Management Speak Research Articles

Harry Potter and the Artificially Intelligent Wand: Learning Team Communication in a Simulation Environment

Communication scholars have done an excellent work in creating business simulations to engage the students in learning communication concepts. However, more can be done to foster interactive business and professional communication pedagogy. Instructors must continue to devise new ways to enable the students to apply business communication concepts. In response to these calls, this article presents an example of a simulation based within the Harry Potter universe that emphasizes the ways team communication and proposal presentation manifest themselves in business speaking practices. This simulation enables students to engage with team communication issues by understanding persuasion and influence as an essential part of business and professional communication.

Design of a business didactic unit for “Tierno Encanto” Association to promote communicative skills, Guanacaste, Costa Rica 2021

Community associations in Costa Rica engage in projects requiring members to communicate in a lingua franca to effectively lead and negotiate with foreign investors contributing to social welfare initiatives. Consequently, the implementation of comprehensive training programs focusing on English language proficiency for this sector is imperative. This study aims to evaluate the design of an English didactic unit emphasizing Business speaking skills for the "Tierno Encanto" Association in Guanacaste, 2021. Qualitative data collection methods, including needs tests, Likert scales, and focus groups, are employed to triangulate the data, ensuring convergence and integration of qualitative findings. The results indicate that despite possessing limited instrumental language proficiency, the participants recognize the necessity to enhance and acquire English language skills, particularly in the context of business, to improve their job prospects and professional competencies within the region. This evaluation serves as a foundation for developing tailored English language training programs that address the specific needs and goals of community associations in Costa Rica, empowering members to effectively engage in business communication and maximize the benefits of collaborations with foreign investors.

Fabricating Feelings in the Post-War Workplace: Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and Christine Brooke-Rose’s The Middlemen (1961)

This essay focuses on two satirical works of the early 1960s: Muriel Spark's The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and Christine Brooke-Rose's The Middlemen (1961), both of which are set in and around synthetic textile firms. In these novels, synthetic textiles function in analogic relation to the synthetic emotions that were coming to inform the modern workplace. More specifically, the novels document the emerging importance of inner feeling within professional frameworks and contexts. The main character of Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye is in the process of conducting ‘human research’ within his working-class district while Brooke-Rose stages an encounter between psychology and public relations through documenting the psychotherapeutic experiences of her corporate middlemen. Both writers send up new office and corporate jargon that drew on psychological discourse in an attempt to fuse, as Nikolas Rose notes, the values of ‘democracy, productivity and contentment’ (Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 1999). Together, the novels offer illuminating perspectives on the complex politics of emotional expertise that was beginning to seep into cultures of governance and work in the post-war period.

Optimize! Oil, Labor, and Authoritarian Neoliberalism in Kazakhstan

AbstractFollowing the 2014–2015 oil price crisis, service companies in Kazakhstan went through a process of industrial restructuring centered on workforce reduction and a concomitant increase of labor outsourcing. Taking the restructuring – or “optimization” – of state-owned service companies in the region of Mangystau as a starting point, this paper illustrates the heterogenous precarization effects and forms of precarity catalyzed by the process. Taking a multidimensional approach, the paper describes and analyses the effects of precarization in both socio-economic and political terms, as well as the implications for the production of differentiated laboring subjectivities. It situates the ethnographic trajectories of workers within the framework of Kazakhstan's authoritarian neoliberalism, highlighting the punitive and pastoral techniques of goverment deployed in the restructuring of the regional oil complex. In the first part, the article describes how precarization was experienced by workers as “slavery”, entailing the loss of social recognition as well as the intensification of economic exploitation and political domination, heightening their exposure to social and bodily vulnerability. The second section looks instead at the workings of a governmental agency in its effort to remake redundant workers into small business owners through the acquisition of entrepreneurial skills and the abandonment of the Soviet “dependency mindset”. The third and last section of the article concentrates on the individual trajectory of a dismissed worker joining a multi-level marketing scheme in order to cleanse himself from the bodily and social toxicity of precarized work in the oil industry.

Collegiality as a Fundamental Professional Value in an Academic Setting: A Case Study in a Teacher Education Institution in a Small Island Developing State

Collegiality is believed to entail “always acting in good faith, [...], in concert with one’shonest judgment as to the best interests of one’s institution” (Siegel, 2004, p. 411). Thisunderstanding of collegiality is deemed to be output-oriented and missing out on importantunderlying concepts and values related to the construct. While research shows thatcollegiality as a concept and a practice is well anchored in corporate jargon and settingswhere collaborative efforts among employees are capitalised upon for the optimisation ofoutput, there seems to be a dearth of literature on the importance of collegiality in relationto personal well-being in the professional set-up. Moreover, in academic settings, collegialityas a concept has been extensively researched in relation to teacher collegiality, but there isvery little mention of how collegiality influences well-being in work life among academics inhigher education institutions. This paper seeks to explore the understanding that academicsin a teacher education institution have of the concept of collegiality and its impact on theirprofessional stance and job-related personal well-being. It addresses the question of whethercollegiality should be incorporated as a fundamental professional value within a teachereducation institution as this is deemed to have implications for human capital development.The study shows that though the corporate logic of the use of collegiality for enhanced performance is the most prevalent practice even in an academic set up, academics have alsoappropriated the concept to include a strong element of social and emotional intelligence.

Of Battle and Business: Military Language in the Corporate Environment

Abstract As early as the second half of the 20th century, theoreticians and commentators in the field of business and corporate culture have started to increasingly make use of military and war metaphors when describing or analyzing business-related matters. This ongoing tendency can be explained by the fact that both military and business jargons have had similar historical trajectories and focus on similar goals and objectives. Military philosophy can furthermore offer valuable lessons and advice to any aspiring manager. To be aware of the symbiosis between military jargon and the language of business is to have a clearer overview of the impact of business practices and eventually to gain the upper hand in a domain where battle and the survival of the fittest are at the basis of all activities and endeavors. The aim of the present paper is to trace the similar trajectories in the evolution of military and business jargon and to analyze, by resorting to practical examples, the manifold similarities between the language of war and the one of business.

Analyzing and Visualizing Text Information in Corporate Sustainability Reports Using Natural Language Processing Methods

Sustainability is a major contemporary issue that affects everyone. Many companies now produce an annual sustainability report, mainly intended for their stakeholders and the public, enumerating their goals and degrees of achievement regarding sustainable development. Although sustainability reports are an important resource to understand a company’s sustainability strategies and practices, the difficulty of extracting key information from dozens or hundreds of pages with sustainability and business jargon has highlighted the need for metrics to effectively measure the content of such reports. Accordingly, many researchers have attempted to analyze the concepts and messages from sustainability reports using various natural language processing (NLP) methods. In this study, we propose a novel approach that overcomes the shortcomings of previous studies. Using the sentence similarity method and sentiment analysis, the study clearly shows thematic practices and trends, as well as a significant difference in the balance of positive and negative information in the reports across companies. The results of sentiment analysis prove that the new approach of this study is very useful. It confirms that companies actively use the sustainability report to improve their positive image when they experience a crisis. It confirms that companies actively use the sustainability report to improve their positive image when they experience a crisis. The inferences gained from this method will not only help companies produce better reports that can be utilized effectively, but also provide researchers with ideas for further research. In the concluding section, we summarize the implications of our approach and discuss limitations and future research areas.

БІЗНЕС-ЕТИКА ТА ДІЛОВІ КОМУНІКАЦІЇ В КОНТЕКСТІ ТЕОРІЇ ПОКОЛІНЬ

The globalization tendencies and the impact of the COVID-19 create a need to increase attention to business ethics and business communications at all levels (in each country and for the entire business community). The current situation in society as a whole and in the business community also has changed significantly under the influence of new communication conditions created during the pandemic. Most communications changed format to distance or mixed form. Also now, there is a change in the age structure of representatives of the business community, both leaders and managers at all levels. That is why the study of the features of business ethics and business communications for modern economically active generations in Ukraine is extremely relevant. The article examines the general characteristics of three generations of Ukrainians: baby boomers (1946–1965 years of birth), generation X (1966–1986 years of birth) and generation Y (1987–2005 years of birth). The features of business ethics and business communications for each of these generations are also systematized and analyzed. Generation of baby boomers is a generation focused on teamwork, ready to work long hours to increase self-esteem, define identity and self-realization; has a focus on work and focus on the process. Generation X is purposeful and responsible workers who value balance of work and life, who are reliable, self-sufficient, and ready to take responsibility and learn throughout life. Generation Y is a generation for which individuality is a norm that does not need to be proved and for which it should not be risked, for which it is important to express oneself in a community formed by a social network. In business communications for baby boomers, personal communications, non-verbal communications and the establishment of friendly relations are really important. For generation X, it is important to use only direct communication style in business communications, with enough number of facts, avoiding loud words and corporate jargon. For Generation Y, a positive, respectful, motivational, electronic style of business communication, the use of language to depict visual images, and the positivity of communication are very important.

Literature as a Matter of Policy

Literature as a Matter of Policy

Does the Stock Market Appreciate Management Speak?

CEOs and other actors often use business jargon – “management speak” – when communicating their firm’s strategy. We examine the use of management speak in the context of acquisition announcements. Rather than providing legitimacy and impress others, we argue that the use of such terminology is likely to make an audience, including analysts and fund managers, suspicious of the value-creation potential of the deal. Consequently, the financial market will respond negatively to it. An event-study on 1,371 large acquisitions confirms our prediction. Importantly, analyzing the longer term impact of the acquisitions in our sample, our findings confirm that the financial market’s dislike of management speak is not necessarily because its use is more ubiquitous among deals with lower ex ante potential for value creation; investors just trust them less. We also show that the results are different for new CEOs, whose use of it is met with more leniency, although this changes significantly in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Our results are robust for a battery of control variables and alternative specifications. We discuss implications for insights into the communication of firm strategy.

Eye on the customer: breaking away from the inside-out mindset

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to plot out pathways for organizations to implement a customer focus. These pathways are outlined with the help of illustrative examples. A well-defined customer focus is vital for organizations to ensure that they are positioned to be in line with the customers’ actual needs. Design/methodology/approach This is a conceptual paper where the argumentation is built on previous research findings, the authors’ reflections and the use of illustrative case examples of companies managing to instill a customer focus. Findings This paper builds a framework of potential pathways toward a customer focus by considering four strategic questions related to competition, products, insights and metrics. Practical implications This paper encourages managers to move beyond labeling themselves as customer-oriented and to actually implement a customer focus. This study puts forth a framework with strategic questions and principles designed to help with these endeavors. Originality/value Many companies pay lip service to customer focus, and it is often merely part of the corporate jargon without any real connection to strategy, the business model or everyday practices. This paper addresses the issue further by highlighting the potential pathways through which an organization can achieve a customer focus.

Cohesive Devices in Business English Speaking and Listening Discourse

Business speaking and listening is an important course for cultivating business English majors’ interactive skills, playing a key role in future successful business contacts. The author in this paper attempts to explore explicit and implicit cohesive devices in business speaking and listening discourses. It is found that explicit cohesive devices are mainly used when expressing willingness to establish further business relationships while implicit ones in unwillingness to do business. It is hoped that this paper may shed some lights on business English study.

Facebookland: the bizarro-linguistic world

Abstract This article investigates the dynamics of contemporary Romanian, focusing on various linguistic structures typically used on social network sites, through which the specific content and interaction strategies are being deployed in virtual communities. The article is part of a larger project devoted to the study of linguistic impoverishment (affecting both the vocabulary and the grammatical structure of the language), social networks being only one of the areas where these “uglified” linguistic structures come from: the mass-media (both print and broadcast), advertising (outdoor, indoor, television commercials), Internet forums, corporate jargon, etc. The structures under scrutiny are mostly loan translations (i.e. calques) from English, false friends, hybrid constructions and, generally, lexical and grammatical oddities (sometimes even in the source language), which, nevertheless, due to frequent use, have entered the active vocabulary of a large category of speakers and are therefore becoming pervasive in everyday conversation. The proliferation of these ‘mongrel’ structures in common parlance is also the result of their migration, on the principle of communicating vessels, to other areas of interpersonal and public communication, that of advertising in particular. Moreover, their oddity and inappropriateness are now beginning to pass unnoticed, as more and more speakers are treating them as legitimate linguistic forms, which often end up being recorded in dictionaries. Our approach combines theoretical insights with practical solutions and the pragma-linguistic perspective with the translator’s corrective input.

Verbs, visuals, and vignettes: Incorporating images into the impromptu speaking exercise

This activity extends the rich pedagogical scholarship on impromptu speaking by integrating visual imagery into the impromptu speaking exercise. The goal of this semester-long series of exercises is to provide students with the opportunity to apply effective delivery skills across general purposes of speaking, receive feedback, and thus develop the ability to self-correct behaviors and strengthen core public speaking competencies over the course of a semester. The integration of visual imagery offers an engaging medium through which these quick-thinking skills are developed and refined for both the speaker and the audience.CoursesIntroductory Public Speaking, Advanced Public Speaking, Business and Professional Speaking, Interview Communication, Mass Communication, Public Relations.ObjectivesAfter repeated participation in impromptu speech exercises for varying general purposes, students should be able to (a) demonstrate an increased awareness of nonverbal behaviors, (b) apply practices of effective delivery across general purposes of speaking, and (c) demonstrate increased ability to speak extemporaneously.

Allies From Within: I-O Practitioners in Organizations

The focal article (Lapierre et al., 2018) highlights many good suggestions but only briefly mentions partnering with an academically trained internal industrial and organizational (I-O) practitioner. We believe beginning a partnership with a similarly trained ally well-versed through training in academic language and through experience in “business speak” will yield a stronger end result. The appreciation for an internal I-O practitioner should not go overlooked; when an academic partners with the right practitioner in the right environment, the partnership can be mutually beneficial and more rewarding than other options. For instance, recently we collaborated to set up a partnership for scientific discovery and mutual interest that involved 12 teams representing 14 different institutions spanning academe and practice to conduct a machine learning competition. This partnership enabled many academics and practitioners access to a complex organizational dataset in order to contribute to both an organization and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) community (see Putka et al., 2018).

Determine Entrepreneurial Characteristics Using Mobile Android Game Freezer

<h1>Psychometric Test has been used as an individual trait measurement for a long time for both experienced entrepreneurs as well as young generation who are looking for their potential in entrepreneurship. The assessment and measurement of strength and weaknesses of key entrepreneurial traits provides the entrepreneurial level and personal development planning for entrepreneur or those who want to venture into business. However, the traditional psychometric test lacks of fun element which is less enjoyable activity during answering the test. Furthermore, it requires basic understanding of business jargon that difficult for certain respondents to provide accurate respond. The purpose of this study is to propose a gamification approach which is mobile game application called ‘Freezer’ that can measured entrepreneurial traits of the player. In this sense, ‘Freezer’ creates a simulated scenario for respondents to play as an ice cream business owner and to win as a successful business person, each action done will be measured as entrepreneurial traits criteria. At the end of the game, the result will be presented that can describe the entrepreneurial characteristics of the individuals based on their planning and activities during playing the game.</h1><p> </p><p> </p>

Kontakty angielsko-polskie w języku korporacji

The paper presents corporate speak in Poland, a social variety of the Polish language, noticeably marked by the presence of English borrowings. It is featured in accordance with the status of English as the lingua franca for corporate communication world-wide. Therefore, this study aims at presenting a certain perspective on language contact in an era of globalization. The survey research was conducted on the cohort of 84 corporate employees to expose the sociolinguistic reflections of the English-Polish contact visible in corporate speak. The research enabled a better understanding of certain underlying phenomena of incorporating English lexical items into the social variety of Polish.

The work of the British School at Athens, 2016–2017

The relevance in the 21st century of an organization founded in the later 19th century lies in the BSA's statutory objective: ‘to promote the study of Greece in all its aspects … in all periods including modern times’. In modern business jargon, the BSA's ‘unique selling proposition’ is its location, which places UK-based researchers (at all career stages) at the heart of a region not only central to the history of the Western tradition, but also pivotal historically to post-Ottoman southern Europe and currently on the front line of the refugee crisis. Its location also offers local researchers and organizations opportunities to establish collaborations with us and – through us – with UK-based researchers. Our 130-year history brings a strong reputation, an unparalleled regional network, an accumulation of library and material resources, and a body of expertise that benefit both UK-based researchers and those who engage with us as research partners.

Developmental Progress in Conducting Action Research

Action research is widely acknowledged as an effective framework of empowerment and emancipation to improve a social situation or condition—an intent that appeals to leaders wishing to create improvement, particularly in low socioeconomic and disadvantaged communities. Validity of such espousals has been substantially unexplored, and where evaluations have occurred, they have been focused more on process than impact. A group of international researchers were engaged in an evaluative study of more than 100 action research initiatives, using a variety of methods, tools and conceptual frameworks. The maturity model for action research is one of the conceptual frameworks adopted in this Evaluative Study of Action Research. Maturity models have their origins in the capability maturity model developed to address the poor performance of software projects delivered to the US Department of Defence in the 1980s. The purpose of the capability maturity model was to help contractors increase capability to improve their software engineering processes from an ad hoc state to a more formal and repeatable state and, eventually, to optimize the processes to deliver consistent outcomes. Maturity models have now found their way into many other organizational contexts, such as project management, knowledge management, process management and research capability. However, the term ‘maturity model’ is usually associated with business jargon and quantitative research. Therefore, the authors of this article felt the concept could be made more palatable to action researchers by rephrasing it as ‘maturity profile’ to improve the ways in which they manage their projects to deliver sustainable outcomes. This resulted in the development of the maturity profile described in this article. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An Enhanced Priority Scheduling Algorithm for Multi-Server Retrieval Cloud System

Cloud computing has become a most used business jargon in the area of high-performance computing as it provides on-demand services over ashared pool of internet resources. Process scheduling is one of the most important research issues to be focused on improving the performance of a cloud-based queuing system. The process of scheduling is to assign an appropriate resource to the task to achieve one or more objectives. Nowadays, the scheduling of jobs in cloud leads to NP-hard problem due to its large solution space and longer time to find an optimal solution. To find an optimal solution for the above issues and to improve theperformance of execution, a new priority based scheduling algorithm Enhanced Priority Scheduling Algorithm (EPSA) is proposed. The EPSA algorithm prioritizes jobs based on the job attribute. The attribute of jobsis execution time, resource requirement, CPU utilization, and dependency and target time. These parametersare combined and formulated for priority calculation. The job priority measure is used to generate a fuzzy decision tree (FDT). The FDT predicts the ordering position and service acquiring time for jobs that enter the cloud-based queuing system. EPSA algorithm improves the execution time and shows better performance compared to existing scheduling algorithms. The Proposed algorithm is implemented using JSIM-graph of JMT for performance modeling and evaluation.