Chapter 10. Business and Professional Communication Ethics

Chapter 10 is talking about communication ethics literacy in business and professional communication. It seems a lot similar with organizational communication ethics, but it rather deals with more detailed areas such as the issues of written works and spoken tasks. What is significant in this communication ethics is promoting and protecting the good of business, which is ensuring the survival of the company. To survive within the society where lots of changes are made, businesses also have to keep track of these changes and follow them, adhering their traditions at the same time. This sounds pretty hard, but very important point to make sure their survival and competitiveness. The textbook says, "Business and professional communication ethics protects and promotes the good of the unity of direction and change. The union of direction and change protects and promotes the goods of survival and competitiveness."

 

For example, we can see how important the direction and the change is when comparing two well-known cell phone companies, Apple and Samsung.   They have their different culture and their own styles when they release their new phone. While Apple is more focusing on its convenience and simple design, Samsung stresses more on endurance and complexity. Despite the fact that they are adhering their own ways to keep their phones being unique, they also try to keep up with changes in many aspects such as finger scanning, thinness, quality of cameras, and so on. It even seems like they are catching up each other's changes so that they are not behind and do not lose their competitiveness. However, recently, I feel like they are too much imitating each other so that they are losing their own uniqueness. In terms of design and size, Apple was used to be a smaller than Samsung and have a very angular edged shape,  but somehow these traits are gone and now I can't really distinguish between Apple and Samsung seeing in some distance because they look so same.

As this example shows, business should neither only stick to their tradition nor only chase after making changes, but rather, mix these two process to make them be better.