This volume brings together a number of wide-ranging, transdisciplinary research articles on the interface between discourse studies and economics. It explores in what way economics can contribute to the analysis of discursive practices in various institutional settings as well as investigating what role discourse studies can play in economic research. The contributors are linguists, communication scholars, economists and other social scientists drawing on various traditions including Critical Discourse Analysis, Cognitive Linguistics, ethnography and the literature on the rhetoric of economics and on economic storytelling. All articles are essentially empirical, focusing on the details of actual language use. The type of data analysed ranges from the minutes of university policy meetings and large-scale corpora of newspaper language, over books of economic theory from both well-respected economists and monetary cranks, to cartoons from The Economist.

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the German economy. Against the background of continuing globalisation, they are increasingly faced with the challenge of internationalisation. This study was designed as an empirical investigation of how well SMEs in the federal state of Saxony are prepared for this task of the future, which measures they take in order to market their products and services in the global marketplace, and it tries to identify their strengths and weaknesses in this respect. The very nature of this thesis is thus a truly interdisciplinary approach, investigating marketing aspects as well as linguistic factors. The main focus was on the language small and medium-sized companies use for their international communications. English has long become the lingua franca of the globalising economy, and this study set out to investigate how well SMEs are prepared to meet the linguistic requirements imposed on them by global business. Enterprises in the new German states are widely believed to be disadvantaged with regard to their communicative competence in English, since English played only a minor role for decades, but has risen to decisive significance within the past couple of years, taking many companies and their employees by surprise, finding them not as well prepared as their colleagues in the old German states. Still, finding their way to the new export markets in Western Europe, the Americas and Asia are vital for the survival of Saxon economy, and communicative competence in English as the lingua franca of international business is the major prerequisite for achieving this objective. Corporate communicative competence involves various aspects, including the foreign language skills of the employees covering the entire range of linguistic skills from oral communication including listening and speaking, giving presentations or participating in negotiations to writing skills ranging from reading and writing of various text types, including media literacy. Apart from the personal linguistic competence of the employees, the corporate linguistic competence of the company also plays a major role for the perception of the company on its international markets. Therefore this study focused on investigating how well SMEs present themselves in their corporate literature and on the internet, which instruments from the wide-ranging selection of marketing tools hey apply for communicating [...]

By bridging the gap between linguistics and economics, this book sheds light on a range of mutually valuable topics.

This volume articulates a new framework for language policy research that explores the connections between language policy and political economy. The chapters are united in their focus on English, a language that has enjoyed a reputation as a "global language" over the course of the last century and that is perceived as a tool for socioeconomic mobility. The book argues that adopting a new, political economic approach to language policy research will enhance our ability to provide more consistent explanations about the status, functions, benefits, and limitations of English in its various roles in non-English dominant countries. The book poses the questions: Does English serve as a "lingua franca" and does it advance the interests of sustainable economic and social development in low-income countries? Written by leading experts in language policy research, the chapters reveal the myriad and complex ways in which government leaders, policymakers, and communities make decisions about the languages that will be taught as subjects or used as media of instruction in schools. English is often advertised as a social "good" with unquestioned instrumental value, yet access to quality English-medium education in low-income countries tends to be restricted to those with sufficient economic means to pay for it. As the capitalist world economy continues to change and grow, and assuming that translation technologies continue to improve, it is likely that the roles and relative importance of English as a global language will change significantly. Assessing the costs and benefits of acquiring English therefore takes on increased urgency. The book argues that a political economic approach is particularly appropriate in this endeavor, as it takes into account theories and empirical findings from a range of disciplines in order to assess and explain real-world phenomena that do not fit neatly into boxes labeled "economic," "social," "political" or "cultural." Together, the chapters in this volume argue for a new direction in language policy studies-grounded in political economy -- that will explain why English has been experienced as both a blessing and curse in different parts of the world, why English continues to be useful as a lingua franca for particular sectors of the global economy, and why it is a detriment to economic development in many low-income countries. The book will be invaluable to language policy scholars, policy-makers, and educators, significantly advancing research in this important field.

In the global economy, linguistic diversity influences economic and political development as well as public policies in positive and negative ways. It leads to financial costs, communication barriers, divisions in national unity, and, in some extreme cases, conflicts and war--but it also produces benefits related to group and individual identity. What are the specific advantages and disadvantages of linguistic diversity and how does it influence social and economic progress? This book examines linguistic diversity as a global social phenomenon and considers what degree of linguistic variety might result in the greatest economic good. Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber look at linguistic proximity between groups and between languages. They describe and use simple economic, linguistic, and statistical tools to measure diversity's impact on growth, development, trade, the quality of institutions, translation issues, voting patterns in multinational competitions, and the likelihood and intensity of civil conflicts. They address the choosing of core languages in a multilingual community, such as the European Union, and argue that although too many official languages might harm cohesiveness, efficiency, and communication, reducing their number brings about alienation and disenfranchisement of groups. Demonstrating that the value and drawbacks of linguistic diversity are universal, How Many Languages Do We Need? suggests ways for designing appropriate linguistic policies for today's multilingual world.

This handbook combines the perspectives of communication studies, economics and management, and psychology in order to provide a comprehensive economic view on personal and mass communication. It is divided into six parts that comprise: 1. an overarching introduction that defines the field and provides a brief overview of its history (1 chapter) 2. the most commonly used theoretic frameworks for the analysis of communication economics and management (4 chapters) 3. the peculiarities of the quantitative and qualitative methods and data used in the field (3 chapters) 4. key issues of the field such as the economics of language, labor in creative industries, media concentration, branding etc. (10 chapters) 5. descriptions of the development, trends and peculiarities of the field in different parts of the world, written by scholars from the respective region (10 chapters) 6. reflections on future directions for the field, both from a managerial and from an economics perspective (1 chapter). The authors of the individual chapters represent different academic disciplines, research traditions, and geographic backgrounds. The reader will thus gain multifaceted insights into the management and economics of communication.

This collection brings together established and emerging scholars in communication studies to examine the relationship between communication and the economy in contemporary society. Through concrete case studies and theoretically informed essays, the chapters explore a range of important disciplinary topics - from the rhetoric of economics to the role of language in mediating financial crises.

This volume brings together contributions concerning the relationship between languages and the economy. Paying particular attention to the topic of “names in the economy” this collection opens this relationship to further fields of interest for the study of the role of language (and linguistics) in the economy and that of the economy in the development of languages.

Market forces are widely acknowledged to be at the heart of globalizing forces, and any consideration of how globalization affects language and vice versa requires an in-depth examination of the relationship between languages and markets. Despite this, the disciplines of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics have an uneasy relationship with markets. The hegemony of market processes and their negative outcomes has, it could be argued, become a commonsense assumption in the academic treatment of the subject. The aim of the current volume is to challenge this assumption. The book takes the market as its common starting point, and examines, in a large number of individual contributions, the sociolinguistic inputs and fall-out from market processes, using a variety of different methodological approaches and various contexts and case studies. These cases range from a call centre in India to an industrial development agency in the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht, with genres ranging from Sámi rap music to corporate mission statements. The book is intentionally interdisciplinary, including perspectives from management and economics, media and communications studies, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnography, and cultural studies.