George E. Cheney is a Professor of Communication at the University of Utah

University of Utah

The University of Utah, also known as the U or the U of U, is a public, coeducational research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest...

, Salt Lake City, Utah

Utah

Utah is a state in the Western United States. It was the 45th state to join the Union, on January 4, 1896. Approximately 80% of Utah's 2,763,885 people live along the Wasatch Front, centering on Salt Lake City. This leaves vast expanses of the state nearly uninhabited, making the population the...

. His research has involved the development of a number of new multidisciplinary

Multidisciplinarity

Multidisciplinarity is a non-integrative mixture of disciplines in that each discipline retains its methodologies and assumptions without change or development from other disciplines within the multidisciplinary relationship....

 approaches to the analysis of communication

Communication

Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...

. In particular he has looked at issues of identity, power, resistance, ethics, peace, and globalization

Globalization

Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...

.(Cheney, 1983a, 1983b, 1995, 1998, 2009; Cheney & Tompkins, 1987; Cheney & Frenette, 1993; Baker & Cheney, 1994; Ganesh, Zoller, & Cheney, 2005). Cheney’s research, is distinctive in that his focus is on collective or group epistemological practices rather than the more traditional focus on the individual. Cheney's approach allows the study of collective political efforts of resistance movements

Resistance movement

A resistance movement is a group or collection of individual groups, dedicated to opposing an invader in an occupied country or the government of a sovereign state. It may seek to achieve its objects through either the use of nonviolent resistance or the use of armed force...

, processes of socialization

Socialization

Socialization is a term used by sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists and educationalists to refer to the process of inheriting and disseminating norms, customs and ideologies...

, and other communicative behaviors. And shows how they emerge through group interaction.

Education
Cheney to a B.A., Psychology, from Youngstown State University

Youngstown State University

Youngstown State University, founded in 1908, is an urban research university located in Youngstown, Ohio, United States. As of fall 2010, there were 15,194 students and a student-faculty ratio of 19:1. It is recognized as being one of the premier schools in the country, comparable to Ivy League...

 (Ohio

Ohio

Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...

) in 1980, an MA in Communication (1982) and Ph.D Communication from Purdue University

Purdue University

Purdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...

in 1985.

Selected publications
Books

• Cheney, G. (1991). Rhetoric in an organizational society: Managing multiple identities. University of South Carolina Press.
• Cheney, G. (1999). Values at work: Employee participation meets market pressure at Mondragon. Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University Press.

Articles

• Barker, J., & Cheney, G. (1994). The concept and the practices of discipline in contemporary organizational life. Communication Monographs, Vol 61, 19-40.
• Cheney, G. (1983a). On the various and changing meanings of organizational membership: A field study of organizational identification. Communication Monographs, Vol 50, 342-362.
• Cheney, G. (1983b). The rhetoric of identification and the study of organizational communication. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 69, 143-158.
• Cheney, G. (1995). Democracy in the workplace: Theory and practice from the perspective of communication. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 23, 167-200.
• Cheney, G. (1998). Values at work: Employee participation meets market pressure at Mondragon. Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Cheney, G., & Frenette, G. (1993). Persuasion and organizations: Values, logics, and accounts in contemporary corporate public discourse. In C. Conrad (Ed.), The ethical nexus (pp. 49–74). Norwood, NJ: Albex.
• Cheney, G., & McMillan, J. (1990). Organizational rhetoric and the practice of criticism. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 18, 2, 93-114.
• Ganesh, S., Zoller, H., & Cheney, G. (2005). Transforming resistance, broadening our boundaries: Critical organizational communication meets globalization from below. Communication Monographs, Vol 72, 2, 169-191.