Discursive Strategies In Multicultural Business Meetings

Winner of the Association for Business Communication Award for Distinguished Publication on Business Communication. This book explores multiparty, multicultural interaction at international business meetings. It investigates discourse at an Italian company's meetings of its international distributors, conducted mainly in English and attended by participants from different countries in Europe, Asia and North America. Data come from audio recordings of the meetings, normally lasting two to three days, and are supplemented by the author's observations of the meetings. The study uses a series of approaches to analyze selected linguistic and interactional features, presenting an in-depth analysis and discussion of data extracts that draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches. It highlights the way the main company speaker and some of the multilingual participants use discursive strategies to build common ground, to construct a cooperative business relationship or to negotiate or avert conflict. The study questions the role of cultural differences in approaching multicultural, multilingual meetings and argues that organizational roles, the business context and individual differences must also be considered.

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.

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.

This book presents a corpus-based study of the language used in business meetings.

This book approaches the issue of ideology in specialized communication in professional, institutional and disciplinary settings across domains as diverse as law, healthcare, corporate management, migration, NGOs, etc. What unites the contributors is their commitment to a discourse view of language use, i.e., the view that organisational and professional practices are rooted in social, ideological orders, although a variety of perspectives on the exact nature of the relationship between ideology and discourse can be discerned in individual chapters. The acts of interpretation - by participants and analysts alike - are invested in ideology, explicitly or implicitly. This manifest/hidden duality surrounding ideology-in-discourse constitutes the main focus. Challenging the traditional presumption of objectivity, impersonality and non-involvement that has often characterized research on Language for Specific Purposes, this book demonstrates how the specialized communication setting is a critical site where ideology is intrinsically embodied in discursive practices.

This book investigates how participants in German business meetings collaborate to “talk” this speech exchange system into existence. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, the study describes how participants in meetings perform different social roles, specifically, focusing on ways in which the enactment of “doing-being-boss” and “doing-being-employee” depends upon a moment-by-moment collaboration between all participants. In its description of how participants enact these social roles through talk-in-interaction, the book also incorporates systematically embodied actions into the analysis of business meetings. Chapter Two situates this project within existing studies on business meetings, and introduces the research methodology of conversation analysis, while Chapter 3 examines all uses of the particle ok in German business meetings, arguing that certain uses of ok relate to enacting the social role of “doing-being-boss.” Chapter 4 then investigates the practice of how employees produce extended reports about ongoing projects. In discussing the social role of “doing-being-employee,” it compares the practice of story-telling in ordinary conversation to that of producing reports during German business meetings. Moreover, Chapter 5 problematizes the notion of pre-assigned social roles. Using the concept of zones of interactional transition, it discusses instances where employees question the role of the meeting facilitator, chairperson, and boss. In analyzing the interactional fallout in these examples, it offers additional evidence that social roles such as boss represent a social construct which depends on a constant co-construction of this role. Finally, the conclusion situates the study’s findings within the field of institutional talk.

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.

This volume is a collection of eight articles on the general topic of translation. The common element running through them all is the analysis of samples of tourist literature and their translations, from a pragmatic point of view. The languages concerned are mainly English and Spanish, but examples of German and French texts are also included. The theoretical approaches are multifaceted. Relevance theory, systemic-functional linguistics and discourse analysis are some of the theoretical standpoints taken as a background. The book covers phenomena as varied as translation quality assessment, audience design and perlocutionary effects, dealing also with more specific features like thematic structure, inference and propositional meaning, discourse markers and grammatical metaphor in order to provide a wide range of analyses for the specialised reader.