The Ins and Outs of Business and Professional Discourse Research Reflections on Interacting with the Workplace

by Alessi, Glen; Jacobs, Geert

• ISBN13: 9781137507679
• ISBN10: 1137507675
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-10-20
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This edited volume offers a collection of original chapters focusing on the Ins and Outs of professional discourse research. The contributors discuss all aspects of the scholarly process, investigating written, oral, non-verbal and digital communication in professional settings. First the book analyses gaining access and collecting data by exploring questions such as, 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? The book then examines feeding results back in the form of recommendations to practitioners, asking questions such as, 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? Drawing on insights from LSP, ethnography and discourse analysis, this book will be of great value to researchers and practitioners of workplace settings.

Author Biography

Glen Michael Alessi is Researcher at the Department of Communications and Business Studies, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. His research interests include corpus assisted discourse analysis, critical genre analysis and intercultural communication. His recent publications examine the role of interdiscursivity and intertextuality in forming new or hybrid generic norms in professional and institutional discourse.

Geert Jacobs is Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Ghent University, Belgium. His research focuses on the study of professional and institutional discourse in a pragmatic perspective. He has published widely in international peer-reviewed journals and has co-edited a number of collective volumes. He is vice-president of the Association for Business Communication as well as co-founder and head of the NewsTalk&Text research network.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Glen Michael Alessi and Geert Jacobs
SECTION I - IN
1. Negotiating Positionality in Ethnographic Investigations of Workplace Settings: Student, Consultant or Confidante?; Dorte Lønsmann
2. The Physical Environment for Communication in 21st Century Work Spaces: A Research Model; Deborah C. Andrews
3. Getting Access to Language Data in the Workplace: Role Enactment as a Data-generation Method; Annelise Ly
4. Gathering Linguistic Data from Two Multinational Companies: Intercultural Communication in the Workplace; Carmela Briguglio
5. 'We Never Even Wondered Whether We Trusted Them or Not': From Freedom to Mutuality in a Student Research Project; Astrid Vandendaele, Geert Jacobs & Tom Bruyer
6. How Legal Translation Studies Research Might Assist Lawyers with Best Procurement Practice; Juliette Scott
SECTION II - OUT
7. Knowledge Management in Multilingual Areas: Practical Recommendations for SMEs; Elena Chiocchetti
8. Evaluating Topical Talk in Interactional Business Settings: When 'Testing the Waters' with Customers May not be Much of a Gamble; Chiara Ganapini
9. Crafting the Investor Pitch Using Insights from Rhetoric and Linguistics; Peter Daly and Dennis Davy

10. Exhibition Press Announcements: An Evolving or Dissolving Genre?; Cecilia Lazzeretti
11. Standardizing the Language of Corporate Internal Investigative Reports: A Case Study in Appropriated Professional Language Practices; Glen Michael Alessi
12. Dissociative Identities: A Multi-modal Discourse Analysis of TV Commercials of Italian Products in Italy and in the USA; Laura Di Ferrante, Walter Giordano, Sergio Pizziconi
13. From Business Letters to Emails: How Practitioners can Shape their Own Forms of Communication More Efficiently; Franca Poppi