Eric Littleton is the president of Bald College, a small, private, residential school in the South that is heavily dependent upon tuition revenue. Due to a drop in the number of incoming stu- dents, Bald had to reduce costs. Littleton called an all-employee meeting to announce that department budgets would be cut and that some employees would be laid off. He delivered this message to faculty and staff while wearing workout clothes—a T-shirt, Bald College sweatshirt, and running pants. At the end of the meeting he declined to take questions. Instead he told the crowd that he was headed over to the athletic complex to run with the college’s highly successful men’s basketball team. A number of employees were upset with the way the president handled this important announcement. What do you think?

Margaret Gates is the superintendent of schools in the Elmwood Hills school district. Elm- wood Hills is an affluent community located in the suburbs of a large metropolitan area. The schools in the Elmwood Hills district have an excellent reputation, and many parents choose to

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8 Chapter One

would suggest that a conversation actually “begins” with the experiences, skills, feelings, and other characteristics that individuals bring to an interaction.

is not linear, it is circular. Models depicting the process of communication have evolved from a linear explanation, first developed by ancient Greek rhetoricians over 2,000 years ago, to a circular explanation, offered by Barnlund. In the earliest description of the communication process, a source transmitted a message to a receiver in much the same way that an archer shoots an arrow into a target. Only the source had an active role in this model; the receiver merely accepted messages. This view, known as an action model, is diagrammed below.

The action model provided an incomplete depiction of the communication process because the response of the receiver was ignored. Reactions to mes- sages, known as feedback, were included in the next explanation of communica- tion—the interaction model. The interaction model described communication as a process of sending messages back and forth from sources to receivers and receivers to sources. From this perspective, diagrammed at the top of p. 9, com- munication resembles a game of tennis.

An Action Model of

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