Communicating in Digital Age Corporations

The distinctive point of the book is its innovative interdisciplinary approach to business communication, with interconnections between linguistics, sociology, and critical organisational studies as applied to the corporate world. It offers a first-hand insight into primary business discourse with a deeper understanding and analysis of business processes and mechanisms underlying and reflected in enterprise software-mediated communication. It answers the question what ‘doing business’ in the digital age is about and illustrates ‘business discourse’ from practitioners’ point of view.
Grounded in the analysis of empirical data, pertaining both to internal and external business communication, the author reflects on the reality of accelerated and pressurised communication in global IT corporations. Following a communication-centred approach, this monograph puts the topic of enterprise software-mediated business discourse into a multi-layered perspective of how global corporations operate, what their primary goals are, and what kind of (political) power they execute. Moreover, it demonstrates how profit-driven corporations can be viewed and interpreted as strategically acting systems within a specific sociological framework.

Anna Danielewicz-Betz is business English lecturer at Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. She has worked internationally throughout her career for institutions such as Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, and recently as associate professor at the Centre for Language Research, University of Aizu, Japan. Her research interests include business/corporate communication, socio-pragmatics, interdisciplinary studies (e.g. forensic linguistics) and internationalisation of higher education. She also is an experienced business consultant and trainer offering customised in-house business English courses and coaching services for multinational companies.

“This important book stands out in the rather cluttered field of texts on business communication, providing perhaps the most sophisticated and careful analysis of business discourse that I have come across in many years.  Adopting a strongly interdisciplinary perspective, Danielewicz-Betz brings together theoretical sophistication with careful and detailed analyses of everyday business discourse.  The result is a text that everyone from the beginning student to the advanced researcher will benefit from reading.” (Dennis Mumby, Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)

“Increasing use of enterprise software in modern corporations is hard to ignore in business discourse research. Software-mediated communication connects business practitioners all over the world, enabling them to brainstorm, negotiate, and exercise decision-making power. Anna Danielewicz-Betz’s work is grounded on the extant literature and on empirical data. This timely and innovative contribution to business discourse research is clearly a must-read for researchers and students in the field.” (Hiromasa Tanaka, Professor, Meisei University, Tokyo, Japan)