Reflections on the Ins and Outs of Business and Professional Discourse Research

Abstract

This book presents a collection of original chapters focusing on what, for lack of a more precise term, we have come to call the "INs and OUTs" of business and professional discourse research. Put simply, this means that we zoom in on the two extreme ends of the scholarly process investigating written, oral, non-verbal and digital communication in business and professional settings. On the one hand, the volume includes a number of chapters that deal with issues of gaining access to and collecting data, and addresses questions like: how can we convince practitioners to let us observe, record, interview, survey? What counts as data? How much data do we need? What shape and form can the data take? How does our research interfere with the professional practices we study? On the other hand, there are a number of chapters that look at issues of feeding results back in the form of recommendations to practitioners. Questions here include: how can professional discourse research be applied to help shape practice? How do we translate our methods and concepts for the communities that we investigate, including industry, government and non-profit organizations? In this introduction, we set out to provide a concise "state of the art" account of the field of business and professional discourse research as this is relevant to the agenda of the book, as well as explaining the significance and contribution of this book to the field. Next, we hope to detail how the notions of IN and OUT that are pivotal to this volume are conceived here, and in what ways they can be seen as relevant to the broader methodological debates and literature in the field. Finally, we will try to illustrate how the chapters, individually and as a set, contribute to addressing these issues.

Public Speeches Of Royal Family Members: Political Or Journalistic Discourse?

“…There are at least four terminological word-combinations which are often referred to such kind of discourse, namely, "institutional discourse' proper, "professional discourse" (Graf et al, 2014;Gunnarsson, 2009;Gunnarsson et al, 1999;Irimiea, 2017), "business discourse" (Shiryaeva, 2011), "special", or "expert discourse" (Gavrilenko, 2016). Some scientists, as Alessi and Jacobs (2016), differentiate even between professional and business types of discourses at least in presenting them as simultaneous attributes of the noun 'discourse" without showing their distinctive features throughout the whole article.…”

Language Awareness and Discourse Consciousness in Contemporary Life and Work

“…The second proposed step is the demonstration of the relevance of linguistics and language-oriented discourse analysis in other disciplines in research, teaching and professional practice. A recent increase in scholarship exploring organisational and professional realities through the language lens, for example, provides strong evidence of the utility of such convergence: from edited volumes showcasing the impact of linguistic and discourse analytic research (Alessi and Jacobs, 2016;Mautner and Reiner, 2017;Mullany, 2020) to handbooks that feature accounts from different professions on the use of applied linguistics (Bhatia and Bremner, 2014;Vine, 2018) and discourse analytic work on specific areas within organisation studies such as management (e.g. Greatbatch and Clark, 2005) or leadership (Clifton, Schnurr and van de Mieroop, 2020), to mention only a few.…”

Language Awareness in Business and the Professions

“…The second proposed step is the demonstration of the relevance of linguistics and language-oriented discourse analysis in other disciplines in research, teaching and professional practice. A recent increase in scholarship exploring organisational and professional realities through the language lens, for example, provides strong evidence of the utility of such convergence: from edited volumes showcasing the impact of linguistic and discourse analytic research (Alessi and Jacobs, 2016;Mautner and Reiner, 2017;Mullany, 2020) to handbooks that feature accounts from different professions on the use of applied linguistics (Bhatia and Bremner, 2014;Vine, 2018) and discourse analytic work on specific areas within organisation studies such as management (e.g. Greatbatch and Clark, 2005) or leadership (Clifton, Schnurr and van de Mieroop, 2020), to mention only a few.…”