Paul Gillaerts – författare

This volume aims to explore what the field of business communication has accomplished so far and where it is heading. In addition to presenting new research, a number of the contributions included address the question of how business communication scholarship may be relevant to education and practice. While the multidimensional nature of the field does not allow a single answer to that question, the contributors generally agree that the ‘language factor’ in international business is an intriguing mix of communicative skills that are receiving increased attention across disciplines. The contributions deal with a wide spectrum of business settings, including leadership and management situations, gatekeeping encounters in a variety of organizations and through a range of media and cultures, oral interaction in the workplace, marketing and PR discourse, on-line communication, management, organizational and corporate communication, and, finally, global aspects of integrated marketing communications. Methodologically, it includes a broad range of approaches, including work in discourse analysis and ethno-methodology, rhetoric and document design, intercultural pragmatics and writing studies, genre analysis, e-semantics and sociolinguistics.

The contributions of this volume approach the genres of employee, CEO and organizational communication from different angles. They analyze how the author’s position in the company influences the construction of these genres, what content and linguistic style characterize them, and how the discourse of these genres is related to other resources. They look at linguistic and rhetorical strategies in a range of communicative settings: email correspondence among (male versus female) co-workers, collaborative writing of formats in the workplace, leadership messaging by the CEO, financial disclosures for (non-)financial audiences and expressions of the corporate philosophy. Two methodologies in particular are prominent in the genre-based chapters: corpus analyses and case studies.

This volume explores the complex relations between norms and exemplars of genres from business and technical communication. Contributors compare a variety of types of norm with textual practices in a variety of ways. The genres examined are typical of the range of audiences and media of workplace and business communication: product withdrawal notices, press releases, job ads, oral presentations, sales letters and tenders, chairman’s reports, and technical reports. They are compared with norms set by teachers, by unimaginative practice, by more or less self-appointed experts, or by practitioners who may not share the national or professional culture of their colleagues. However accurate these may be they never do justice to the complexity of ‘reality’. The contributors to this volume use a wide variety of methods in their attempt to capture this reality. Many analyse texts, but all combine this procedure with at least one other approach and often more: questionnaires, experiments assessing the effect of manipulated texts, analysis of practitioner comments, and use of natural sources of practitioner judgements like awards for good practice.