This edited book engages with the richly interdisciplinary field of business and professional communication, aiming to reconcile the prescriptive ambitions of the US-centred business communication tradition with the more descriptive approach favoured in discourse studies and applied linguistics. A follow-up to the award-winning book The Ins and Outs of Business and Professional Discourse Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), this volume brings together scholars and their recent work from wide-ranging business and professional settings to engage with the question of what counts as good data. The authors focus on four key themes - authenticity, triangulation, background and relevance - to shine a light on business and professional discourse as essential contextual and intertextual. This book will be of interest to scholars working in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and business communication, but also other social scientists interested in a range of perspectives on oral, written and digital language use in workplace settings.

This book provides a unique orientation to the present, past, and future of the field of business communication by collecting reflective essays from some of its most influential scholars, teachers, and leaders. Through a series of essays that bridge personal narrative and critical analysis, this book mentors a new generation of students, teachers, and professionals as they encounter the challenges and opportunities of business communication and shape the future of the field. The authors—all influential figures and award winners—describe their personal histories with the field and discuss how major aspects have evolved over time. The essays examine the pathways through which scholars encounter the discipline, the professional challenges they face, the evolving content of the business communication curriculum, the development of business communication programs and institutions, the value of an entrepreneurial mindset for career development, and the relationships between research, teaching, and professional practice. They offer stories about a diversity of paths for achieving personal and professional success and invite readers to think about what lessons they can apply to their own career advancement and satisfaction. In total, this collection provides both a living history of the field and a series of real-world examples of business communication at its finest. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of business communication and can be used as a supplemental text for courses in business communication, professional communication, and communication career preparation.

This book showcases various methodological approaches to the analysis of organizational talk and text. Arguing that organizations are discursive constructions that are communicatively constituted, the authors use the analysis of transcripts of audio-recordings of naturally-occurring workplace talk and authentic written texts to demonstrate what applied linguistics has to offer to scholarly research into organizations as well as management practice and training. The authors discuss the theoretical underpinnings of discursive approaches to the role language in the communicative constitution of organization, and then each chapter focuses on one particular analytical approach. The chapters cover conversation analysis; membership categorization analysis, positioning theory; ventriloquism; metaphor analysis; and metadiscourse analysis and computer-mediated discourse analysis. Consequently, this interdisciplinary work presents a number of methods that allow researchers unfamiliar with fine-grained linguistic analyses of naturally-occurring talk and text to explore ways of adding to their repertoire of research skills.

Stancetaking is inherent in verbal communication, as it is connected with the expression of subjectivity and the construction of intersubjectivity in discourse. This book presents theoretical findings in this field and their practical implications, exploring the variations in time and space of meaning negotiation processes in a large variety of communicative forms, including political and judicial discourse, journalism, fiction, private letters, informal conversations, and school debates. Some articles refer to events with a strong impact on social and political life, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or Ceaușescu’s trial. The volume’s approach is mainly pragma-rhetoric and interactional, but also interdisciplinary, promoting dialogue between stance researchers in different fields. There is a specific focus on possible applications of some key findings of stance research in improving inter-ethnic communication and the teaching of foreign languages, as well as students’ communicative abilities.

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.

Winner of the Association for Business Communication’s Distinguished Publication on Business Communication Award 2016 This edited volume offers a collection of original chapters focusing on the Ins and Outs of professional discourse research. Drawing on insights from LSP, ethnography and discourse analysis, it covers a wide range of issues, ranging from gaining access and collecting data to feeding results back in the form of recommendations to practitioners.

This book examines how discourse analysts could best disseminate their research findings in real world settings. Each chapter presents a study of spoken or written discourse with authors putting forward a plan for how to engage professional practice in their work, using this volume's Framework for Application.

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 explores the concept of intercultural competence, focusing specifically on education. Intercultural competence can vary depending on the field of research or the context of application and has therefore developed over recent decades. As the world becomes increasingly global intercultural competence has become even more important but it is still not practiced satisfactorily. This book highlights views which are at odds with official and orthodox positions on intercultural competence to encourage fresh approaches to intercultural competence. It will be invaluable for researchers, practitioners and students interested in the global possibilities of education.

This book explores the structure and use of academic and professional discourse through the lens of corpus linguistics. The goal of this book is to show how insights from corpus linguistic analyses can help us better understand how we use academic and professional language and help us find ways to better train newcomers to the genres used in various professional contexts. The contributions to this book show that specialized corpora of specific genres from a variety of fields allow us to make more relevant observations about the function and use of language for particular purposes. The specialized corpora examined include written and spoken academic genres, written and spoken business and legal genres, and written philanthropic genres. The book showcases a variety of approaches to analyzing the discourse of specialized corpora, and each chapter concludes with a reflection on the practical and pedagogical implications of the analysis.