Erika Darics

• PhD
• Lecturer at University of Groningen

This chapter highlights the importance of combining approaches to metaphor analysis based on developments in the study of metaphors in organisational and discourse-focused disciplines. The chapter showcases a proposed method through the analysis of interviews with two employees and demonstrates why it is important to consider close linguistic and b...

This chapter offers an overview of the theoretical foundations of the book, making a point about the importance of language in shaping organisational processes and outcomes. The authors challenge the view that considers communication to be a mere “technical skill”; rather, they argue that language should be considered as a dynamic and context-bound...

Stories and storytelling are ubiquitous in organisational settings and have been the focus of much academic research. In this chapter, using interactional sociolinguistics as a methodological tool and taking a social practice approach to narrative, we focus on the interactional achievement of rumour (i.e. unofficial storytelling) as in situ social...

In this concluding chapter, we revisit the main themes and insights from the book in the context of organisational healing. The chapter demonstrates why language and communication matter for organisational healing, a process that involves restoring interpersonal connections and renewing organisational practices, and which is essential for fostering...

In this chapter, we outline some of the key theoretical issues you might consider before carrying out your own linguistic research into organisational practice. First, we discuss the issue of getting access to a research site and data collection. Second, we consider the status of recordings and transcription. Third, we address issues of generalisab...

Teams are ubiquitous in organisations; however, the in situ analysis of teamwork as it happens has rarely been the object of research. Despite claims that fostering team spirit is essential for success, trying to pin down such a notoriously ephemeral, slippery, and abstract notion has proved difficult. Using transcripts of naturally occurring meeti...

This chapter investigates what external communication on social media platforms, such as Twitter, can reveal about organisational members’ core values, beliefs, principles, and perceptions—in short, their organisational identity. By combining insights from organisational identity research with metadiscourse analysis, our study offers a comprehensiv...

In this chapter, we showcase the use of the Montreal School’s notion of ventriloquism to demonstrate how not only human but also other-than-human entities can be agentive and consequential to the communicative constitution of organisation. More specifically, using transcripts of naturally occurring talk, we demonstrate how other-than-human entities...

Leadership research often uses interviews as a way of gaining access to organisational players’ lay theories of leadership, i.e. who they consider leaders to be and what they consider leadership is. Such an approach elicits post hoc reflection and thus runs the risk of recycling existing discourses of leadership. Conversely, in this chapter, we use...

Applied Corpus Linguistics Special Issue on Corpus Linguistics and the Language of COVID-19: Applications and Outcomes; Guest Edited by David Oakey, Benet Vincent Communication has played a critical role during the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and communicators have had a particularly difficult task in persuading different types of a...

This book showcases various methodological approaches to the analysis of organizational talk and text. Arguing that organizations are discursive constructions that are communicatively constituted, the authors use the analysis of transcripts of audio-recordings of naturally-occurring workplace talk and authentic written texts to demonstrate what app...

Computer-mediated webchat is fast replacing voice support in customer service. Whilst previous studies have explored how communication breaks down in customer service voice exchange in off-shored/outsourced multinational companies; studies into webchat exchange in the same industries are scarce. Given the high stakes of customer service interaction...

The crucial role language plays in constituting our reality, and in achieving political influence and control, has long been known in scholarship. However, appreciation of the role of language in understanding our social realities and power relations has not been fully translated to education or even to research beyond linguistically focussed acade...

The crucial role language plays in constituting our reality, and in achieving political influence and control, has long been known in scholarship. However, appreciation of the role of language in understanding our social realities and power relations has not been fully translated to education or even to research beyond linguistically focussed acade...

The crucial role language plays in constituting our reality, and in achieving political influence and control, has long been known in scholarship. However, appreciation of the role of language in understanding our social realities and power relations has not been fully translated to education or even to research beyond linguistically focussed acade...

The crucial role language plays in constituting our reality, and in achieving political influence and control, has long been known in scholarship. However, appreciation of the role of language in understanding our social realities and power relations has not been fully translated to education or even to research beyond linguistically focussed acade...

Professional communication consultancy work which examines business processes and organisational realities through the lens of language is gaining legitimacy. In this chapter I examine the tensions these new kinds of professional-academic collaborations may create. Using examples from my recent consultancy projects, and drawing on existing scholars...

Communication and, through it, language have become key elements of business and organizational life. How organizations interact within their walls and with the outside world fundamentally affects business processes, creating organizational culture, shaping public perceptions, and influencing consumer choices. This essay calls for a greater acknowl...

Digital communication technologies led to a revolution in how people interact at work: relying on computer-mediated communication technologies is now a must, rather than an alternative. This empirical study investigates how colleagues in a virtual team use synchronous online communication platform in the workplace. Inspired by the conceptualisation...

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...

This article makes a case for increasing the discursive awareness of practitioners and developing their discourse analytical skills. Although the importance of such an awareness is being increasingly recognized by scholars and practitioners alike, the insights of fine-grained discursive analyses of talk-in-interaction have rarely been seriously con...

Words are the foundation of business, affecting everything from how companies operate internally to how the conduct business externally. They are more than just a means to an end: they convey identities, cultures and visions, of both the companies and individuals. Featuring dozens of real-life examples, this book explains how language works in busi...

At the end of this chapter, you will be able to • define what interpersonal conflicts are, and identify the various stages and conflict styles; • have an insight into the linguistic and conversational features that characterize conflict talk; • understand the basic concepts of conversation analysis and have a go at applying the method to conversati...

This chapter demonstrates how the affordances of computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies can frame and reframe swearing in the workplace. In particular, we provide evidence that communicating via digital technologies leads to novel communicative situations – situations that might be held accountable for the spread of swearing at work. Th...

Doing leadership in the virtual realm has now become a routine part of many leaders’ daily work, yet our understanding of how leadership is enacted in mediated contexts—especially in text-only channels—is very limited. By applying micro-level analysis to naturally occurring instant message conversations, this article exposes the strategies leaders...

Although text-based, digitally mediated communication has been around for more than 60 years, the communicative environment and the digital genres that came into existence in this environment are still new and unsettled. The reason for this " novelty " is twofold. First, the evolving media and emerging new communication technologies create new soci...

It is already a truism that emerging communication technologies have changed the landscape of communication in every aspect of our lives, but this is specifically true for how we communicate at work. Advances in communication technologies have enabled a wide range of digital communication modes to be utilized for both internal and external business...

Digital Business Discourse offers a distinctively language- and discourse-centered approach to digitally mediated business and professional communication, providing a timely and comprehensive assessment of the current digital communication practices of today's organisations and workplaces. It is the first dedicated publication to address how comput...

Instant messaging is one of the most popular communication technologies in virtual teams, enabling interactions to intertwine whole working days, thus creating the sense of copresence for team members who are geographically dispersed. Through close linguistic analyses of naturally occurring data from a virtual team, this article discusses the impli...

This study focuses on the interactional functions of non-standard spelling, in particular letter repetition, used in text-based computer-mediated communication as a means of non-verbal signalling. The aim of this paper is to assess the current state of non-verbal cue research in computer-mediated discourse and demonstrate the need for a more compre...

Drawing on the newest findings of politeness research, this paper proposes an interactionally grounded approach to computer-mediated discourse (CMD). Through the analysis of naturally occurring text-based synchronous interactions of a virtual team the paper illustrates that the interactional politeness approach can account for linguistic phenomena...

Based on close examinations of instant message (IM) interactions, this chapter argues that an interactional sociolinguistic approach to computer-mediated language use could provide explanations for phenomena that previously could not be accounted for in computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA). Drawing on the theoretical framework of relational...

This article presents a research project on CMD in virtual teams and proposes a methodology synthesizing various analytical frameworks. It introduces a multidisciplinary perspective that accounts for pragmatic, linguistic, sociolinguistic and cultural factors affecting CMD: the theoretical framework of communicative competencies functions as synthe...