This study examines how diversity and inclusion are communicated in LinkedIn job advertisements as workplace communication texts. Using qualitative, discourse-oriented analysis of job advertisements from global hotel brands, the study identifies recurring discursive frames through which organisations construct inclusivity, including belonging-oriented language, celebration of diversity, formal equal opportunity claims, and well-being–focussed narratives. These discourses are realised through specific communicative signals such as non-discrimination statements, values-based cultural cues, identity-affirming language, and references to inclusive policies. The study proposes the Inclusive Recruitment Communication Process conceptual framework, explaining inclusive recruitment communication as a platform-mediated process linking discourse, signalling, and conceptualised applicant sensemaking.

This study addresses the persistent misalignment between Arabic language curricula in Chinese universities and the communicative demands of Arabic-mediated business work. Adopting an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, we surveyed 105 Chinese graduates who use Arabic in professional settings and conducted follow-up interviews with three lecturers responsible for Arabic for Business Purposes (ABP) courses. Exploratory factor analysis confirmed three reliable constructs: teaching methodology, workplace ability, and future training needs, while regression analyses showed that learner-centered, task-based teaching methodologies significantly predict graduates’ perceived workplace ability and heighten their awareness of ongoing training needs. The qualitative findings illuminated high-stakes communicative events such as negotiations, client correspondence, and intercultural meetings, and revealed systematic gaps between academic instruction and workplace discourse practices. Integrating quantitative and qualitative strands, the study proposes a dual-layer instructional model consisting of eight developmental stages and five interrelated competence domains that link classroom tasks to authentic business communication events. The model offers a contextualized pathway for redesigning ABP curricula in China and contributes to wider debates on how language-for-specific-purposes programmes can better support employability and professional communication readiness.

This study contributes to the literature on corporate diversity and crisis management by analyzing stakeholder perceptions in the aftermath of Google’s and Microsoft’s sexual harassment scandals. The results reveal that both scandals were construed from the perspective of activism, an inherent feature of social media communication. While users made demands for additional corrective action from both companies, Google’s scandal was predominantly defined from the frames of controllability and perceived injustice, possibly eroding corporate reputation. By contrast, the frame of severity prevailed in the online discourse around Microsoft and showed a delineation between perceptions of senior leadership and HR. The findings have implications for the practice of communication management with respect to scandals.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have ignited discourse within the Technical and Professional Communications (TPC) community in relation to authorship and accountability. This article employs a qualitative synthesis of current and theoretical scholarship regarding authorship theory and LLMs. This analysis argues that while LLMs provide assistance to improve human-generated text, LLMs are unable to participate in authorship, as they cannot be held accountable for their outputs, participate in reciprocity, or demonstrate rhetorical awareness regarding audience and context. The analysis urges professors and professionals to consider concrete guidelines surrounding LLM usage to create transparency in the classroom and workplace.

Personality testing is an elementary part of recruitment. The test results are increasingly considered a necessary means of obtaining information about candidates’ personalities and suitability. This has raised questions about who has the right to define a candidate’s personality in recruitment interviews. Here, we use conversation analysis to describe two strategies through which recruiters evaluate candidates’ personalities based on the personality test results and show how these methods are linked to different interactional affordances. We recommend the candidate-driven strategy that attends to the candidates’ fundamental right to define their personality in a situation where their career is at stake.

We conduct a close reading and micro-level analysis of a market update released by Restaurant Group Plc, a UK leisure firm, during the COVID-19 pandemic to examine its communication functions. While the market update aligns with communicative action theory by enhancing information transparency, it also deploys various rhetorical strategies, including impersonalization, positive self-evaluation, and metaphors consistent with impression management. The overly optimistic tone bears no relation to subsequent corporate outcomes. This study provides valuable insights for business and professional communication practitioners and students, enabling them to interpret the linguistic characteristics of market updates as a distinct genre of corporate communication.

This article examines the relationship between politeness, culture, and speech acts in multilingual corporate communication. It emphasizes the role of second language acquisition (SLA) practices in teaching politeness strategies, with a focus on explicit instruction, immersion programs, and authentic language practice. The article also offers suggestions to enhance communication in such environments, using Luxembourg as an example of a multicultural business environment and highlighting the importance of understanding cultural norms and expectations surrounding politeness. By examining the interplay between these factors, this study aims to contribute to improved communication practices in multilingual corporate settings.

English professional communication competence is crucial for fresh graduates to succeed in the workplace and has been identified as a national priority in Malaysia to enhance employability. This study explores key attributes of that competence based on interviews with 12 employers and 9 graduates. Using a basic interpretive qualitative approach, 26 attributes were identified across four areas: linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competence. The findings highlight the importance of aligning educational outcomes with workplace demands and offer insights that support curriculum development, targeted instruction, and assessment—informing policy and future research to enhance graduate readiness.

This study examines metaphors in the hospitality discourse of Singapore (SG) and Hong Kong (HK) using conceptual metaphor theory, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis. We identify the key source domains employed in luxury hotel websites across both regions and use quantitative methods to reveal metaphorical patterns in each corpus. The findings reveal that the SG corpus exhibits a greater inclination toward FORTUNE metaphors, whereas the HK corpus shows a prominence of MAGIC metaphors. Against this background, we argue the importance of a frequency-based collocational approach for analyzing conceptual metaphors, as it facilitates the exploration of the sociocultural dimensions embedded in hospitality discourse.

This article examines the often-overlooked role played by classical dialectics in managerial discourse, highlighting its enduring relevance in business communication instruction. Through comparative analysis, the article shows how Peter F. Drucker’s management theories draw on classical dialectics and how an applied liberal arts approach can inform interpersonal workplace dialogue and strengthen managerial effectiveness. The analysis suggests that, through the Druckerian lens, classical dialectic effectively bridges practical wisdom ( phronesis ) and action ( praxis ) in management. The article concludes that incorporating classical dialectics into business communication curricula and training can enhance modern management education.

This ethnographic case study provides authentic insights into the intertextual negotiation processes for a particular merger-and-acquisition (M&A) transaction in the context of international legal practice, involving interdisciplinary legal and business professionals. Using genre and discourse analytical methodology, this study focuses on the interactional discourse practices and textual products used for negotiation of the primary sale and purchase agreement. By providing sociolinguistic insights into the M&A negotiation process, these research findings can promote a better understanding of the professional discourse activities and interactional role behaviors for this very important area of international business law practice.

The problem of discourse marginalization in intercultural meetings is usually attributed to linguistic or pragmatic shortcomings of marginalized second language English speakers who are seen as either “learners,” in contrast to first-language English speakers, as uncommunicative, or even as professionally incompetent. The influence of culturally oriented participation styles, distinct patterns of turn-taking behavior, has so far not been considered as a contributing factor. The present study examines intercultural meeting discourse and reveals how diverse participation styles can lead to marginalization. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

Using a mixed methods approach that relies on conceptual metaphor theory, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis, the study investigates the use and function of metaphor in a self-constructed corpus of U.K. bank chairman’s letters to shareholders during the study period, covering a state of relative stability (2002-2007), financial crisis and scandals (2008-2019), and the coronavirus pandemic (2020). We find evidence that bank chairmen use conventional metaphors to communicate with shareholders. Additionally, the choice of metaphors is conditional on the contextual environment in which banks operate. Further qualitative analysis of the metaphors supports a persuasive role that depends on the contextual environment.

Although power manifests as a form of social behavior through language, how it contributes to business English lingua franca (BELF) discourses remains underresearched. This article problematizes how perceptions of power dynamics manifest through choices of BELF discourses as practiced in the Bangladeshi ready-made garments (RMG) industry. Data for this study were collected from interviews with three levels of business professionals. Findings show that perceived power is embedded in everyday business discourses to both empower and disempower speakers and influence differences in their language use. Specifically, perceived organizational position, business position, linguistic ability, and sociocultural identity impacted language differences.

This study investigates the impact of guest speaker programs on student engagement and skill development in a university setting, focusing on different types of speakers: alumni and industry experts. Through a quantitative analysis involving 159 business students, the research examines how speaker characteristics influence perceived learning outcomes, problem-solving abilities, and communication skills. The findings reveal that alumni speakers, sharing a common educational background with the students, significantly enhance students’ perceived learning outcome and communication skills because of their relatability and personal insights. The implications of these findings underscore the need for educational institutions to strategically select guest speakers to optimize educational outcomes and prepare students more effectively for professional environments. This study contributes to the broader discourse on integrating practical experiences within academic curricula to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application in higher education.

Effective Q&A management in team presentations is a crucial yet often neglected aspect in academic discourse. Building upon Usera and Fuller’s previous work, this article explores the intricacies of Q&A management for teams. It outlines three key challenges teams face in managing Q&A, introduces two common components (isolated and embedded Q&A) with strategic insights, and proposes techniques for anticipating and responding to questions. By aligning Q&A strategies with the five team presentation formats identified by Usera and Fuller, this article offers a comprehensive framework for enhancing team presentations, with implications for educators, practitioners, and researchers in public speaking.

Business and professional communication courses hold special opportunities to contribute to students’ development of entrepreneurial mindsets through the use and extension of classical rhetorical theory and praxis. We situate pedagogical activities within the context of the entrepreneurial venture pitch by using Rhetorical Canons of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery to develop oral discourse while recognizing and developing entrepreneurial mindsets. We utilize elements of entrepreneurial mindset development presented by Kuratko et al. and Daspit et al. to introduce business and professional communication instructors to cognitive, behavioral, and emotional aspects contributing to the establishment of entrepreneurial mindsets.

Marginalization in decision-making discourse results in disempowerment of the marginalized and detracts from the efficacy of participatory decision making. In ESL contexts, it is usually associated with English proficiency. But this view ignores the influence of preferences for different participation styles, an understanding of which is essential for the development of effective pedagogical remedies to the problem of marginalization. The present study addresses this gap by investigating discourse participation and marginalization from a participation styles perspective. Findings reveal that marginalization resulted from a failure to adopt turn-taking strategies associated with dominant participation styles. Implications for pedagogy are discussed.

This article argues for using discourse analysis in business and management curricula to increase language awareness. To that end, an ecolinguistic discourse analysis approach (Stibbe, 2015a) for teaching sustainability is proposed. The article first explores sustainability discourse in two chief executive officer letters to shareholders followed by a classroom implementation enabling students to practise discourse analytical skills. Students examined vocabulary, hedging, modals, abstract and concrete representation, and social actors. Linguistic features were interpreted to reveal communicators’ underlying ideologies. This systematic analytical approach allows students to reflect on communication processes and how these processes can be used strategically when communicating in organizational contexts.

This study aims to compare how leading companies in Spain and in Spanish-speaking Latin America communicate corporate social responsibility or sustainability on their web pages. For this purpose, the pages of 68 companies were examined to establish the accessibility of such topics and to trace how their prominence and wording had evolved over time. The results show a trend toward greater uniformity in both Spain and Latin America, with corporate social responsibility/sustainability discourse gaining in prominence and “responsibility”-related terms being gradually replaced by those related to “sustainability.” Various cases hint that changes in terminology may be unrelated to any clear distinction between both terms.

This study examines how and why 20 instructors (17 tenure-line and 3 nontenure-line) in introductory service courses enact their pedagogical values and address current concerns (e.g., personal branding, LinkedIn, and applicant tracking systems) when teaching résumés and cover letters. Research methods included a demographics survey, qualitative interviews, and critical discourse analysis of assignment sheets and deidentified student examples. Results provide an opportunity to renegotiate gaps between Business and Professional Communication’s research and pedagogical methods, shifting from overemphasizing formatting and checklists and toward understanding job applications as workplace genre ecologies to encourage deeper learning.

Business adopted a terminology of sustainability to defend, then justify, and finally explain practices that acknowledged resource limitations as inherent in the business environment. Tracing the rhetoric across a half century of business use demonstrates an expansion of the concept of sustainability to encompass managerial attention to finite human, capital, and political resources. A rhetoric of sustainability seemed to promise a revolution in management practice, and practitioners have indeed adopted principles of complex systems. The sustainability terminology retains its narrower focus on environmentally responsible corporate activities, however, and management communication pedagogy has not yet recognized the emerging discourse of adaptive communication practices.

This article reports on the use of discourse maps in conjunction with genre and discourse analysis to help teach communicative practices for contract negotiation. Using one map as a baseline to understand the intertextual process of negotiating a contract in communication with business clients and counterpart lawyers, other maps can zoom in and examine the discursive features of email genres, cover letters, and different versions of the contract under negotiation. The type of discourse maps developed in this study can be utilized for task-based writing materials and role-play activities that facilitate the authentic experience of negotiating a business deal.

Leveraging a team’s diverse perspectives can be a powerful way to foster team innovation. A common approach to leverage team differences involves tool-based approaches, including brainstorming, mind-mapping, and whiteboarding. However, the effective use of ideational tools as a means to innovation often assumes high levels of team cohesion and productivity—dynamics that may not be safe to assume, especially in teams with high levels of diversity. This study investigates how workplace teams at a Biotech company use discourse to innovate, and in doing so, instantiate a larger rhetorical practice known as difference-driven inquiry.

We argue that language awareness and discourse analytical skills should be part of business communication curricula. To this end, we propose a three-step analytical model drawing on organizational and critical discourse studies, and approaches from systemic-functional linguistics, to explore agency and action in business communication. Focusing on language and discourse helps students to analyze texts more systematically, researchers to gain deeper insights into organizational discourse, and practitioners to reflect on communication processes and produce texts with more impact. We view discourse as central to organizational processes and render a specific approach accessible and easy to integrate into business communication curricula.

The ability to copy in relevant stakeholders has rendered the business email a useful tool for managing interpersonal relations and operational matters. However, CCing in business email has remained vastly underresearched in workplace discourse literature, a gap this article seeks to address. We explore the functions of CCing in workplace emails and the way formality is negotiated by writers in one organization. We draw on the analysis of email chains and discourse-based interviews and show that employees strategically project professional achievements and assume and deny responsibility for company decisions as they shift between the sender/receiver positions in the chain.

This article reports a discourse analysis of journals from adult learners during a 1-week residency in Cape Town, South Africa. The theoretical posture is a critical dialogic perspective, making use of a postcolonial understanding of intercultural interactions. The purpose of the study was exploratory. The analysis suggests that demographic variables (e.g., race), prior international travel, and experiences during the residency influence the amount and pace of cognitive change. Results include both questions for future research and suggestions for educators.

Hostile challenges to planned organization change are common and challenging to deal with effectively. Little research has explained successful responses to such stakeholder hostility. To address this gap, we use the concept of readiness to characterize the content of hostile challenges. We also use rhetorical strategies based on speech act theory to describe options for responding to those challenges. Because change agents must choose among multiple strategies, we continue a line of research investigating relative preferences among them. Ultimately, our aim is to offer six lessons for change agents who face hostile challenges based on evidence from research.

The aim of this article is to study employees’ discursive construction of disparate survivor responses. The analysis reveals how employees position themselves simultaneously within different types of categories by use of discursive actions. Drawing on various discourses, the actors reject having one solid core of identity and instead signal the existence of various flexible identities. The article contributes to a greater understanding of the importance of discourse within organizational change. An increased managerial sensitivity toward employee discourse may help to understand why employees obstruct organizational changes and subsequently make it easier to preempt and handle such reactions.