Business Discourse

The Handbook of Business Discourse is the most comprehensive overview of the field to date. It offers an accessible and authoritative introduction to a range of historical, disciplinary, methodological and cultural perspectives on business discourse and addresses many of the pressing issues facing a growing, varied and increasingly international field of research. The collection also illustrates some of the challenges of defining and delimiting a relatively recent and eclectic field of studies, including debates on the very definition of 'business discourse'. Part One includes chapters on the origins, advances and features of business discourse in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Part Two covers methodological approaches such as mediated communication, corpus linguistics, organisational discourse, multimodality, race and management communication, and rhetorical analysis. Part Three moves on to look at disciplinary perspectives such as sociology, pragmatics, gender studies, intercultural communication, linguistic anthropology and business communication. Part Four looks at cultural perspectives across a range of geographical areas including Spain, Brazil, Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam. The concluding section reflects on future developments in Europe, North America and Asia.

This book provides a timely and comprehensive snapshot of the current digital communication practices of today's organisations and workplaces, covering a wide spectrum of communication technologies, such as email, instant messaging, message boards, Twitter, corporate blogs, consumer reviews and mobile communication technologies.

This second edition reviews the field of business discourse, centring on the investigation of business language and communication as practice. It combines research-based discussions with innovative practical applications and promotes debate and enquiry on a range of competing issues, emerging from business discourse research and teaching practice.

This book examines the social organizational discourse of task-oriented business meetings in a Kuwaiti financial organization and an American non-profit trade organisation. Focusing primarily on the linguistic behaviours demonstrating agency and power of managers and staff members displayed during these meetings, the project is based on ethnographic data collected during eight months of fieldwork. The author examines the similarities and differences between the linguistic behaviours of both organizations, particularly relating to the production of collective “we,” “us,” and “our” utterances and directive speech acts issued to explore how managers and co-workers perform agency and power in meetings. This distinctive book will shed light into the influence of language on the actions and relationships of managers and co-workers in business meetings, and will be of interest to applied linguists and discourse analysts in the field of business discourse in addition to business professionals in management and finance.

This second edition reviews the field of business discourse, centring on the investigation of business language and communication as practice. It combines research-based discussions with innovative practical applications and promotes debate and enquiry on a range of competing issues, emerging from business discourse research and teaching practice.

The contributions to this volume together confirm that though context and culture are complex and difficult notions, they are crucial to understanding the professional genres of modern business communication. In today's globalised business environment, professionals of all backgrounds are under pressure to employ new and different discourse standards to allow for smoother production and reception of business documents and dialogues. In this changing environment, the success of any commercial activity will depend on how competently business professionals respond to the cultural sensitivities and preferences of their partners. Taking a variety of approaches to professional genres, including customer complaints, mission statements, international contracts and decision-making meetings, the authors explore complex aspects of both cross-cultural and interpersonal issues in business discourse and suggest practical applications of their analytical findings.

Discourse Perspectives in Organizational Communication brings together researchers from the social sciences and humanities to look at discourse and how it shapes organizations and their social actors. Unlike others in the field, this book assumes that language creates and constitutes reality, rather than simply mirroring or describing it. This collection illustrates the variety of organizational phenomena that might be studied and the range of epistemological and methodological approaches that might be used in discourse analysis techniques.

This book presents research in business discourse and offers pedagogical approaches to teaching business discourse in both classroom and consultancy contexts that address the key issues of dealing with different types of learners, developing teaching materials and evaluation. Drawing on the authors’ extensive experience of researching business discourse from a variety of different perspectives including pragmatics, discourse analysis, rhetoric, and language for specific purposes, it demonstrates how these approaches may be applied to teaching. Each chapter includes a list of additional readings, together with a number of practical tasks designed to help readers apply the materials presented. Case studies are used throughout the book to illustrate the concepts, thus equipping readers with a set of research tools to extend their own understanding of how language and communication operate in business contexts, as well introducing them to a variety of research-based ideas that can be translated easily into a classroom setting. The book is cross-cultural in scope as it includes perspectives from a range of different contexts. It represents a significant advance in current literature and will provide a valuable resource for students and scholars of applied linguistics, business communication, and business discourse, in addition to teachers of Business English.