Corporate Discourse

Corporate discourse examines business communication practices from a discourse perspective, looking in detail at the ways in which corporations around the world communicate with individuals, with other collective entities and with the world at large. It is concerned with understanding how language works in business contexts and how corporate identity and personal and professional relationships are configured through discourse. Using a range of analytical techniques to examine different forms of textual evidence from companies operating in many sectors, this book maps out current developments in corporate discourse against the complex background of globalization.

Discurso corporativo examina las prácticas de comunicación de negocios desde la perspectiva del discurso, mirar en detalle la forma en que las empresas de todo el mundo se comunican con las personas, con otras entidades, colectivos y con el mundo en general. Tiene que ver con la comprensión de cómo funciona el lenguaje en contextos de negocios y cómo la identidad corporativa y de relaciones personales y profesionales se configuran a través del discurso. Usando una variedad de técnicas analíticas para examinar las diferentes formas de evidencia textual de las empresas que operan en varios sectores, este libro traza la evolución actual de discurso corporativo contra el complejo contexto de la globalización.

Ethics. Whether explicit or implicit, it plays a key role in our lives, guiding our decisions and shaping our view of what the world – including the world of business – is or ought to be like. This volume provides a thorough description of the language that is used to encode ethics, to deal with ethical issues, and to express ethical values in business and professional discourses. It explores the relationship between ethics and ethos in a variety of professional and corporate texts and genres, and investigates the role and positioning of ethics in today’s cultural environment, shedding light on how it is negotiated vis-à-vis other values in the pursuit of business and professional goals. Thanks to its rigorous linguistic approach, the analysis fills a significant gap in the burgeoning scholarship on ethics in discourse, laying the ground for a better understanding of what ethical pronouncements do, linguistically and pragmatically.

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 new study reconciles cognitive metaphor theory with Critical Discourse Analysis to offer a fresh approach to the study of metaphor. In applying this framework to a substantial corpus of texts from business magazines, the author shows how metaphors of war, sports and evolutionary struggle are used to construct business as a masculinized social domain. In view of the subtle but pervasive socio-cognitive impact of these metaphors, the study raises the question of possible alternatives and the scope for change in business media discourse.

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 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.