The case study I found to be the most interesting was "Moving up." In this story Jim, a recent college grad, started working a local law firm. Jim is originally from a blue collar family that worked extremely hard to get a dinner on the table every night. He is the only person in the family to attend college and graduate, known as the "brains" of the family. His father always wanted him to come back to take over the shop, but Jim felt like he would be letting down his family. Jim had been spending endless hours at the law firm showing his coworkers and bosses that he is worthy. He makes sure to be the first one to work and the last one to leave the office. He takes cases home to read over and over, to make sure he is not miss a single detail. He gets up early every morning to run and have enough time to allow himself planning time on what needs to get done that day. Quickly approaching was the big meeting with the bosses, so they could tell Jim what they thought of him and his performance at the law firm. Jim was confident he had taken all the right steps to make this evaluation go smoothly. He thought he had created amazing relationships with his coworkers and impressed the bosses with his work ethic. Jim did his same routine the morning of the meeting, work up early, ran, relaxed and thought about his duties of the day. That morning he has a strong sense of self, because he has been working hard. He sees his relationship with his coworkers and bosses being driven by that strong sense of wanting to be a good attorney. His understanding of what is going on is that he is doing a good job creating relationships in the company because he drives to be a good attorney for them. All of this confidence changed after that meeting. At the beginning it went great. Marc, his boss, complimented Jim on his work ethic and the dedication he showed towards the law firm, but there is a miss alignment between Marc’s nonverbal and verbal. In the beginning he tells Jim how awesome he is and how he is doing a great job for the firm, then seems to change his approach and his gestures. He uneasily says how Jim is a problem for the company because he is not professional enough. Marc says the way he dresses, his language, his car, and his friends are not the way the company accepts. Jim has to change a lot about himself to fit in better with the image of a young attorney the company wants. Jim needs to fix a verbal side of himself with the type of language he uses and whom he creates a relationship with. His appearance is a huge nonverbal that needs to be fixed because people judge you on what you look like and how you present yourself. That is the same with his car, having a fancy car is a type of status appearance, and people will judge you based on your car. The first thing I think about a law firm is wealth. So naturally if a law firm has a bunch of broken and old cars in the parking lot the clients will question the success of the law firm. The same thing will happen with the appearance in the law firm. Marc wants his employees to set off the impression that they are a successful and powerful business. That money is not a problem for any employee because they work hard to support their life style. Communication perspective is where we look at all human experience through the lens of what was made and how it was made in communication. We apply this with the question of how are relationships made in human interaction. If we look at the communication perspective of Marc vs. Jim they are very different. Marc is making decisions that will have a positive affect on his business and what he believes the standards are to work in a law firm. While Jim is doing things to impress the bosses, but doing it in the way that he knows how coming from a blue collared family. This causes Jim to have to force himself into a communication and self change. He needs to save his money more towards a new car rather than a trip with his friends. He needs to spend more money on clothes rather than gas money. He also needs to make friends with certain people so he does not become an
