Introduction: How to Use This Book With Your Placement Course
This book is the text (combined with a few articles here and there) for your placement course. You will use it each week alongside your placement and our in-class sessions. Treat it as a field guide you can apply immediately.
Four lenses provide the theoretical framework for the course:
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Structuration Theory helps us see structure and agency as intertwined. Structures are rules and resources that guide action. Agency is what people do. People create structure, are bound by structure, and change structure. Your communication and soft skills are the means by which you align with or reshape structures. Your mindset directs what you see as possible.
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Communication as Constitutive is a theory that suggests we create our reality through all of the forms by which we communicate. CCO theory is rooted in this and explains how organizations are made in talk, text, and tools. When communication changes, the organization changes.
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Self-Determination Theory (SDT) gives you a standard for “good”. This long standing psychological theory finds that people thrive when autonomy, competence, and relatedness are supported. These needs are enacted through communication and action. Research has found that organizations that support these needs thrive. You wants your SDT needs met and so does everyone around you. Be aware of this for yourself and for what you can give to others.
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Experiential Learning turns action into knowledge and skills. Experiential learning values technical skills but also soft skills, emotions, relations and place. A growth mindset converts friction into opportunity, not failure.
This reader tracks the syllabus:
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Weeks 1–6: Foundations. Build an ethnographer’s stance, map visible rules and hidden norms, set goals, and examine how technologies, including generative AI, mediate communication and identity.
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Weeks 7–12: Working with others. Trust, culture, teamwork, conflict, feedback, and power are communicative practices. You will observe, gather evidence, and review effects.
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Weeks 13–18: Professional identity and career story. Celebrate your story, find your strengths, and create artifacts that express values, capability, and fit across résumé, LinkedIn, and STAR stories.
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Weeks 19–24: Career design, search, and exit. Apply design thinking to the hidden job market, plan a professional exit, and integrate learning in a final reflection.
Throughout, you act as an ethnographer of your placement, the world of work, and your life course. Observe interactions and events, track soft-skill patterns, note mindset cues, keep fieldnotes, collect artifacts, map structures, and test low-risk changes as you reflect on your positionality as an emerging professional.
How to use each chapter:
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Read before class and note one question.
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Observe at your site and collect one thought.
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Try one small communicative move.
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Capture evidence and write a brief reflection that names a transferable insight.
The promise is practical. Read structures well, cultivate a learning mindset, and treat communication and soft skills as your instrument. You can align where wise, challenge where needed, and grow in professional judgment, leadership, and career clarity. Your placement is the lab. Your experiential practice starts now.