Business Discourse

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, Catherine Nickerson, B. Planken

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137024930
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

Part I
The Field of Business Discourse

1

What is Business Discourse?

This chapter will:

•Define business discourse as it will be referred to in the rest of this book;

•Provide a brief overview of the historical development of business discourse with a number of landmark studies;

•Discuss the hallmarks of business discourse research including the types of data investigated;

•Provide details of the most important approaches that have been taken in business discourse research;

•Give a geographical and disciplinary overview of how business discourse has evolved around the world together with profiles of a number of prominent researchers.

1.1 What is business discourse?

Business discourse is all about how people communicate using talk or writing in commercial organizations in order to get their work done. In this book we will view business discourse as social action in business contexts. We will discuss the work of researchers (and practitioners) primarily interested in the investigation of spoken and written communication in general and language in particular in business settings, most often in corporate settings. We will be looking at (a) what business discourse research has told us about how people in business organizations achieve their organizational and personal goals using language, (b) how the findings of that research have been applied in teaching and training materials, and (c) how to go about doing business discourse research.

Business organizations and the types of communication used within them are complex entities. Many different factors can contribute to the ways in which business people use language in order to carry out their work. As we will see in the next section in this chapter, researchers interested in business discourse have referred to a number of approaches and disciplines in their investigation of language at work, such as genre theory, discourse analysis, organizational communication and applied linguistics. This cross-disciplinarity has led to a number of different ways of thinking about business language and the different contextual variables that can be of influence in how people talk and write at work. We will discuss many of these ideas in this chapter and the next, and then go on to look at their applications in Parts 2 and 3 of this book.

The variety of definitions, approaches and methodologies that make business discourse an ‘interdisciplinary space’ is illustrated in the Handbook of Business Discourse (Bargiela-Chiappini, 2009). The contributions represent two current debates in the social sciences that are relevant in understanding the identity of business discourse: that of discourse versus communication, as well as specifically, what constitutes business discourse versus business communication (see Concept Box 1.1). The popularity of discourse (analysis) in the social sciences is undisputed. Scholars studying institutions and organizations, including business organizations, claim that ‘discourse is very popular because it is somewhat better than other approaches for understanding organizations’ (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2011: 1123). These are some of the reasons given for this focus on discourse and discourse analysis: (1) the emphasis on the communicative character of human interaction; (2) the analytical focus on mundane, observable communicative activities; (3) the empirical nature of the analysis; (4) the view of organization as emergent from the performance of (power-ful) acts. In other words, discourse analysis allows the researcher to understand the relationship between human beings and the organizations they create. And in addition, bringing the two traditions of business discourse and organizational discourse together affords access to an extensive range of epistemological and methodological choices, resulting in a deeper understanding of a wider range of organizational phenomena (Aritz and Walker, 2011).

As we will see in the chapters that follow, discourse analysis, in all its diverse forms, has been successful at engaging with multiple aspects of business discourse.

Concept 1.1 Business discourse and business communication

Business discourse (BD) and business communication (BC) are complementary disciplines which often overlap. Louhiala-Salminen (2009), for instance, concludes that it is largely a question of degree rather than of actual difference; whereas BD may be more textual in approach, BC may be more contextual. As a result, where a project falls on the BD/BC cline ‘is often a matter for the researchers to decide’ (2009: 305).

(Adapted from Nickerson, 2013)

1.2 A short history of business discourse

Business discourse has been influenced by a number of different approaches and disciplines including discourse analysis, conversation analysis, the pragmatics of interaction, ethnography, genre theory and organizational communication. We will return to many of these and the way that they have been used in Part 3, when we talk about doing business discourse research. An additional characteristic of business discourse research is that many of those researchers involved in the investigation of business discourse are also active in teaching. This has meant that applied linguistics in general, and LSP (Language for Specific Purposes) and ESP (English for Specific Purposes) in particular, have also been influential, especially outside of the North American context where many of those involved with business discourse research are teachers of English or other languages for specific business purposes (for overviews, see: Candlin and Crichton, 2011a and Swales, 2000; see also the volume on LSP by Gollin and Hall, 2006). The evolution of professional communication as a field that ‘straddles two domains of study: applied linguistics and studies in professional and organizational communication’ (Sarangi & Candlin, 2011: 3) is well-documented in the Handbook of Communication in Organisations and Professions (Candlin & Sarangi, 2011), which includes numerous empirical studies carried out in legal, health and corporate settings.

In addition, business discourse research shares some of the same concerns as the North American business communication tradition, although unlike business communication, business discourse research does not generally claim a vocational focus. A number of the researchers we will profile later in this volume have been influenced by and influential on both business discourse and business communication through their involvement with the Association for Business Communication and the Business Communication Quarterly (e.g. Gina Poncini, Priscilla Rogers, Linda Beamer). The conversation between the two fields is clearly likely to continue; as Mirjaliisa Charles (see Profile 1.1) concludes: ‘Increasingly, business discourse is being referred to as business communication. How does that affect our disciplinary status? However named, I hope that business discourse researchers will continue to be the practically oriented, applied scholars that we, to date, take pride in being’ (Charles, 2009: 461–2)

In this section, we will present a short historical overview of the development of the field of business discourse from the late 1980s onwards, referring to a number of landmark studies to do so.

Concept 1.2 Applied linguistics, LSP, ESP and business discourse

Applied linguistics is concerned with how people learn languages, what it means to speak or write a language effectively, and how people might learn to speak or write languages more easily. One important branch that developed within applied linguistics in the 1980s is the investigation of Language for Specific Purposes or often more narrowly, English for Specific Purposes, where researchers are particularly interested in how language is used in a specific social context, such as in an academic setting, in the doctor’s surgery or in a business organization. Many of the methodologies associated initially with LSP/ESP research, such as needs analysis surveys, genre analysis and close text analysis, have also been used in investigating business discourse. Unlike LSP/ESP research, however, business discourse is less motivated by pedagogical concerns and more with a concern with understanding how people communicate strategically in an organizational context.

There is now also an established cadre of organizational and professional communication scholars who do not have much to do with either LSP or ESP directly, e.g. Britt-Louise Gunnarsson, Srikant Sarangi, Celia Roberts, Rick Iedema (see Profile 2.3), etc. Their work has, and will continue to be of influence on business discourse research. One scholar, however, who has made a sustained and distinctive contribution to both LSP and discourse scholarship in the last four decades, is Christopher Candlin (e.g. Candlin & Crichton, 2011a). In collaboration with Srikant Sarangi he has proposed a cross-disciplinary understanding of ‘communication’ in organizational and professional settings, which blends insights from applied linguistics (specifically LSP) and communications studies, (cf. Candlin & Sarangi, 2011; Sarangi & Candlin, 2011). With Jonathan Crichton, he has also introduced and applied a multiperspectival model of discursive practices that combines textual and semiotic analyses with interpretive and ethnographic approaches (Candlin, 1997, 2006; Candlin and Crichton, 2011b, in press, in press; see also: Crichton, 2003, 2010).

The late 1980s did not seem to have much to offer to the linguist in search of an understanding of the role of language in corporations, other than in research with a prescriptive motivation. At that time, the Journal of Business Communication, Business Communication Quarterly, the Journal of Business and Technical Communication and, to a lesser extent, the Management Communication Quarterly, reflected the strong vocational and applied intent of much research in North America, as did work in LSP and applied linguistics, where journals such as English for Specific Purposes also tended towards a pedagogical focus. Researchers interested in business discourse in the 1990s were faced with the task of defining the field and also with identifying those approaches and methodologies that could be useful in understanding how business people use language to achieve their goals (e.g. Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris, 1997a, 1997b; Bargiela-Chiappini & Nickerson, 1999).

Quote 1.1 Business discourse

Business discourse as contextual and intertextual, self-reflexive and self-critical, although not necessarily political, is founded on the twin notions of discourse as situated action and of language at work. This perspective seems now quite remote from early discussion on the nature of professional language that originated from within LSP, or Language for Specific Purposes (Johns, 1986). In its attempt to recontextualize discourse within the current dialogues between related disciplines and combined approaches, and between praxis and social theory, business discourse also remains distinct from recent developments in LSP (Swales, 1999) and ESP (Louhiala-Salminen, 2002).

(Bargiela-Chiappini & Nickerson, 2002: 277, original emphasis)

Bargiela-Chiappini (2004a) provides a historical overview of the evolution of the field of spoken business discourse beyond the boundaries of a primarily pedagogical focus. She describes the lack of interest in language by authors of books on business negotiation in the 1970s and 1980s and their reliance on quantitative analysis. Attention to the role of communication in bargaining (Putnam & Jones, 1982) and the strategic use of language in negotiation (Donohue & Diez, 1985) continued to be relatively unexplored topics in the literature on negotiation until quite recently (e.g. Candlin, Maley & Sutch, 1999). The positivist influence of cognitive and behavioural approaches to the study of language in business settings remained dominant and language was treated as one of the dependent variables. It was not until 1986 when Lampi’s seminal monograph on the discourse of negotiation was published, that studies of negotiation became language-based and began to proliferate. The numerous publications that date from that time, as evidenced by the following list, are an indication of how influential this shift to language-based analysis was (e.g. Ehlich & Wagner, 1995; Firth, 1995; Ulijn & Li, 1995; Trosborg, 1995; Jaworski, 1994; Graham, 1993; Holden & Ulijn, 1992; Mulholland, 1991; Neumann, 1991; 1994). The most representative of these, including a variety of different languages and settings, are the two collections both published in 1995, edited by Alan Firth, and Konrad Ehlich and Johannes Wagner, respectively. Although authored by scholars from a variety of disciplines, the research in these collections marks the establishment of a growing body of discourse analytic and pragmatic studies of real-life language in the workplace. Unlike earlier research in negotiation, Firth’s (1995) collection of fourteen articles approaches negotiation as discourse, i.e. as language in use (p. vi). In his introduction, he reviews the theoretical approaches to negotiation research, ending with what had until that time been referred to as the ‘discourse approach’. Firth’s discussion makes clear that this is a potentially misleading label as this approach in fact tended to describe studies that used (decontextualized) transcripts of neg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figure
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The Field of Business Discourse
• Part II Applying Business Discourse Research
• Part III Researching Business Discourse
• Part IV Resources
• References
• Index