The area expertise represented on the panel is extraordinary broad, and includes Argentina, Australia, Canada, European Union, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, South Africa and the United States. Speakers in the morning session will consider the direction of the field of organizational communication and speakers in the afternoon session will discuss strategies for making sense of the dissertation process and of life beyond graduate school. Recent organizational communication Ph.D. graduates will act as discussion leaders whose recent experiences will serve as a sounding board for consortium participants. For an important part, the study of how individuals communicate with each other has become the study of the mental machinery by which people code, select, infer and explain the world around them. Within the traditions of conversation and discourse analysis, the role of mental concepts in the explanation of interactant's practices is at least ambiguous.
Some researchers draw upon mental states as part of their analytic equipment.
Others researchers explore the mentalistic implications of alternative analytic discourses. Still others have pointed to the difficulties which araise from the use of cognitive concepts such as intentions, attitudes, scripts and plans. Rather than as a starting point, they consider the attribution of a particular mental state as a potential issue of negotiation for the participants. They maintain that it is wrong to transform practical matters into psychological phenomena. In this preconference, we want to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches to discourse and cognition.