Business Discourse

Abstract

Studies of business discourse examine how the work of a business institution gets accomplished through talk and texts. Academic and practitioner interest in business discourse has emerged in a social context where business institutions, notably corporations, have a powerful presence in the world. Close attention to business discourse is predicated on the following suppositions: that people spend a significant portion of their lives in business institutions, that this work gets accomplished primarily through talk and texts (especially as managers and in a knowledge economy), and that there are better and worse ways to practice discourse. The study of business discourse is international and approached from multiple disciplines and perspectives, including various forms of → Discourse Analysis – such as → action‐implicative discourse analysis, discursive psychology, and critical discourse analysis – conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, organizational communication, management theory, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, genre analysis, ethnography, and narrative analysis.