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Organization of the volume and the contributions
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Discourse and business communication An
Organization of the volume and the contributions
That said, we can move to the structure of this collection and an overview of the chapters. There are, first, eight chapters which deal with issues of general representation, followed eventually by five contribu- tions whose focus is on various kinds of interaction within the orga- nization. In between, however, there are two chapters (Kardkarnklai; Gago and Silveira) which bind together the two groups of texts, by offer- ing insights into interactional strategies and behaviours as important in the context of the organization’s global image. Altogether, the chap- ters draw upon an extensive spectrum of genres and, generally, ways of ‘doing’ business discourse (business letters, political addresses, academic tests, advertising, online communication, intercultural negotiations, job interviews, press releases, computer-mediated communication, etc.) in different countries and cultures, studying both oral and written aspects of communication, in the light of the multiple models and theories as outlined in the previous section. The first two chapters, by Norman Fairclough and Carlos Gouveia respectively, demonstrate the most general focus, discussing issues of organizational identity and culture in the broad contexts of political economy and developments in theories of social change. Close already in their methodological fit, they show further similarities on empirical grounds, addressing and analysing fragments of texts related to e-culture in business settings. A distinctive characteristic of Fairclough’s chap- ters is his proposal for a refined version of transdisciplinary dialogue between research in political economy and the strategic (as opposed April 14, 2009 11:52 MAC/RAMS Page-7 9781403_947369_02_cha01 PROOF Piotr Cap 7 to ideological and rhetorical) critique of discourse. On the other hand, Gouveia’s approach is more from the side of the discourse itself, and leads to the question of how the growing hybridization of discourses, genres and styles (encouraged by e-culture and, specifically, computer- mediated communication) influences the perception of discourse as a facet of social change as well as of social and institutional identity. The remaining contributions in the ‘representation’ part are a bit less preoccupied with methodological disputes (though they still describe and opt for preferred methods) and their theoretical underpinnings, and more focused on either specific genres or organization types. Mauro Sobhie places his critical lens on advertising brochures and analyses them in terms of four stages of company–customer interaction: presen- tation of the brochure, presentation of product or service, legitimiza- tion, and request for contact. In his argument, he not only provides adequate evidence for the organization’s image being construed through a continual feed of updates, but also points to SFL and some later, more cognitively oriented approaches, as feasible groundworks to account for this dynamic process. The theme of ‘advertising’ is continued by Paul Bick, yet his chapter offers an interesting and apparently provocative change of perspective. Exploring the issue of the corporate identity of McDonald’s, Bick con- centrates on attempts, by Adbusters magazine, at deconstructing this identity in a series of negative advertising strategies. His particular inter- est is in the existing ‘community of ideology’ that unites McDonald’s and its customers, and the organized, discourse-dependent, strategic ways in which to ‘extract’ the customer from this community. The next three chapters, by Dorien van de Mieroop, Yvonne McLaren and Calin Gurau, and Marcel Burger, are all examples of data-driven search for methods that would suit the macro analysis of represen- tation of the organization in the most systematic manner possible. In addition, the latter two show common interest in (the ways of researching) mediatized business communication. Van de Mieroop, who works with a corpus of 40 business speeches enacting a company’s institutional identity, opts for an eclectic, intrinsically complemen- tary, qualitative–quantitative approach which uses frame and cognitive semantics and pragmatics as initiators of analysis, accompanied by cor- pus methods which play the role of verification tools. This analytic stance is apparently shared by McLaren and Gurau, who analyse ways in which reputation of a pharmaceutical company is created, first, through the company’s own press releases, and second, through independent articles appearing in the British national press. The naturally varying April 14, 2009 11:52 MAC/RAMS Page-8 9781403_947369_02_cha01 PROOF 8 Download 72.04 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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