Managing Language
The discourse of corporate meetings
The book attempts to answer the question: what do managers in multinational companies really do during meetings? Following fieldwork in three corporations in Britain and Italy, the picture that emerges is one that challenges the widespread understanding of meetings as boring, routine events in the life of an organisation. As the recordings analysed in the book show, organisational meanings and relations come into existence through verbal interaction; these are challenged and manipulated in a constant process of sense-making in search of coherence which engages managers in their daily work life. The pragmatics of pronominalisation, metaphors and discourse markers, as well as thematic development, reveal the dynamics of sense-making in both English and Italian. The native perspective adopted in Part One of the book is complemented , in Part Two, by a contrastive study of the structural and pragmatic properties of meetings in the corporate and cultural contexts of the British and Italian multinationals, respectively. Finally, the intercultural dimension of corporate communication is vividly portrayed in the experience of managers of an Anglo-Italian joint venture examined in the concluding chapter.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 44] 1997. ix, 295 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 26 July 2011
Published online on 26 July 2011
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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acknowledgements | p. ix
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The Business of Language | p. 3
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Research as Experience, Research as Method | p. 35
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Sense-Making and Coherence | p. 55
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Interpreting British Meetings | p. 103
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Comparing and Contrasting: Cross-Linguistic and cross-Cultural | p. 137
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Meetings as Genre | p. 205
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Cross-Culturally Speaking: On the Edge of Communication | p. 227
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Appendix: Questionnaire | p. 249
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Notes | p. 255
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Index | p. 293
“This is an important work on two counts: (1) it establishes the interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity of cross-cultural linguistics, and (2) it demonstrates that managerial science can profit from a consideration of the linguistic insights offered by the author.”
Alan S. Kaye, California State University, Fullerton, in Multilingua, 2002
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Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CF: Linguistics
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General