The language factor in international business covers a wide spectrum of business settings using a broad range of approaches including intercultural pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and genre analysis. It presents accomplishments and developing trends in this field, which is both academic and practice-oriented.
Chapters 1, 2, and 3 in Section 1 introduce the current state of the art in the field of business communication, relating theories to teaching, and communicative strategies to practice. Chapter 1 outlines changes that have affected business and workplace environments and further discusses how these changes (such as the use of social media) are reshaping business communication. Chapter 2 calls for genre-based pedagogical approaches in teaching business communication by analyzing a tourist website and a chairman's report. Chapter 3 delineates reasons for linking research and practice and provides examples of specific ways in which to connect research findings to the business community and its practices.
The four chapters in Section 2 investigate language use in intercultural business communication. Chapter 1 studies the real and perceived benefits of learning languages for specific business purposes, particularly French, as seen through the eyes of Canadian university students and alumni. Chapter 2 explores the use of English as a global language in multinational settings and the implications for the preparation of graduates for the workforce. Chapter 3 examines how leadership is constructed, perceived, and reenacted in multicultural teams and explores how linguistic strategies influence the organizational functioning of multicultural teams. Chapter 4 investigates the intercultural differences of patient information leaflets using corpus analysis.
The two chapters in Section 3 focus on the persuasiveness of advertising language. Chapter 1 explores the effects of using English (rather than Cantonese) in product advertisements aimed at a bilingual audience in Hong Kong and finds that the bilinguals perceive their two languages as having almost the same status. Chapter 2 compares the persuasiveness of hedges and pledges in advertising claims in print and audio, and examines how these markers are processed in the two communication modes.
Section 4 focuses on the analysis of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Chapter 1 investigates a database of reports published on the internet by two leading and well-established companies in the automotive industry, Fiat and Toyota, with an attempt to cast some light on the content-related and discursive strategies forming the companies' approaches to CSR. Chapter 2, drawing on Roch's annual reports and related advertising campaign, explores the role played by the discourse of CSR, with a view to finding evidence for and describing the discursive modalities of this value-orientation business discourse.
Section 5, using corpus analysis, aims to examine meaning and grammatical devices in business communication. Chapter 1 focuses on the comparison of approximations involving numbers in written business news reporting and academic business English. Chapter 2 investigates nanotechnological discourses by focusing on some discourse features for expressing newness and technological potential that are poorly studied in the Italian context under cognitive concept modeling, proposing a linguistic typology for understanding the systematic and dynamic nature of conceptual future building.
