Digital business discourse

Digital Business Discourse offers a distinctively language- and discourse-centered approach to digitally mediated business and professional communication, providing a timely and comprehensive assessment of the current digital communication practices of today's organisations and workplaces. It is the first dedicated publication to address how computer-mediated communication technologies affect institutional discourse practices, bringing together scholarship from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including organisational and management studies, rhetorical and communication studies, communication training and discourse analysis. Covering a wide spectrum of communication technologies, such as email, instant messaging, message boards, Twitter, corporate blogs and consumer reviews, the chapters gather research drawing on empirical data from real professional contexts. In this way, the book contributes to both academic scholarship and business communication training, enabling researchers, trainers and practitioners to deepen their understanding of the impact of new communication technologies on professional and corporate communication practices.

Introduction: business communication in the digital age – fresh perspectives

Digital Business Discourse offers a distinctively language- and discourse-centered approach to digitally mediated business and professional communication, providing a timely and comprehensive assessment of the current digital communication practices of today's organisations and workplaces. It is the first dedicated publication to address how computer-mediated communication technologies affect institutional discourse practices, bringing together scholarship from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including organisational and management studies, rhetorical and communication studies, communication training and discourse analysis. Covering a wide spectrum of communication technologies, such as email, instant messaging, message boards, Twitter, corporate blogs and consumer reviews, the chapters gather research drawing on empirical data from real professional contexts. In this way, the book contributes to both academic scholarship and business communication training, enabling researchers, trainers and practitioners to deepen their understanding of the impact of new communication technologies on professional and corporate communication practices.

Abolishing the Audit Commission:framing, discourse coalitions and administrative reform

The abolition of the Audit Commission in England raises questions about how a major reform was achieved with so little controversy, why the agency lacked the institutional stickiness commonly described in the literature on organisational reform and why it did not strategise to survive. In this paper, we apply argumentative discourse analysis to rich empirical data to reveal the pattern and evolution of storylines and discourse coalitions, and the ways in which these interact with and affect the practices of Parliament, the media and the Audit Commission itself. Our analysis shows that the politics of administrative reform are as much about discursive framing and the ability of pro-reformers to gain discursive structuration and institutionalisation as they are about the material resources available to a newly elected government and its ministers. Questions of technical feasibility are unlikely to derail a reform initiative once its promoters gain discursive ascendency.

Learning from a deceptively spacious policy discourse

In this chapter, the way in which varied terms such as Networked learning, e-learning and Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) have each become colonised to support a dominant, economically-based world view of educational technology is discussed. Critical social theory about technology, language and learning is brought into dialogue with examples from a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of UK policy texts for educational technology between1997 and 2012. Though these policy documents offer much promise for enhancement of people’s performance via technology, the human presence to enact such innovation is missing. Given that ‘academic workload’ is a ‘silent barrier’ to the implementation of TEL strategies (Gregory and Lodge, 2015), analysis further exposes, through empirical examples, that the academic labour of both staff and students appears to be unacknowledged. Global neoliberal capitalist values have strongly territorialised the contemporary university (Hayes & Jandric, 2014), utilising existing naïve, utopian arguments about what technology alone achieves. Whilst the chapter reveals how humans are easily ‘evicted’, even from discourse about their own learning (Hayes, 2015), it also challenges staff and students to seek to re-occupy the important territory of policy to subvert the established order. We can use the very political discourse that has disguised our networked learning practices, in new explicit ways, to restore our human visibility.

Language policy and critical discourse studies:towards an integrated approach

This chapter offers a framework for combining critical language policy with critical discourse studies (CDS) to analyse language policy as a process in the context of minority language policy in Wales. I propose a discursive approach to language policy, which starts from the premise that language policy is constituted, enacted, interpreted and (re)contextualised in and through language. This approach extends the critical language policy framework provided by Shohamy (Language policy: hidden agendas and new approaches. Routledge, London, 2006) and integrates perspectives from the context-sensitive discourse-historical approach in CDS. It incorporates discourse as an essential lens through which policy mechanisms, ideologies and practices are constituted and de facto language policy materialises. This chapter argues that conceptualising and analysing language policy as a discursive phenomenon enables a better understanding of the multi-layered nature of language policy that shapes the management and experience of corporate bilingualism in Wales.