Publications

Publication details [#38633]

Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise. 2004. The multilayered structure of enterprise discourse. Information Design Journal + Document Design 12 (1) : 35–48.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/idjdd

Annotation

This article explores the complex relationship between enterprise and discourse from a sociolinguistic viewpoint. A model of communication is presented which depicts the multilayered framework of texts within organizations. With this model as a background, results from two studies on enterprise discourse are discussed. The first study analyzed communication within banks and structural engineering companies in Sweden, Germany and Great Britain. Interviews were held with staff at different levels, and written documents were analyzed. Though of course the discourse within the studied companies had much in common, differences were found as well, which can be explained by variation in sector, the organizational culture and the national culture. The second study focused on the multilingual production of texts in a Swedish based international company. An analysis of company brochures produced in different European branches showed considerable variation in relation to content, arguments and style.