Small Group Communication:  A Bona Fide Group Perspective 

This book uses the Bona Fide Group Perspective (BFGP) to broaden students’ understanding of small group communication. While developed in the 1990s by Linda Putnam and Cynthia Stohl, the perspective remains relevant and, as you will see, many scholars use the theory as the basis for their current research. The BFGP encourages students and scholars to look outside the group as much as they look inside the group to understand how groups function. In fact, the boundary between the group and its environment is permeable, acknowledging that individuals and information flow back and forth. This unique perspective offers students a new way to look at groups and facilitates their participation in different kinds of groups outside of the classroom.

This book was adapted from Small Group Communication: Forming & Sustaining Teams, which is an interdisciplinary textbook focused on communication in groups and teams. This textbook aims to provide students with theories, concepts, and skills they can put into practice to form and sustain successful groups across a variety of contexts.

About the Original CONTRIBUTORS

• Editor:
  • Jasmine R. Linabary, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of communication at Emporia State University. Her research focuses on organizing, new media, and social change. She teaches classes on topics like small group communication, group leadership, communication and emerging technology, ethics, and public speaking, among others. She is also the co-founder and director of the EAT Initiative, an interdisciplinary and collaborative effort to combat food insecurity.
• Contributor:
  • Moon Castro is a McNair Scholar and a senior communication major at Emporia State University. His research interests include peacebuilding, social change, and emerging technology. Castro is a past winner of the Community Impact Challenge, a grant competition in which teams of students identify creative and meaningful solutions to challenges facing the campus or local community.

Acknowledgments

This version of the open education (OER) project was made possible by the University of Arkansas OER Course Materials Conversion Program.

This open education resource (OER) project was made possible by a Class Resource Affordability Initiative Grant (CRAIG) from Emporia State University. Special thanks to Dr. Cameron Piercy for his contributions and insights. Also thanks to ESU librarian Bethanie O’Dell for her support for this project.

Copyright Information

Content in this textbook is adapted and remixed from a variety of open educational resources including those from OpenStax, University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing, The Noba Project, and Wikibooks, among others. Portions of this text were also adapted from Problem Solving in Teams and Groups by Piercy. Each chapter contains attribution information and has its own Creative Commons (CC) license at the end of the chapter under the heading “Author & Attribution.”

This adaptation has reformatted original text, replaced or removed some images and figures, condensed content, and combined related materials but has otherwise not significantly altered the content from the attributed sources. This textbook as a whole is made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license unless otherwise specified in the individual chapter.

For questions or revisions related to this version of the book, please contact Dr. Kasey L. Walker (klwalker@uark.edu).

For questions or revisions related to the original version of the book, please contact Dr. Linabary (jlinabar@emporia.edu).