International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Studies of business discourse examine how the work of a business institution gets accomplished through talk and texts. Academic and practitioner interest in business discourse has emerged in a social context where business institutions, notably corporations, have a powerful presence in the world. Close attention to business discourse is predicated on the following suppositions: that people spend a significant portion of their lives in business institutions, that this work gets accomplished primarily through talk and texts (especially as managers and in a knowledge economy), and that there are better and worse ways to practice discourse. The study of business discourse is international and approached from multiple disciplines and perspectives, including various forms of →  Discourse Analysis – such as →  action-implicative discourse analysis , discursive psychology, and critical discourse analysis – conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, organizational communication, management theory, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, genre analysis, ethnography, and narrative analysis. There are two characteristic features of research in business discourse: first, the insight that discourse represents a form of situated social action, and second, a disposition toward investigating actual language use in work settings ( Bargiela-Chiappini et al. 2007 ). The notion that discourse is situated social ... log in or subscribe to read full text