The Editors: Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, Senior Research Fellow at Nottingham Trent University, has been working on business discourse since 1990. Her research has covered, among others, intercultural pragmatics, management discourse and organisational communication in joint ventures. Her publications include Managing Language: the Discourse of Corporate Meetings, The Languages of Business: An International Perspective (both with Sandra Harris) and Writing Business: Genres, Media and Discourses (with Catherine Nickerson).Maurizio Gotti is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bergamo. He is currently President of the Italian Association of University Language Centres and Director of CERLIS, the research centre on specialized languages based at the University of Bergamo. His main research areas are the features and origins of specialized discourse (I linguaggi specialistici, Robert Boyle and the Language of Science, Specialized Discourse: Linguistic Features and Changing Conventions).

• Contents: Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini/Maurizio Gotti: Introduction – Dániel Zoltán Kádár: Power and Profit: The Role of Elevating / Denigrating Forms of Address in Pre-modern Chinese Business Discourse – Kenneth Kong: Metaphors in Network Marketing Discourse: Language, Ideology and Organisational Culture in Hong Kong – Miranda Lee: Uniqueness of Asian Promotion Discourse: A Contrastive Study of Hong Kong Bilingual Texts and Native English Texts – Yunxia Zhu: Effective Communication in Chinese Business Fax Writing – Habil Hadina/Shameem Rafik-Galea: Communicating at the Workplace: Insights into Malaysian Electronic Business Discourse – Bertha Du-Babcock: Communication Behaviors in Intra- and Inter-cultural Decision-making Meetings – Carl Hinze: Looking into ‘Face’: The Importance of Chinese Mian and Lian as Emic Categories – Michael Haugh: What Does ‘Face’ Mean to the Japanese? Understanding the Import of ‘Face’ in Japanese Business Interactions – Winnie Cheng/Martin Warren: // well I have a DIFferent // THINking you know //: A Corpus-driven Study of Disagreement in Hong Kong Business Discourse – Song Mei Lee-Wong: Raising Awareness of Hedging in Chinese Business Letters: Linguistic Symbol of Precision or Politeness? – Yeonkwon Jung: Power and Politeness in Korean Business Correspondence – Carmela Briguglio: Developing an Understanding of English as a Global Language for a Business Setting.