Business Correspondence Research Articles

Letters of loss and urgency: Jewish refugee industrialists, business networks and pathways of rescue

ABSTRACT By exploring a collection of business correspondence between Jewish industrialists and their global networks following the expropriation of a large hat factory in Czechoslovakia in 1938, this article sheds light on the complicated and unpredictable nature of human responses to an unfolding moment when Jewish business colleagues faced ruinous economic persecution. Within these letters, these industrialists compose identities that reflect their business selves shaped by their experience of becoming refugees. They also draw out the mechanisms of decision-making in a crisis situation and highlight the concepts of strategy and agency that were crucial to navigating a new social and economic reality.

INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS CORRESPONDENCE DALAM IN-HOUSE TRAINING DI SMK NU GEBANG

The high unemployment rate in Indonesia, with most of them are the Vocational High School’s graduates. It triggers the vocational schools to improve the competence of their graduates that they will be part of the industry and business. One of the steps taken by the school based on the applicable laws and regulations is On-the-job training (Prakerin). However, the Covid-19 pandemic that hit Indonesia made it impossible to carry out as usual. SMK NU Gebang took steps to fill this void by holding In-House Training as a substitute for internships. One of the materials provided in the In-House Training is Business Writing on the topic of Introduction to Business Correspondence. This activity was attended by 16 students of class XI of the Financial Accounting study program and the NU Gebang Vocational School. This activity is carried out for approximately one month (May – June 2022). The method used in this activity is the lecture of material with direct practice. From this activity, it is known that SMK NU Gebang students are actively involved in participating in the In-House Training. Students can also complete the assigned tasks well.

When Egos Collide: The Linguistics of Aggressiveness in English, German, and Hungarian Business Letters – A Contrastive Approach

Abstract The subject of verbal aggressiveness seems to be marginalized in the context of business correspondence. Our paper sets out to fill in this niche, as it exposes the linguistic patterns of this phenomenon within business letters. The study commences with a conceptual framework within which the most relevant theoretical findings applicable to business correspondence in general and to verbal aggressiveness in particular are foregrounded. Next, through a descriptive approach, it presents a series of linguistic markers to identify the morphological, syntactic, and semantic constructions for the expression of aggressiveness. For this purpose, the article scrutinizes authentic business letters in English, German, and Hungarian, and then it juxtaposes data contrastively to conclude that offensive emotions materialize in relatively similar linguistic structures in these languages, i.e. through verbs and modal verbs of obligation, necessity, and impossibility, verbs in the first-person singular, conditional and result clauses, and time adverbials. Furthermore, given the linguistic characteristics of the aforementioned languages, business letters also exploit specific tools, such as inversion, fronting, and the emphatic “do”, to communicate hostile and threatening messages. Due to the large variety of linguistic resources provided, we deem that verbal aggressiveness alters, reshapes, and enriches the business discourse. It therefore deserves a proper place in the rhetoric of business correspondence.

Sustainability of Indian Microfinance Institutions: Analysis of Financial and Social Super Efficiency

Andhra Pradesh’s microfinance institution (MFI) crisis calls for establishing a balance between financial and social performance to ensure sustainability. The present study analyses the financial efficiency and social efficiency of Indian MFIs during 2015–2020, which is a crucial period, as during this period, Indian MFIs came across some significant changes such as permission to act as business correspondents, Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency (MUDRA) scheme, demonetization and outbreak of COVID-19. Since the relative efficiency scores based upon specific set of inputs and outputs proclaim many MFIs to be fully efficient, super efficiency scores have been computed to discriminate their performance. The results reveal the setbacks to all MFIs during 2016–2017 and 2019–2020 as an immediate impact of demonetization and COVID-19, respectively. Super-efficiency estimates divulge that the fall in financial efficiency was greater than in social efficiency in both the years. Mann-Whitney test reveals significant differences between financial and social efficiency in terms of overall efficiency, however, no significant difference could be observed for managerial efficiency. The results are expected to be fruitful for MFIs striving to maintain a trade-off between the twin objectives as results endorse a positive rank correlation between financial and social efficiency.

AN ZWEI POLEN – GESCHÄFTSBRIEFE IN POSITIVEM UND NEGATIVEM TON

The article sheds light on the fundamental characteristics of the positive and negative tone in the context of business correspondence. Commencing with a brief psychological insight into the phenomenon, the paper offers a theoretical overview of how the aforementioned tones can crystallise within business letters. As a completion to this description, it also expounds by what means unpleasant and inconvenient messages can be converted into welcoming and favourable ones. Ultimately, the practical section provides an analysis of positivity and negativity, laying a special stress on their linguistic representation.

ELECTRONIC BUSINESS CORRESPONDENCE TEXT IN THE PRAGMALINGUISTIC ASPECT

Background. Competent execution of business letters is one of the important factors in conducting successful business activities. With the widespread use of video communication, voice messages and instant messengers, written business correspondence remains relevant. Electronic business correspondence, which determines the social and cultural specifics of the modern world community in the field of business, management and material production, is considered in the article as a linguistic phenomenon.
 Purpose. To reveal the pragmalinguistic features of the texts of English-language electronic commercial letters and consider the specifics of the English-language electronic commercial letter.
 Materials and methods. To solve the tasks set, a set of scientific research methods was used: analysis of scientific literature on the research problem and texts of English-language electronic commercial letters, continuous sampling method, descriptive method, comparative method.
 Results. Particular attention is paid to business letters as a traditional way of communication between organizations, enterprises, associations and bodies. It was revealed that each business letter has its own communicative purpose, pragmatic essence. The pragmalinguistic aspect of the texts of electronic business correspondence is carried out through the implementation of a specific communicative intention with a specific goal.
 Practical implications. The results of the research can be useful for further research in the field of communication technologies: problems of communication efficiency, public relations, advertising, speech etiquette, theory and practice of translation.

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS OF ROMAN URDU REVIEWS

Easy access and economic availability of Computers, Tabs, Smartphones and high—speed internet people are now using web for Social interaction and Business correspondence. People are becoming habitual to post their reviews about any specific entity/product, they used. These reviews are very helpful for both—user and seller. Initially these reviews not too much they can easily be analyzed by reading them. The continuous increase in the amount of these reviews creates a need that reviews can be analyzed and useful pattern be found and explored through automated channel. This need leads to a new filed in the domain of research known as “Sentiment Analysis”. Sentiment Analysis is the study of people’s opinions, sentiments, attitude and emotions expressed in written language or also said that, it is a process of categorizing people’s opinions expressed in the piece of text especially in order to determine whether the writer’s attitude towards a particular topic or product is positive, negative, or neutral. This research is targeting the mining of the sentiments from these reviews of PSL anthums. In this thesis, five different classification model are used for text classification of reviews by using Rapid Miner Tool. Thesis presents a Sentiment Analysis of Roman Urdu reviews on PSL Anthums available on YouTube. These reviews are scraped, pre—process and analysed using Naïve Bayes, Gradient Boost Tree, Support Vector Machine, K-Nearist Neighbours and Artificail Neural Netwrok. The Roman Urdu Sentiment Analysis is perform at 7000 bi-lingual reviews. The Naïve Bayes and and Logistic Regression correctly predicted 68.86% reviews. ANN achived 68.86% on testing dataset and 69.71% on the validation of the results.

Banking the Unbanked: Conceptualizing Success of the Business Correspondent Model

The Business Correspondent (BC) model is an IT-enabled business process outsourcing initiative to provide financial services to the unbanked. It is a complex banking system involving multiple actors, system elements and settings, intended to address financial exclusion. Given the BC-Model’s potentially significant role in economic sustainability, it is important to evaluate its success. Efforts to measure the success of the BC-Model have been limited to date; this paper therefore presents a conceptual framework of BC-Model-Success consisting of six dimensions- economic, strategic, technological, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and social, resulting from a three-phase study design. The relevance of the framework was empirically validated across four implementations of the BC-Model. The resulting framework provides strong theoretical foundations for understanding what BC model success is, for assisting practitioners with evaluating the success of the BC-Model and with identifying possible improvements, and for facilitating future research on the BC-Model.

Humour in the Letters of Thomas Campbell

Humour within the letters and personal writings of Romantic poets and authors has remained relatively neglected. Similarly seldom studied is the Scottish Romantic poet Thomas Campbell (1777–1844). Calling into question John Anster’s assessment of Campbell’s letters as a ‘weary heap of good-for-nothing evidence’, this article will attempt to give his unpublished epistles their rightful prominence in studies of Romanticism. Campbell’s correspondence reveals humorous descriptions of cooks kicking cats, which jostle with declarations of explicit disgust against ‘second-rate writers’, and detailed accounts of Campbell’s numerous illnesses. By shedding light on the use of humour in his letters, this article will challenge current preconceptions of Campbell, and show how he used humour to forge and maintain relationships in both his personal and his business correspondence.

The Impact of Socio-cultural Context on Composing Business Letters in Modern Kazakhstani Business Community: A cross-cultural Study

ABSTRACT With the greatest economic potential of the countries in the Central Asian region, the Republic of Kazakhstan is currently engaged in international commercial activities with more than 190 countries. At the same time, while actively pursuing modern marketing strategies and when communicating with business partners of different cultural and linguistic background, particularly, in business correspondence, Kazakhstan also bears witness to a Soviet legacy combined with specific Asian characteristics. The aim of this study is to examine socio-cultural factors identified in 316 business letters composed in Kazakh, Russian, and English, the most commonly used languages of the modern Kazakhstani business community. The forms of relationships between business communicants in the hierarchical chain of a superior and their subordinate are also considered, including their role statuses, social distance, the factors involved in the constructing a business text and other aspects.

Corresponding with Customers – How is Daily Writing Done by Office Workers?

Business correspondence has been a subject of various advisory literatures and an object of academic writing process research for many years. With the publication of the research report “The Writing Subject”, Reinke added a relevant component to the scientific discourse on writing in the business world (Reinke 2019). Superiors who read draft texts are less perceived by the authors as help and much more as control and censorship – this can lead to a change in writing behaviour. In other words: to adapted, uncreative, externally determined letters, whose innovative power – individual originality – can no longer or does not want to develop. Reinke’s work follows Kaiser’s research (Kaiser, Brötz 2011; Kaiser 2013; Kaiser, Brötz 2015; Kaiser 2017) into the vocational training of office workers as well as Efing’s work (Efing 2015; 2017) into professional language registers. By means of a reflective grounded theory, Reinke gains interesting insights into the everyday world of writing merchants – and valuable impulses are created for the relevant training and further education.

INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS CORRESPONDENCE IN IN-HOUSE TRAINING AT SMK NU GEBANG

The high unemployment rate in Indonesia, with most of them are the Vocational High School’s graduates. It triggers the vocational schools to improve the competence of their graduates that they will be part of the industry and business. One of the steps taken by the school based on the applicable laws and regulations is On-the-job training (Prakerin). However, the Covid-19 pandemic that hit Indonesia made it impossible to carry out as usual. SMK NU Gebang took steps to fill this void by holding In-House Training as a substitute for internships. One of the materials provided in the In-House Training is Business Writing on the topic of Introduction to Business Correspondence. This activity was attended by 16 students of class XI of the Financial Accounting study program and the NU Gebang Vocational School. This activity is carried out for approximately one month (May – June 2022). The method used in this activity is the lecture of material with direct practice. From this activity, it is known that SMK NU Gebang students are actively involved in participating in the In-House Training. Students can also complete the assigned tasks well.

Formation of the Leningrad Institute of Pedology and Defectology in the 20s of the XX century.

The subject of the study is the historical aspect of the formation of the Institute of Pedology and Defectology. The object of the study are the archival materials of the Central State Administration of St. Petersburg, the Central State Educational Institution of St. Petersburg, the GARF (resolutions, minutes of meetings, reports, circulars, notes and other documents of the Psychoneurological Academy, the Petrograd Pedological Institute, the Institute of Preschool Education, the Petrograd Pedagogical Institute of Social Education of Normal and Defective Children, and, directly, the Institute of Pedology and Defectology). The author examines in detail the controversial points in the work of these institutions, attempts to explain the mergers and "consolidation" of departments and universities under study into unified educational organizations. The aim of the work is to reconstruct the process of integration of educational institutions of higher education on the example of the Institute of Pedology and Defectology. The main conclusions of the study, conducted using methods of historical analysis, systematization of factual material of documents, are: inconsistency of activities within educational institutions with a wide range of departments, the emergence of numerous educational organizations with similar functions (after 1918, the opportunity to organize an educational institution, the main activity of which will be in the field of social engineering and concern the development of the child did not leave labor, since there was a need to work with children's groups), frequent changes of subordinate organizations to monitor the activities of universities, inconsistency of financial support from the state and the results offered by institutions and organizations, an attempt to standardize the educational space to improve the quality of education by senior management after 1921 (Decree on the management of universities), formal execution of orders, etc. A special contribution of the author is an appeal to the business correspondence of the institutions under study.

I.V. STALIN’S TAKING THE POLITICAL ADVANTAGE IN THE PARTY INFIGHTING IN THE SOVIET STATE IN 1922–1936

The purpose of the article is to analyze the factors of transformation of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b) into the governing body of the Soviet state. The article has studied the activities of such party and state institutions as the Council of People’s Commissars, the Politburo, the Secretariat of the Central Committee. In this work, an attempt was made to consider the transformation of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b) headed by I.V. Stalin into a body for developing key decisions. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that it describes the main events of the internal political struggle of various departments of the Soviet state in terms of their priority on the political Olympus at the time of the initial formation of a new one-party state. The article uses the methods of comparison and analysis of archival documents.
 
 A chain of various political events led to the fact that by the beginning of the 1930s, the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b), headed by the Secretary General I.V. Stalin, had begun to hold a privileged position in the political circles of the Soviet state. As a result of the internal political struggle, the interaction between the members and candidates for membership in the Politburo of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b) began to focus on the political position of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b), which since April 1922 was headed by I.V. Stalin.
 
 In a long and bitter struggle, I.V. Stalin gained a privileged position in political circles and got a stable majority of votes at party congresses. Considering various disputable situations that constantly arose between the opposing factions in the Bolshevik Party, it can be revealed that as a result of the internal political struggle, ideological principles were often pushed into the background. The primary task of one or another group of party leaders was to discredit political opponents and exclude them from the leadership, and then from the Communist Party. I.V. Stalin gained a preponderance of political power due to combining positions in the leadership of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b) and in the leadership of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b). The realization of this benefit took place through frequent changes within the Party and gaining the overwhelming majority of Stalin supporters’ votes at the plenums of the Central Committee of the Party, meetings of the Political Bureau and congresses of the Bolshevik organization. After I.V. Stalin had been promoted to the position of General Secretary in April 1922, the Central Committee Secretariat headed by him was gradually becoming superior to other political institutions. Stalin’s work in the above-mentioned party organ turns into a decision-making activity, and over time the nature of the documents emanating from him is transformed. As a result of the party infighting of the 1920s, such leaders of the October Revolution as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, Pyatakov were removed from the political arena. Their names had ceased to appear in the business correspondence of the central party organs. In the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, the factor of the informal system of political decision-making is gradually becoming crucial.
 
 The practical significance of the article is that the results obtained in the study can be used in the preparation of generalizing works on the history of Russia, as well as the history of party-state construction in the USSR. The prospects of the research consist in using the article by teachers and students of educational institutions in the framework of educational courses on the history of the Fatherland. The research materials and the conclusions obtained may be of interest to the heads of state authorities for the development and implementation of personnel policy, the implementation of measures aimed at improving its effectiveness, as well as the strategy of sustainable development of the state.

THE SIEMENS’ “GADABAY POSSESSION” IN TRANSCAUCASIA

The article presents the history of the so-called “Gadabay possession”, which was the allotment of public lands and forests to the Gadabay and Kalakend copper smelters in Transcaucasia in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries. With its help, one of the largest mining enterprises in the region was organized, which belonged to the famous entrepreneurs of the Prussian origin – the Siemens. Forest allotments were required for the procurement of wood fuel for metallurgical furnaces. Using the example of business correspondence between owners and directors of enterprises with regional and central mining authorities, we demonstrate how the conditions of possession, which form the basis of the relationship between owners and the state, influenced the progressive development of the region’s largest mining enterprise. At a certain stage, the rigid connection of the size of forest allotments to the annual productivity of enterprises began to restrict the growth of production, which, in the context of falling market prices, was the only way for the plants to survive. The severity of the fuel problem, on the one hand, caused difficulties in relations with the regional mining administration and an increase in overhead costs, but on the other hand, it pushed the plant management to introduce the latest methods of copper smelting and the use of fossil fuels. Possessional legal relations turned out to be one of the factors that forced the owners to abandon not only forest allotments, but also the further exploitation of a large industrial business, established by many years of hard work.

Category of Situationality in Narrative Model of Artistic and Legal Discourse

The subject of research in this article is the specificity of the category of discursive situationality, which determined the problematics of the novel “Bleak House” by Ch. Dickens (1853). The purpose of the article is to build a typology of situationality (the situationality is prototypical, intertextual, intentional, coherent) and to identify the means of linguistic representation of the category of situationality in a text that functions in the conditions of interaction of two discourses — legal and artistic. Language techniques representing various types of situationality are divided into textual ones (“detention” technique, interruption of narrative angles, prolonged syntax, etc.), lexical-semantic ones, including a class of stylistic figures of speech (metaphor, precedent name, onomastic allusion, comparison, oxymoron, irony, sarcasm, emotive syntax, etc.) and style, reflecting the inclusion of elements of official business style in artistic speech (verbal nouns, verb-nominal combinations, etc.). Elements of the official business style of speech are expressed in the speeches of the characters during the interrogation, in court speeches, in the business correspondence of the heroes of the novel, and they are also fragmentarily woven into the author’s narrative (they are highlighted with quotation marks). The study emphasizes that the category of discursive situationality is manifested at all levels of the implementation of the narrative model of artistic and legal discourse.

A Discourse Analysis Approach to Email Communication on Ships

Emails have become an inevitable communication tool in a specific profes-sional environment such as a ship. Changes that arose due to data digitaliza-tion, automatization and advances in communication systems have expanded the scope of internal and external ship business correspondence. Neverthe-less, the structure of an email as a genre in seafaring has adapted to generic schemata in online communication and ship-specific communicative stand-ards. Based on the genre analysis theories put forward by Swales and Bhatia, we analyse a corpus of emails collected from five foreign companies (100 pages of text). Then, the collected data were explained and interpreted con-cerning the contextual setting, primarily participants and their role in the giv-en shipboard situation. The findings of this paper have pedagogical implica-tions for creating teaching material for present and future ESP courses and introducing the concept of genre in establishing communication patterns in email correspondence on ships.

An Analysis of Jargon Written on the Correspondence by Villas’ Staff in Gianyar, Bali

Jargon, as part of a sociolinguistic study, is a language variation consists of technical terms or phrases used by a particular profession or group of individuals. The research focuses on the three points of discussion, i.e. forms, meanings, and functions of jargon found in business correspondence written in email by the staffs of Front Office Department and Sales & Marketing Department in Djanuraga villa and Letung villa in Gianyar. Forms of jargon consist of acronym, abbreviation, word, and phrase. The data was collected by observation methods of the business correspondence sent through email and also interview techniques to the employees of the Front Office department and Sales & Marketing department in the villas. Qualitative descriptive method was used to analyze data in this study. The finding in the forms of jargon that acronym is the most frequent one used in the correspondence, with 23 data and the second is abbreviation with 6 data. Regarding to the meaning of the jargon, the jargon is described clearly to make the staffs understand about the jargon more clearly. According to the finding of the functions of jargon in the correspondence used by villas’ staffs, the data analysis reveals that there are two functions, i.e. providing a technical or specialist language for particular purpose and as a sign of professionalism that showing sufficient work experience and to make communication more effective.

Modal verbs indicating politeness in business correspondence

Politeness theory proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) is supposed to be universally valid for every culture and language. It is generally acknowledged that language is not only an instrument for communicating information, it also marks identity, helps establish and maintain social relationships. Naturally, politeness plays an essential role in international business writing as well. The appropriate use of polite forms is particularly effective, practical and necessary in business letters and can lead to either to business success or its failure.The paper aims to focus on the use of modal verbs in business correspondence. The practical part is focused on the analysis of the modal verbs in samples of business correspondence. In the presented paper the use of modal verbs in a corpus of 47 English business letters written by II year (B2 level) Georgian non-native students is analyzed. It may serve as a resource of linguistic realizations of politeness in English to native speakers of other languages.

THE PECULIARITIES OF OFFICIAL-DEPARTMENTAL STYLE

This thesis deals with the study of the official-departmental style and its peculiarities. It helps to understand the style, structure, composition and lexical features of business correspondence texts.