Management Communication
Assesment 2
Document Design : Memo format
Length : 750
words +/-10%
Weight : 20%
No. Sources : Three to
Five (3-5)
Getting started
1. Analyse and plan the
question
The task
An exciting new approach to teamwork has resulted from
advances in information technology, shifting employee expectations and the
globalisation of business, namely the virtual team. The appeal of forming
virtual teams is clear. Employees can manage their work and personal lives more
flexibly, and they have the opportunity to interact with colleagues around the
world.
Companies can use the best and lowest-cost global
talent and significantly reduce their real estate costs.
However, virtual teams are hard to get right. In a
study of 70 virtual teams Govindarajan and Gupta (2001) found that 82% fell
short of their goals and 33% rated themselves as largely unsuccessful. Most
people consider virtual communication less productive than face-to-face
interaction, and nearly half admit to feeling confused and overwhelmed by
collaboration technology (Ferrazzi 2014).
Faced with these statistics your boss, the Marketing
Director of Company XYZ, is deciding whether to develop a new virtual marketing
team with staff located in Melbourne, Los Angeles, Shanghai and Bangalore or
keep things the way they are with separate marketing teams within each country.
What will your advice be to the Marketing Director?
Will you argue for or against the creation of the virtual team? Why?
Developing an argument
• The purpose of many academic texts is to persuade and
this is typically done through the use of ARGUMENT.
• Argument seeks to state a position on an issue and give
reasons, supported by evidence, for agreeing with that position.
Common problems with an
argument paper
The following examples
of lecturers’ comments indicate they feel the student has a problem in
developing an argument in their written assignments:
• ‘You have made some good points but you have
not substantiated them.’
• ‘Where is your evidence for this claim?’
• ‘You need to show me that you have done the
reading on this topic.’
• ‘I know the literature myself so you don't
need to just tell it all to me: What I
want to know is - what is your position?
• Your argument here contradicts your starting
position
• The
Solution
How you can develop and
substantiate an argument or position (‘persuade’) in writing through the use of
evidence. Its objective is to answer the following five questions:
• what is appropriate evidence for academic
contexts?
• how can I recognise different positions taken
in the readings?
• how can I develop my own argument
through the evidence?
• how can I present and support my own
position?
• what
is the difference between merely summarising the evidence, and using it to
substantiate my position and develop my argument?
How can I recognise
different positions taken in the readings?
• When
you are preparing your essay through reading literature on the topic, you will
probably be reading from different sources, which often have different
positions towards the topic. It is
important that you can recognise these differences to help you understand the
topic more. Sometimes the different
views that you read on a topic are very strongly in conflict with each other,
particularly in areas that are quite controversial.
How can I develop an
argument out of the evidence to support my own position?
• First,
you need to chose your position. When
you are researching a topic, you will probably come across a range of
positions, sometimes extremely opposed to each other. You will then have to evaluate each position
and decide why one is more valid than another.
This will help you to decide what your own position is, so that you can
establish the starting point of the argument for your paper. Sometimes your
position will be determined by the amount of source material available.
If you had to make a
position statement to identify where you stand on the effects of passive
smoking, would it be similar to 1) or 2) above?
Would it be stronger or weaker than those positions? Try to identify your position on the
following gradient of views.
• Most
essay topics which involve developing an argument will have a similar range of
possible positions. You may find that
your choice of position in any argument will depend largely on the amount of
evidence available to support it.
• Once
you have done enough reading on your topic, you should begin to get a feel for
the range of positions put forward by different authors, and also a feel for
where you stand on the topic. This next
exercise will help you to go through the process of reading different
positions, making judgments about which ones are most valid, and then deciding
your own position.
The
steps to follow:
(a) Read all the evidence through once before
going on. Then go back and read each
piece in turn, and answer the following questions:
• Is
this piece of evidence relevant to the essay question
• Is
this piece of evidence written by a reputable person or group? )You might still
be able to use evidence which is not as reputable, by criticising it.)
(b) Make notes about how you could use this
piece of evidence: what position is it
taking? is it valid in taking this
position? if it is not valid, what are
the problems with it?
(c) Decide which position you intend to take in
order to respond to the task.
• Finally,
decide how you will structure your ideas and the information you want to use to
support them.
How
can I present and support my position?
MATCHING
EVIDENCE WITH THE DIFFERENT STAGES OF YOUR ARGUMENT
• is there a clear position statement
signalled in your introduction?
• are there clear stages in the body of
your writing where you develop your argument?
• is your evidence relevant? from a reputable source? used in an appropriate way?
What is the difference
between merely summarising the evidence, and using it to substantiate my
position and develop my argument?
• We
have looked at how you can develop an argument through reading critically and
then deciding your position. When you
present your position, it will only be convincing if you use evidence to
support your argument.
• This
is an important step, BUT IT IS NOT
ENOUGH!
• A
persuasive analytical piece of writing must be based on a logical structure which
is your own way of seeing the topic. The
research literature is then used to support your way of seeing the topic. You have to choose those ideas from the
literature that are useful to support your position and show the inadequacies
of other ideas that contradict your position. There is no point at all
in just making a summary of what the various authors have all said.
CHOOSING YOUR FOCUS:SOURCE
OR AUTHOR?
When you refer to a
source, you can focus on the author, or on the ideas in the source. This means that you begin your sentence with
either the author's name or with the actual idea in the source.
Focus information is
the information in front of the main verb of a sentence
Examples of strong
focus on the author:
• Dickson
maintains... (that television violence
has a marked effect on the development of the child)
• Brown
says... (that children who
watch a great deal of televised violence could be affected for many years)If you want to change
to a focus on the source ideas, you could do something like this:
• The
possible long term effect of televised violence on children is noted by Brown…
If all your focus is on
the author, the danger is that you are merely summarising the evidence and not
using it to develop an argument and support your own position.
WHAT ABOUT THE
RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT PIECES OF INFORMATION?
• ⇒ Demonstration:
• You
need to focus the reader on the connections between your pieces of evidence,
and move the reader on to your conclusion.
Finding the
relationships - a strategy
• In
the same short text, the focus relationships are the similarities and
differences between the research studies and the effect of these studies on the
TBT.
• Many
students find these sorts of relationships difficult to identify. Instead they see the evidence simply as a
list of various sources without asking themselves how the ideas in one source
are related to the ideas in other sources.
• In
other words they do not synthesise the information and ideas in their sources.
Exercise:
– Brainstorm:
What are the main points of the virtual team?
– Decide
on your opinion
– Consider
the main points – the good and the bad (the for and against)
To help reach your own point of view on the facts or
ideas:
• read some other points of view on the topic. Who do
you feel is the most convincing?
• look for patterns in the data or references. Where is
the evidence strongest?
• list several different interpretations. What are the
real-life implications of each one? Which ones are likely to be most useful or
beneficial? Which ones have some problems?
Developing
your argument
We have looked for
comparisons and contrasts in the different pieces of evidence. You could simply
summarise these similarities and differences without telling the reader your
own position. What you need to do next
is decide on your own position. Then you can begin to sequence the evidence in
a logical way to develop your argument and support your position. In this next exercise, you will see how
another writer has done this.
• ⇒ Demonstration:
• Let's have a look at how one writer
has organised the above pieces of evidence from the grid to develop an argument
in response to the following task.
What
is the connection between environmental tobacco smoke and asthma?
• (b) how the writer has incorporated and
sequenced the supporting evidence
• (c) the new pieces of evidence the writer has
added, to critique and explain
• (d) how the writer has developed a conclusion from
the main points plus the evidence.
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