27.2472, Review: Discourse: Darics (2015)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-2472. Fri Jun 03 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.2472, Review: Discourse: Darics (2015)

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Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2016 15:25:37
From: Agnieszka Lyons [a.lyons at qmul.ac.uk]
Subject: Digital Business Discourse

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-2842.html

EDITOR: Erika  Darics
TITLE: Digital Business Discourse
PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Agnieszka Lyons, Queen Mary, University of London

Reviews Editor: Robert Arthur Cote

SUMMARY 

“Digital Business Discourse”, edited by Erica Darics, is a comprehensive
collection of papers dealing with digital communication in organisational and
professional settings. The volume is divided into three parts, dealing
respectively with new modes of communication (Part I), new conventions (Part
II), and theoretical and methodological approaches to the analysis of digital
business discourse (Part III).

The first part of the volume, titled “New Technologies: New Modes of
Communication”, begins with  Chapter 1, chapter “‘Don’t even get me started…’:
Interactive Metadiscourse in Online Consumer Reviews”, by Camilla Vasquez. The
author analyses explicit forms of addressivity in online reviews building on
her earlier work on interactive features in this form on online content
(Vásquez 2012). She argues that discursive strategies discussed in the chapter
help writers grasp and maintain readers’ attention and foster readers’
involvement as participants in the discourse. To this end, she employs the
Bakhtinian notion of addressivity (Bakhtin 1986) to refer to the ways in which
writers design their texts for an audience with an expectation of a particular
reaction. Some of the linguistic features that help create this conversational
style include discourse markers (e.g., you know, well), second-person address
forms and metadiscourse (e.g., let me tell you), questions (e.g., Can you
believe that?), questions and answers which simulate conversational
interaction, and anticipating reader responses while constructing reviews. She
finds that, in line with guidelines for business interactions, reviewers have
found ways in which they “converse” with the readers, rather than project
their opinions at them.

In Chapter 2, “Social CEOs: Tweeting as a Constitutive Form of Organisational
Communication”, Katerina Girginova’s continues the focus on interactions with
the audience. Girginova discusses personal use of Twitter by chief executive
officers (CEOs) of a range of organisations who manage their own Twitter
accounts. The data was analysed in the context of communicative constitution
of organisations (CCO), according to which communication of and around an
organisation is a constitutive force in that organisation. The findings
revealed that CEOs’ personal Twitter use serves to assert their positions in
the industry, rather than referring to the organisation in a structured,
physically-bound way.

Chapter 3, “Utterance Chunking in Instant Messaging: A Resource for
Interaction Management” by Kris M. Markman, draws on an array of earlier
studies on the use of Instant Messaging (IM), including that in organisations
(e.g., Baron 2010; Mackiewicz & Lam 2009) in her analysis of utterance
chunking in task-based IM exchanges. The data analysed in the chapter comes
from a lab-based study of IM interactions between people with and without
prior relationship with each other, which included text analysis alongside
screen recording to trace text-composition process. She finds that utterance
chunking is used as a floor-holding and interaction-management device.
Utterance chunking, she concludes, can help reduce social distance, increase
trust in the workplace, and index status.

The last chapter in the first part, Nives Lenassi’s “Some Linguistic and
Pragmatic Aspects of Italian Business Email” is devoted to the analysis of
features of business emails with the view of informing language teaching
effectiveness for economics students at Slovene University. The author
provides qualitative and quantitative analyses of the language of emails
concerned with business transactions written by native Italian speakers. The
chapter discusses such features as register, the use of passive voice, and the
range of verb forms used in business email communication in Italian. 
Significant amount of attention is given to the discussion of the evidence of
social distance between interactants and the level of formality in business
emails, which does not follow a strictly defined pattern akin to that of
formal letters. Instead, the choice of linguistic forms can reflect the type
of relationship between interactants, distance from the content, or the
complexity of the matter conveyed.

Part II of the volume, “New Models of Communication: New Conventions”, starts
with Karianne Skovholt’s chapter “Doing Leadership in a Virtual Team:
Analysing Addressing Devices, Requests, and Emoticons in a Leader’s E-mail
Messages”. The main objective of the chapter is to analyse linguistic and
discursive strategies employed by a leader of a virtual project team in a
Norwegian telecompany. The study reveals that the leader uses four strategies
to build in-group solidarity and trust: positively charged addressing devices,
metaphors which create a positive picture of the team, positive feedback
highlighting acknowledgement by the upper management, and emoticons used to
soften requests and intensify utterances. Skovholt finds that the leader does
not need to discursively position herself as a leader with respect to her
subordinates but performs leadership through an informal, personal, and
emotional email style.

Chapter 6, “Swearing Is E-Business: Expletives in Instant Messaging in Hong
Kong Workplaces” by Bernie Chun Nam Mak and Carmen Lee addresses the use of
expletives as discursive tools for identity and power creation in workplace
instant messaging. They discuss their findings in two distinct contexts: in
task-directed and relational IM. The analysis covers a number of aspects, such
as the use of expletives for business and transaction purposes and swearing
for affiliation and leisure purposes. The authors employ Gee’s (2011) model of
discourse analysis to analyse their data and draw on studies concerned with
non-native use of swearwords in English (Dewaele 2004). They call for
recognising expletives as carrying a range of possible in-group connotations.

In her chapter “Snuff Said! Conflicting Employee and Corporate Interests in
the Pursuit of a Tobacco Client”, Kristy Beers Fagersten considers aspects of
crisis communication in employee posts to a company-wide intranet forum
following an implication from the management that the company is looking to
work for a tobacco client. The author comments on the ways in which employees
assert or challenge the potential threat to the company’s reputation, should
the contract materialise. Apart from the content analysis, Fagersten discusses
the linguistic form of comments, focusing on those characteristic of digital
discourse: emoticons and approval postings. She suggests that intranet
discussions should be considered as pre-meeting activities to allow employees
to better prepare for expressing their views in a face-to-face context.

Valerie Creelman explores the phenomenon of social media listening in  Chapter
8, “Sheer Outrage: Negotiating Customer Dissatisfaction and Interaction in the
Blogosphere”. She conducts a textual analysis of a company letter to its
customers from the perspective of image restoration techniques following
complaints about one of their products. She then analyses of a set of customer
blog posts in response to the letter. Drawing on Bakhtin's concept of
addressivity, she explains why the corporation's attempt at restoring its
image received negative reactions from the customers.

Part III of the volume, “Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Digital
Business Discourse”, aims to set new directions in the field of digital
communication in professional settings. In Chapter 9, Steven Edelson, Ron
Scott, Phil Kimn, and July Szendrey propose the concept of “digital emotional
literacy” as a way for organisations to develop a more profound understanding
of communication in these contexts and argue that emotional intelligence
should be developed alongside technological skills to increase effectiveness
of workplace interactions in the current communicative landscape.

In their chapter titled “Recovering the Human in the Network: Exploring
Communicology as a Research Methodology in Digital Business Discourse”, Craig
T. Maier and David Deluliis call for refocusing research interests in the
field of digital communication to include the thoughts and feelings
experienced while communicating digitally rather than focusing purely on the
language used. They propose that this could be achieved by adapting
‘communicology’ (i.e., a branch of communication research exploring human
experience of communication) as a qualitative methodology for the analysis of
digital business communication, a methodology based on “a living, reflecting,
human practice between persons” (p. 215). 

Chapter 11, “Identification of Rhetorical Moves in Business Emails Written by
Indian Speakers of English”, by María Luisa Carrió-Pastor, analyses the use of
rhetorical moves in business emails written in English by non-native speakers.
Carrió-Pastor compares her findings to those of earlier studies into
rhetorical moves in native English email communication (e.g., Bhatia 1993) and
concludes that emails written by Indian businesspeople include moves that had
not been identified in earlier studies. These moves involve adaptations of the
features of the writers’ mother tongue alongside English, particularly in the
context of politeness, and as such can be treated as revealing the writers’
linguistic background.

In the final chapter of the volume, “Deconstruction – Analysis – Explanation:
Contextualization in Professional Digital Discourse”, Erika Darics proposes a
method for the analysis and description of ‘written contextualisation cues’ in
text-based computer-mediated communication. The deanex method consists of
three stages (Deconstruction – Analysis – Explanation) and follows an
interactional sociolinguistic approach. The author suggests that the method
offers non-experts a way to explore contextualisation in digital communication
without the need for formal training and could therefore be used in both
research and training of users in professional settings.

EVALUATION

In putting the volume together, the editor aimed to provide an overview of the
most recent research in the field of digital professional communication, where
instantaneous interactions have taken over carefully prepared newsletters and
reports and are forcing companies to reconsider their business communication
practices in order to increase the effectiveness of digital interactions in
the workplace.

Darics comments on the relative scarcity of research dealing with digital
business communication and their dispersion among a range of outlets that tend
to be inaccessible for wider audiences. Having a volume devoted specifically
to digital business discourse addresses this problem. One of its main
strengths is the wide range of represented approaches and methodologies. The
volume brings together scholars working in a range of disciplines and in
different cultural contexts, analysing datasets that are diverse both from the
perspective of mode (IM, email, Twitter, online reviews, intranet forums) and
culture (e.g., Italian business email, Instant Messaging in Hong Kong, and
Indian users of Business English as a Lingua Franca). Despite this diversity,
the chapters cohere well in the three separate sections that the book is
divided into. 

Taking into account both its content and format, the volume would appeal to
researchers interested in communication in organisational and professional
settings as well as in digital communication more broadly. It would also be a
valuable read to students wishing to explore the subject and explore ways of
conducting research in digital and social media. The range of theoretical
approaches employed in individual chapters offers readers potentially new ways
of approaching analysis. 

As a whole, the volume constitutes a significant step in the development of
digital business discourse as an interdisciplinary subfield and promoting
communication between researchers scattered across disciplines.

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (tr. V. W. McGee).
Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.

Baron, N. S. (2010). Discourse structures in instant messaging: The case of
utterance breaks. Language at Internet, 7 (2). Retrieved from:
http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2010/2651.

Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analysing genre: Language use in professional settings.
London: Longman.

Dewaele, J.-M. (2004). The emotional force of swearwords and taboo words in
the speech of multilinguals. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural
Development, 25 (2/3), 204-222.

Gee, J. P. (2011). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method
(3rd edition). London: Routledge.

Mackiewicz, J., & Lam, C. (2009). Coherence in workplace instant messages.
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 39, 417-431.

Vásquez, C. (2012). Narrativity and involvement in online consumer reviews:
The case of TripAdvisor. Narrative Inquiry, 22 (1), 105-121.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr Agnieszka Lyons is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Queen Mary University
of London. Her research interests include discursive construction of
physicality and embodied actions in electronically mediated discourse,
expression of multimodal content in text-based digital communication and
mediated discourse analysis.





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