Writing Business

Genres, Media and Discourses

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, Catherine Nickerson, Catherine Ross Nickerson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317882282
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Writing Business: Genres, Media and Discourses offers an analysis of the genres and functions of written discourse in the business context, involving a variety of modes of communication. The evolution of new forms of writing is a key focus of this collection and is only partly attributable to the ever increasing application of technology at work. Alongside machine-mediated texts such as electronic mail and computer-generated correspondence, the contextualised analyses of both traditional genres such as facsimiles and direct mailing, and of lesser studied texts such as invitations for bids, contracts, business magazines and ceremonial speeches, reveal a rich complexity in the forms of communication evolved by organisations and the individuals who work within them, in response to the demands of the social, organisational and cultural contexts in which they operate. This rich textual variation is matched by a discussion of a range of methodological approaches to the development of business writing skills, including rhetorical analysis, organisational communication analysis, social constructionism, genre analysis and survey and experimental methods. Using authentic data and benefiting from a fresh, interdisciplinary approach, the volume will be of interest to students and researchers of business communication, Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), English for Specific Purposes (ESP), and sociolinguistics.

One
Business writing as social action

Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Catherine Nickerson

1. On the Title of This Volume

Giving a book its final title is equivalent to calling it into being, bestowing on it a unique identity that distinguishes it from other books and giving the potential readers an indication of what they may expect to find in it. This creative act takes on further significance when it attempts to capture the collective effort of a group of authors who have agreed to share in the adventure of writing 'under one title'.

A discussion of what distinguishes and unites three well-established descriptive labels that resonate in the title of this volume seems an appropriate starting point. These are 'professional discourse' (Gunnarsson et al. 1997), 'institutional discourse' (Agar 1985; Drew and Sorjonen 1997) and 'business discourse' (Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris 1997). In their introduction to The Construction of Professional Discourse, Gunnarsson and colleagues refer to the legal, medical, social welfare, educational and scientific fields as distinctive 'professional areas' or 'domains', each characterised by 'a unique set of cognitive needs, social conditions and relationships with society at large' (1997: 5). Although the role of their language and discourse will vary, too, they argue that beyond the specificity of individual professional discourses there are common underlying processes which the various chapters set out to explore. Institutional discourse as intended by Agar (1985) – i.e. an interaction between an expert and a lay person – is described as 'a major type of professional discourse' by Gunnarsson et al., thus implying that 'professional discourse' is a hyper-category that encompasses several others, or, rather, it is a collective category where discourse is intended in the singular and towards which other institutional genres converge by virtue of sharing in some of its characteristics. If this reading is correct, then 'business discourse' (Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris 1997) can also be seen to be sharing in many of the general characteristics of professional discourse, not only through intertextuality, but also through interdiscursivity; that is, through constitutive linguistic features which can be found in various business discourse genres.¹

The status of the interactants could be seen as a decisive element in the distinction between professional and business discourse: as already mentioned above, in the former (but not in the latter) a lay person is often involved and the professional discourse is therefore of an institutional nature. In contrast, 'business discourse' is dominated by talk and writing between individuals whose main work activities and interests are in the domain of business and who come together for the purpose of doing business. In addition, an active corporate dimension is implied in the identities of these interactants, which may supersede or, at most, co-exist with the interests of any professional group to which they may also happen to belong (Barabas 1990). The majority of the studies included in the present volume report on aspects of writing by and for business individuals and groups, and they therefore constitute 'business' rather than 'professional' discourse. The remaining chapters blur the distinction between the two, however, as exemplified in the contributions by Bargiela-Chiappini and Pogner, who both explore the consequences of hybrid membership of business and professional groups, and in the chapters by Touchstone et al. and Loos, where the interaction is between business and non-business interactants. In the latter studies, although the discourse is more similar to professional (i.e. institutional) discourse it may also be viewed as being distinct from it, since the primary social roles involved are those of buyer and seller rather than those of expert and lay person.² Business writing, therefore, always involves or facilitates doing business. In addition, it encompasses not only intra-group communication within a business organisation (or a unit within a business organisation), but also inter-group interaction, both with other organisations and private individuals, where the purpose of the texts produced as a result is to buy or sell goods or services, or to facilitate the buying and selling of goods and services.

In this volume, writing at work and for work is equivalent to writing as work; that is writing is seen as an activity that shapes organisational and social structures (see section 4 below). We will argue that social constructionism provides an ideal background for the study of writing as a social activity, on which we will project Miller's construct of written and spoken genres as 'typified social action' (Miller 1984) (see sections 2 and 3 below). Furthermore, in a constructionist perspective, the analytically useful dimensions of context (local, organisational, regional, national and so on) adopted in many situated approaches to language analysis are subsumed within the all-encompassing process of 'contextualising', resulting from the interactional activities of social actors, which include the production of written and spoken texts. Contextualising, which employs the social conventions and cultural assumptions brought to bear on the texts by the actors themselves, is also signalled in the unfolding discourse through intertextuality and interdiscursivity (see section 3 below). Many chapters in this book, despite using different methodological approaches, have identified the phenomenon of interconnectedness of texts in the social context, its realisation in real-time and its vital contribution to the dynamics of the interaction.

The concern of the authors in this volume is not only with what actors write and how they write it, but also, and perhaps more importantly, with why they write the way they do, and what the effects of their writing on inter-firm and inter-group relations are (see Bhatia 1993). Although not all authors take an openly constructionist view of social activities (e.g. David, Touchstone et al., Vandermeeren) and therefore of writing, it is clear that the findings of their research reveal the inherently social nature of writing, its relatedness to other social activities and its power to shape the way human life unfolds through purposeful, personal acts of intervention (see section 5).

2. Social Constructionism

Embracing a social constructionist approach to the understanding of writing in and for business implies adherence to the tenets of a theoretical orientation that has been instrumental in the development of some of the critical and radical alternative disciplines that have emerged in the humanities and the social sciences during the last two decades (Burr 1995). Although no single feature characterises social constructionism, there are some underlying assumptions which represent its epistemology:

1. a rejection of the taken-for-granted stance of positivism and empiricism;
2. the cultural and historical relativity of all forms of knowledge;
3. the processual and interactional nature of knowledge;
4. the interdependence of knowledge and patterns of social action.

These tenets underpin an understanding of society and human nature that refutes any definable and discoverable feature in the world and therefore also excludes the existence of objective facts. Moreover, all knowledge is seen as culture- and time-bound. For social constructionism, language is the vehicle for thought in that concepts and categories are passed from one group of people to another through its medium. Language is social action and a means through which the 'construction of the world' is effected. Cognitive or sociological explanations of social phenomena are not acceptable: explanations are to be found in social practices and interpersonal interactions. In other words, reality for the social constructionist is a matter of social definition: 'entities we normally call reality, knowledge, thought, facts, texts, selves, and so on are constructs generated by communities of like-minded peers' (Bruffee 1986: 774; see also Grabe and Kaplan 1996).

The focus on language as social action and the central role attributed to it in the construction of reality is undoubtedly an attractive starting point for any research that seeks to bridge the gap between the researcher and the researched, and between the actions of the researched and social structures. According to constructionism, people 'construct' organisations through daily interaction, and it is therefore there that researchers must place themselves as observers and interpreters of those historically and culturally important happenings as they unfold.

In this volume, the first six chapters and the epilogue acknowledge, to a greater or lesser degree, a debt to moderate constructionism based on the following assumptions:

1. that writing is a social activity that creates arid maintains organisations;
2. that the analysis of social practices in general, and language in particular, is a means towards gaining an understanding of the world; and
3. that culture affects the construction of the world through language.

It is against this broad social constructionist perspective that the concepts of genre and structure(s) are discussed in sections 3 and 4, respectively.

For researchers concerned with communication in professional or organisational communities, and with written communication in particular, social constructionism has proved a useful framework in accounting for how a social group comes to recognise certain actions as germane (e.g. Rubin 1988; Barabas 1990; Orlikowski and Yates 1994).

Among research applying social constructionism to the study of written communication in institutional settings, the edited volume by Rafoth and Rubin (1988) is of particular relevance to our discussion, because it represents an attempt to bridge the gap between the social and the cognitive forms of constructionism. The introductory chapter presents four dimensions, each describing a type of social constructive process, which are illustrated through the relationship between social context and written discourse; thus, 'social contexts and written discourse stand in a reciprocal, mutually constructive relationship, one to the other', and 'the participants ... negotiate the definition of their relationship; discourse has constructed social context' (Rubin 1988:1). Rubin's description of the four constructive processes involved covers many of the concerns of the research in the present volume:

1. writers construct mental representations of the social contexts in which their writing is embedded;
2. writing as a social process or system can create or constitute social contexts;
3. writers – in some senses all writers – create texts collectively with other participants in discourse communities;
4. writers assign consensual values to writing and thus construct a dimension of social meaning. (Rubin 1988: 2)

First of all, writers construct a mental background for their writing including features such as audience, purpose and topics for discussion. The analysis of ceremonial speeches by Carol David (this volume) maps this process in the rhetorical choices of two female CEOs. Although the mechanism writers use to do this is a cognitive one, the actual composition of the mental representation is a consensual one which is determined through a process of social negotiation.

The second assumption relates to the reciprocal relationship between the social action constituted by written communication and the context in which it takes place.³ It is this dimension of social construction that is involved in the process of structuration (see section 4 below), as Rubin demonstrates by using the US Constitution as an example of the production and reproduction of social structures through the creation of, and reference to, a written document (see also Pogner, this volume).

The third assumption explicates the collaborative nature of writing production, and the fourth the consensual nature of its interpretation. Therefore, texts such as a corporate report or a business letter are collectively constructed, either directly through multiple authorship, as in the construction of a legal brief, which Rubin describes – where several lawyers may be involved in drafting one document – or indirectly, through a process of intertextuality. In turn, intertextuality may occur through several different mechanisms such as direct reference to other texts, as is frequently the case in business correspondence, or in the incorporation of what Rubin refers to as linguistic shells or 'boilerplates' (i.e. sections of text which are copied over from previous texts as is common practice in legal discourse), or similarly, in direct reference to other pertinent texts, such as the reference to tax regulations identified by Devitt (1991) in correspondence written by tax accountants. (Intertextuality is discussed in detail in section 3 on Genre below.)

Rubin's third assumption implies the concept of discourse community, as the social group for whom a text has social relevance, and which 'may be roughly understood as a consensus about... what is worth communicating, how it may be communicated, what other members of the community are likely to know and believe to be true about certain subjects, how other members can be persuaded, and so on' (Faigley 1985: 238, quoted in Rubin 1988: 13). Further insights into the workings of discourse communities as social groups formed around shared use of genres emerge from Orlikowski and Yates's (1994) social constructionist research on organisational settings, where 'the notion of community ... broadly includes identifiable social units such as groups, organizations, and occupations (as in Van Maanen and Barley 1984) or communities of practice (Brown and Duguid 1991; Lave and Wenger 1991)' (Orlikowski and Yates 1994: 542). In this approach to the investigation of organisational communication, each social community is seen as having its own set of shared communicative practices, or genres, which the community recognises and uses, and through which it is constituted. A genre such as a memo or business letter may therefore be recognised and used by 'most advanced industrial nations', whereas a genre such as an audit report may be 'specific to transorganizational groups such as occupations and industries' (Yates and Orlikowski 1992: 304). This is discussed in more detail in section 3 below.

Consensus is the principle governing the attribution of values to writing from which social meaning is constructed, in Rubin's fourth assumption (Rubin 1988). This includes the value which is socially assigned to the written medium in general, as opposed to the spoken medium, by a social group. For example, Rubin refers to the veto on note-taking by jurors in the US legal system; Yli-Jokipii (1994) identifies a British preference for written communication in initiating a business contact with a foreign customer, and Rogers and Swales (1990) describe a US corporation where the use of writing is actively discouraged as a medium of internal communication. In each case, the value assigned to the written medium is socially constructed by the group involved, and as several of the contributors in the present volume suggest, this may also extend to the selection of an appropriate medium within the general category of written communication; e.g. Nickerson (this volume) on e-mail communication and Akar and Louhiala-Salminen (this volume) on fax communication.

In business settings, discourse communities are likely to be characterised by 'hybrid membership'; that is, communities composed of individuals with dual, or even multiple, membership. Management consultants are a good example of a hybrid discourse community where the combination of academic and private practice requires mobility across discourses. Tensions within the dual membership of the scientific community and the corporate community and the effect which this has on organisational ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Publisher's acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Business writing as social action
• Part I: Electronic Media and Writing in Organisations
• Part II: Identities, Discourse Communities and Rhetorical Styles
• Part III: Business Genres and their Language
• Part IV: The Business of Relating: Effectiveness, Adaptation and Emotion in Writing
• General Index
• Name Index