Abstract:While a lot of attention has been paid to online branding and the construction and communication of a company’s identity via its website, there is only very little research that looks at the processes involved in these activities from a discourse analytical perspective. This article aims to address this gap by conducting a case study of innocent, a UK producer of fruit juices. Combining corpus analytical tools with discourse analytical techniques and considering both text and multimodal features, we explore so… Show more
“…Previous work assuming such an angle has already shown that the way agency and action are encoded allows for inferring the ideologies that inform a text as well as for recognizing the possible intentions of the communicators. In terms of inferring underlying ideologies, studies have shown that the linguistic manifestations of agency and action can serve the strategic goals of individual organizations (The PAD Research Group, 2016;Pollach, 2005) but, perhaps more worryingly, even influence societal values and public policy. For example, in their analysis of AOL Time Warner's Internet policy document from the early 2000s, Amernic and Craig (2006) showed how the document refers to human stakeholders outside of the corporation.…”
This paper makes a case for raising critical language awareness in business communication education and proposes that the development of discourse analytical skills should be made part of management and business communication curricula. As one specific approach to train such awareness and skills, we propose a three-step analytical model to explore agency and action in business discourse and communication. The proposed model draws on organizational discourse scholarship, critical discourse studies and approaches from systemic-functional linguistics, and allows for gaining a better understanding of how agency is assigned in organizational texts. The method draws attention to linguistic and discourse practices and thus helps students to analyze texts more systematically, enables researchers to gain deeper insights into agency and action in organizational discourse, and assists practitioners to reflect on communication processes and consequently to improve their practice and produce texts with more impact. The study is thus part of a broader agenda that sets out out to fully realize the linguistic turn: it promotes an approach that views discourse as central to organizational processes, and by making the analytical framework accessible, it renders the approach easy to adopt by business and management curricula.
“…Previous work assuming such an angle has already shown that the way agency and action are encoded allows for inferring the ideologies that inform a text as well as for recognizing the possible intentions of the communicators. In terms of inferring underlying ideologies, studies have shown that the linguistic manifestations of agency and action can serve the strategic goals of individual organizations (The PAD Research Group, 2016;Pollach, 2005) but, perhaps more worryingly, even influence societal values and public policy. For example, in their analysis of AOL Time Warner's Internet policy document from the early 2000s, Amernic and Craig (2006) showed how the document refers to human stakeholders outside of the corporation.…”
This paper makes a case for raising critical language awareness in business communication education and proposes that the development of discourse analytical skills should be made part of management and business communication curricula. As one specific approach to train such awareness and skills, we propose a three-step analytical model to explore agency and action in business discourse and communication. The proposed model draws on organizational discourse scholarship, critical discourse studies and approaches from systemic-functional linguistics, and allows for gaining a better understanding of how agency is assigned in organizational texts. The method draws attention to linguistic and discourse practices and thus helps students to analyze texts more systematically, enables researchers to gain deeper insights into agency and action in organizational discourse, and assists practitioners to reflect on communication processes and consequently to improve their practice and produce texts with more impact. The study is thus part of a broader agenda that sets out out to fully realize the linguistic turn: it promotes an approach that views discourse as central to organizational processes, and by making the analytical framework accessible, it renders the approach easy to adopt by business and management curricula.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.