Words and Actions

Wait a minute. Why does ‘corporate consultant’ sound more prestigious than ‘business consultant’? Or does it? Do they mean the same thing? How does organizational communication differ from corporate or business communication? And what topics, genres and text types should textbooks on communication in these settings tackle when the genres themselves are blended? Welcome to the challenges of three authors revising a textbook on the power of language in business(?), now turned into a podcast episode and made even more interesting with Wittgenstein and Jonathan Clifton joining the writing table. Tune in if you want answers and more questions on the language game as we are playing it. For more information, references and a full transcript please visit our website: wordsandactions.blog   In this episode on business (or is it corporate?) communication textbooks, we cannot help mention the one we wrote ourselves and are currently revising. The first edition of Language in Business, Language at Work is available here. ChatGPT answered Bernard’s question “Is there a difference between business communication and corporate communication?”:  “Yes, there is a distinction between business communication and corporate communication, although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. The differences lie in their scope, focus, and the context in which they are applied: Business Communication:     • Scope: Business communication is a broader term that encompasses all types of communication within a business environment. This includes communication between employees, between different departments, with customers, and with external stakeholders.     • Focus: Business communication focuses on the day-to-day exchange of information, ideas, and messages to facilitate the smooth functioning of a business. It includes various forms of communication, such as emails, memos, reports, meetings, and presentations.     • Audience: The audience for business communication can be internal (within the organization) or external (outside the organization), and the content can range from operational details to marketing messages. Corporate Communication:     • Scope: Corporate communication is a subset of business communication that specifically deals with the communication strategies and activities of an organization as a whole. It involves managing and conveying a consistent corporate identity and message.     • Focus: Corporate communication is strategic and often focuses on shaping the public image of the organization, maintaining a positive reputation, and managing relationships with external stakeholders, such as investors, customers, the media, and the public.     • Audience: The primary audience for corporate communication is often external stakeholders, but it also includes internal stakeholders. It aims to create a favorable perception of the company and ensure that its values and messages align with its overall business goals. We also searched for the phrases ‘business communication’, ‘corporate communication’ and ‘organizational communication’ in large corpora of American and British English in general. Here is part of concordance (see glossary) from the British National Corpus 2014. Still in the introduction, we then look at a critique of economic textbooks, drawing on the work of our interview guest from episode 26 (the language of corporate social responsibility Part 2): Stibbe, A. (2020). Ecolinguistics and economics: The power of language to build worlds. WEA Commentaries, 10(3), 2-7. In the  interview, Jonathan Clifton challenges the idea that “in a court of law, or in a civil court, whosoever is right is going to win, and whosoever is wrong is going to lose”. Instead he says, success depends on “how successful lawyers or defendants or witnesses, expert witnesses can marshal resources to make a convincing argument”. This echoes a scene in the film Anatomy of a Fall (2023): when the suspect assures her lawyer that “I did not kill him”, her lawyer replies: “That is not the point.” The film is much recommended - courtroom dramas don’t get better than this! Jonathan’s book is broad in scope, ranging from legal language to football punditry. As for the latter, he mentions the popular BBC programme Match of the Day, which is hosted by former player and outspoken commentator Gary Lineker. In the final part of the episode, we first look at advice for email writing from this textbook: Hartley, P., Marriott, S., & Knapton, H. (2023). Professional and Business Communication: Personal strategies for the post-digital world. (3rd ed.) Routledge. The authors of that textbook in turn quote: Kelly, S. (2019). Computer Mediated Communication for Business: From theory to practice. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.   That’s it for this episode - see you next time!  

Raves, poker nights and Marvel movies – no costs or effort were spared in this final episode on CSR to raise awareness about one of the most pervasive manifestations of discrimination: accentism. In the presence of experts, we uncover what is hidden beneath the surface, and just when we thought we would never judge someone based on the sound waves they produce, we dare(d) ourselves and you to eat the pudding…   Long Notes: More information, a full transcript and academic references on wordsandactions.blog. We start episode 28 by critically reflecting on anti-discrimination efforts in the workplace, which, unless they change the organisational culture, all too often do not have the desired or even an adverse effect. We then move on to the notion of intersectionality, which linguist and writer Kat Gupta has likened to a deck of cards. The fascinating finding that feelings of non-belonging are neurologically similar to physical pain is reported here: Eisenberger, N. I. (2012). The pain of social disconnection: examining the shared neural underpinnings of physical and social pain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13(6), 421-434. Moving on to the language aspect of workplace discrimination, Bernard entions Erin Carrie’s  and Rob Drummond’s Accentism Project, which, among other things, is a real treasure trove of testimonials.   For a light touch, we look at how film characters are stereotyped through their accents - who could forget Babs and Rocky from Chicken Run? In another corner of the cinematic universe, the villain with a British Received Pronunciation accent is so common that he has sparked parodies in advertising. In real life, however, this particular accent is nearly extinct: Lindsey, G. (2019). English after RP: Standard British pronunciation today. Springer. Linguistic stereotyping and accentism can have harsh consequences, for how competent someone is perceived to be to how much investor money they can attract or the severity of court sentence Our second guest, Annelise Ly, mentions the metaphor of culture as an onion with layers. This idea goes back to Geert Hofstede’s work on national cultures in the workplace: Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s Consequences: International differences in work-related values. London: Sage. While still influential, Hofstede’s work has been the subject of much criticism, and other metaphors have been proposed: Fang, T. (2005). From “onion” to “ocean”: Paradox and change in national cultures. International Studies of Management & Organization, 35(4), 71-90. In the final part of the episode, we use Mats Deutschmann’s RAVE resource to test our own stereotypes around accents. Mats and his colleague Anders Steinvall have written about how to use the resource to counter prejudice:  Deutschmann, M., & Steinvall, A. (2020). Combatting linguistic stereotyping and prejudice by evoking stereotypes. Open Linguistics, 6(1), 651-671. We encourage you to give it a go yourself, it’s quite an eye-opener.

Prepare to meet some ignorant pigs and silly cows in our second episode on CSR... Together with an expert in ecolinguistics, we will explore the discursive construction of our ideology-laden relationship to nature (and animals in particular!) via the analysis of presuppositions and metaphors, going from tepid COP27 implementation plans on global heating to Chinese self-serving CSR reporting. It will become painfully clear how and why language matters and you'll find out more about your ecosomatic awareness.    As always, you can find more information, references to research and a full transcript on https://wordsandactions.blog. In the introduction, we mention the Yale Programme for Climate. Its most recent survey of  on public attitudes to climate change dates from 2022 and includes the following two maps. The different colours indicates the percentage of the population thinking that climate change will have a direct impact on them. The article on metaphors in climate change discourse is Atanasova, D., & Koteyko, N. (2017). Metaphors in Guardian Online and Mail Online opinion-page content on climate change: War, religion, and politics. Environmental Communication, 11(4), 452-469. This article gives a good overview of war metaphors more generally:  Flusberg, S. J., Matlock, T., & Thibodeau, P. H. (2018). War metaphors in public discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 33(1), 1-18. We also talk about a chapter in the following book:  Goatly, A. (2007). Washing the Brain: Metaphor and hidden ideology. Benjamins. The cue for our discussion about presuppositions in proverbs about pigs is taken from this article by our interview guest:  Stibbe, A. (2003). As charming as a pig: The discursive construction of the relationship between pigs and humans. Society & Animals, 11(4), 375-392. The origin of the German phrase ‘Schwein gehabt’ meaning having been lucky is not entirely clear, but may go back to a mediaeval custom to give a pig as a consolation prize to someone who had lost in a competition.  The idea that pigs are filthy is also expressed in the film Pulp Fiction (1994), where animals consumed by humans are compared to pets. The different ways in which humans relate to animals are put into stark contrast in this row of shops in a small English town. Our discussion of presuppositions draws on  Polyzou, A. (2015). Presupposition in discourse: Theoretical and methodological issues. Critical Discourse Studies, 12(2), 123-138. Our interview guest, Arran Stibbe, is the founder of the International Ecolinguistics Association and runs a free online course called The Stories We Live By. During the interview, Veronika mentions Buy Nothing Day in Britain, which is on the last Friday in November (but feel free to buy nothing on any day of the year!).  The seminal work in ecofeminism was Daly, M. (1978). Gyn/Ecology: The metaethics of radical feminism. Beacon Press.  while a recent article focuses on the language angle is  Appleby, R., & Pennycook, A. (2017). Swimming with sharks, ecological feminism and posthuman language politics. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 14(2-3), 239-261. In the analysis part of the episode, we report on the work on CSR reporting by a number of researchers from China. We mention some recent work that a previous interview guest, Matteo Fuoli, has done with Annika Beelitz, on the discourse of energy companies In the analysis part of the episode, we report on the work on CSR reporting by a number of researchers from China. We mention some recent work that a previous interview guest, Matteo Fuoli, has done with Annika Beelitz, on the discourse of energy companies.   Fuoli, M. and Beelitz, A. (2022). Framing the path to net zero: A corpus analysis of carbon disclosures by the world’s largest corporate emitters, 2011-2020. Paper presented at the 6th Corpora and Discourse international conference. 26-28 August, Bertinoro/Italy. The text we analyse is the 2021 CSR report by China Southern Airlines 2021. The complete report is available both in Chinese and in English.  Finally, we’d like to mention that Erika, Veronika and Bernard are working on the second edition of the Language in Business, Language at Work textbook (Bloomsbury, 2018), which will feature a new chapter on CSR.  See you again for the third and final part of this mini-series!

All good things come in threes. Or more. Add a Chief Sustainability Officer, a body positive Barbie doll,  a purple inclusive M&M and an actual expert in applied ethics and you get a lively discussion on true colours, washings and genuine CSR efforts in the first episode of our new mini-series (it comes in threes) on corporate social responsibility. Have a listen and find out more, including how energy companies account for their profits and your bills via legitimisation strategies.   More information about the podcast and  a full transcript can be found on wordsandactions.blog. In this episode early in the introduction, Erika cites two definitions. She first cites the definition of sustainability in a 1987 report by the World Commission on Environment and Development (a sub-organisation of the United Nations) called “Our Common Future”. It can be found here. The second definition is on corporate social responsibility and taken from the website Investopedia.  The examples we give of CSR in action, including attempts that backfired, are body-positive Barbie dolls, the “inclusive” and desexualised M&M candy figures and a now (in)famous Benetton advert. The latter is  reproduced in Erika’s and Veronika’s textbook Language in Business, Language at Work (Macmillan Higher Education, 2018; the second edition will have Bernard as the third author. Still in the introduction, we also mention this article on the social responsibility of business, the reference to which can be found on our website.  Every summer, the Pride season in Western countries now comes with many examples of “pinkwashing”, where companies claim to be queer-friendly, but either don’t have relevant policies or even have practices that go against LGBT equality. Some examples from 2022 can be found here.  Towards the end of the introduction, Veronika talks about legitimation as a discourse strategy, based on these works by van Leeuwen and Reyes. We then proceed to the interview with Garrath Williams. On the links between ‘responsible’ and ‘response’, the Oxford English Dictionary has the following to say (shortened – the OED has lots of detail): Etymology: < Anglo-Norman responssable, ressponsable, Anglo-Norman and Middle French responsable answerable, entitled to an answer …, answerable, required to answer …, that responds, that constitutes a reply (15th cent.), apparently < classical Latin respōns- , past participial stem of respondēre respond v. … probably < classical Latin respōnsāre to reply  While we mention but do not elaborate on the Drink Responsibly campaign in the UK, someone else has, in a 2014 report on alcohol and the night-time economy.  During our analysis of the ExxonMobil press release, we wonder if the company has a Chief Sustainability Officer. The answer is no but it has had an external sustainability advisory panel since 2009.    In episode 26, we’ll talk about language and the environment – see you then!

Are you one of those people who is always tricked into doing or buying things you don’t want? Do you want to find out how they do it or how to do it yourself? You’re in luck! If you listen to this episode, you will find out all about it! You will even get free access to all the other W&A episodes on language in business, politics and beyond and you’ll discover that your current annoyance and reluctance by reading this is caused by genre awareness. Do it now or regret it later! #hardselltacticsshamelesslybroughttoyoubuyW&A.   The episode, as always, is accompanied by a blog post on wordsandactions.blog, where we publish additional resources, and importantly for this episode, the images we discuss.  In this episode on ‘selling, hard and soft and everything in between’, we want to raise advertising literacy by showing and identifying how language and semiotics are used in marketing to influence people’s buying behaviour. In the introductory chat, it soon becomes obvious that advertising is everywhere in different shapes and forms and that all three hosts have succumbed to it: we even shamelessly do it on the podcast itself (can you spot all instances?) and we have to admit to having bought clothes, paintbrushes and ice-cream ourselves, fuelled by subtle and less subtle advertising. In the introduction, Erika refers to Arran Stibbe’s work, in which he analyses the discourse in textbooks on economics. We then move on to elusive types of advertising, where the genre is bended and blended with others so it is harder to spot. Veronika starts with an example of so-called native advertising. Later, Bernard mentions the study below about the phenomenon: Apostol, N.-E. (2020). What is known about native advertising in editorial contexts? A descriptive literature review. Journal of Media Research 37, 59-81. Veronika also refers to product placement and illustrates how the appearance of the Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses in the Tom Cruise blockbusters Top Gun and Maverick boosted sales (and US Navy applications).  Non-conventional and blended advertisements are often referred to with blended (or ‘portmanteau’) words as well: advertorials, infomercials, shopatainment. The last of these includes live sellers on video channels. A recent MA dissertation at Lancaster University addresses the phenomenon from a language point of view Tan, K. (2021). A corpus-based analysis on the language in Chinese livestream sales. MA dissertation, Lancaster University.  This case study of one live seller shows that, unsurprisingly, verbs and nouns closely related to purchase and discount are frequently used in livestream sales (‘buy’, ‘get’, ‘coupon’). In addition, live sellers use evaluative nouns (‘beauties’) and personal pronouns like ‘everybody’, ‘we’, etc. to address the customers. Repetitions or interactions with audiences can also be noticed. Hard and soft advertising strategies are applied in livestream sales together, to attract and persuade customers. In the run-down of advertising types, we also refer to basic distinctions that are often made, such as hard selling and soft selling (see title of this episode) and reason vs. tickle, which are also covered in Bernstein’s and Cook’s works. Bernard refers to the typical features of hard selling as the very recognizable aggressive tactics that centralise the product and its features and benefits, while playing on the scarcity principle and fear of missing out. Veronika’s son, Feranmi Ayo Omoniyi, would like to be given full credit for all his research into hard-selling tactics in computer games – thank you!  Erika mentions that soft selling plays more on emotions, stories, atmosphere and associations, with the possessor reflecting the possessed. Still in the introduction, we also mention Bhatia’s colony of promotional genres, which features both central and more peripheral members. We then move on to the interview with Joe McVeigh, who is a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki in Finland. You can also find him on Twitter: @EvilJoeMcVeigh (ignore the account handle, he is very nice!). In the analysis we look at an example each that we brought - these can be found at wordsandactions.blog! And that’s it - see you next time for the start of season 4!

Your identity is a right old mess. As is ours, mind you… and don‘t get us started on Marcus Rashford! In this episode we delve into the different layers and facets of identity construction in digital space. Via small stories, solo selfies and networked narratives, we offer ways to inspect different senses of selves as they are created in online environments. The journey will take us past talking dogs, overpowering teacher personas (yes, we are talking about ourselves!) socially constructed bosses, and walking gods. And we will get started on Marcus Rashford.   For further info and a full transcript please head over to: wordsandactions.blog In this episode,right at the beginning, we reminisce about previous episodes. You may want to listen (again) to episodes on crisis communication (S1E6) and on negotiations (S2E19). Later we mention two other episodes S1E7 on storytelling and S1E11 on impression management.     We start our topic, computer-mediated communication and identity, with Erika telling us about the very early days of the Internet.  We also mention Peter Steiner’s 199 cartoon “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”, which has become so famous that it has its own Wikipedia entry.  We then go on to introduce the theory for this episode, namely Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall’s work on identity construction through spoken interaction:   Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse studies, 7(4-5), 585-614   Erika gets due credit from Bernard and Veronika for her work on constructing identities in digital spaces, e.g.:   Darics, E., & Gatti, M. C. (2019). Talking a team into being in online workplace collaborations: the discourse of virtual work. Discourse Studies, 21(3), 237-257.   Still in the introduction, Bernard mentions a study on whether women prefer female bosses. We contrast this global study with one that addresses very specific contexts.  Talking about how identity can be indexed in online interaction, Veronika mentions a recent PhD thesis completed at Lancaster University. A bit later, Bernard refers to influencers and mentions the case of Dotan, a Dutch singer and influencer podcaster who was less than authentic. Veronika’s current research on how online identity construction works in political discourse is part of a multi-authored book on which she is lead author and that is currently under review with the publisher (so fingers crossed!). The title is Voices of Supporters: Populist parties, social media and the 2019 European elections.  The interview guest for this episode is Alexandra Georgaopoulou, a professor at King’s College London who is known for her work on so-called “small stories” and their function in constructing identities, including online. Information on the Ego Media project, which studied the impact of new media on forms and practices of self-presentation, can be found at https://www.ego-media.org/. There is a  forthcoming digital publication from the project with Stanford University Press. Moving on to the analysis part of the episode, we look at the social media profiles of footballer, author and campaigner Marcus Rashford: @MarcusRashford (Twitter), marcusrashford (Instagram), _marcusrashford (TikTok). The fan account in TikTok is rashford10marcus. All three accounts feature a logo based on his initials:   In analysing the posts, we draw on a matrix first proposed for how CEOs present themselves online:   Jameson, D. A. (2014). Crossing public-private and personal-professional boundaries: How changes in technology may affect CEOs’ communication. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 77(1), 7-30.   And that’s it for this episode - see you again next time!  

Yesterday’s sci-fi has become today’s reality. Join us as we venture our way into the ever-growing domain of Language Technology in which we discover and discuss current and future developments in speech recognition, automated literary translation, opinion mining and open domain chatbot applications. Not only do we find ourselves having cheeky chats with clever cars and critical conversations with experts,  we also ponder over the pros and cons of Artificial Intelligence and assess our position as linguists (and one alleged Professor of Disco Studies) in view of these developments.     For more information, references and a full transcript please visit wordsandactions.blog In this episode we start our discussion of language and technology with voice recognition. Bernard mentions a general bias towards female voices, as discussed in this paper: Edworthy J., Hellier E., & Rivers J. (2003). The use of male or female voices in warnings systems: a question of acoustics. Noise and Health, 6(21): 39-50.  Pitch range is also important, as demonstrated in the experiment on using different voices for sat navs that Erika mentions:  Niebuhr, O., & Michalsky, J. (2019). Computer-generated speaker charisma and its effects on human actions in a car-navigation system experiment: or how Steve Jobs’ tone of voice can take you anywhere. In Misra S. et al. (eds) Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 11620:  375-390. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24296-1_31  Moving from acoustics to culture, the following paper discusses how male voices are perceived as more authoritative:  Anderson R.C., & Klofstad, C.A. (2012). Preference for leaders with masculine voices holds in the case of feminine leadership roles. PLoS ONE, 7(12): e51216. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0051216 It is worth sharing a few more auto-captioning gems in the lectures of Veronika and her colleagues at Lancaster University:  "my grammar is leaving me" →  "my grandma is leading me" “n-sizes” → “incisors” “Hardaker and McGlashan” → “heartache and regression” “institutional” → "it's too slow" (truth!) “masculine” → "mass killer" (bit harsh)   On readability, Bernard mentions an example from accounting, namely the obfuscation hypothesis. The following paper on the topic is considered the first accounting study that uses automated textual analysis with a very large sample to address readability: Li, F. (2008). Annual report readability, current earnings, and earnings persistence. Journal of Accounting & Economics, 45: 221–247. doi:10.1016/j.jacceco.2008.02.003    We then go on to talk about sentiment analysis, which is used to find out about, for example, brand perceptions or patient satisfaction. Here is an example of the latter:   Hopper, A. M., & Uriyo, M. (2015). Using sentiment analysis to review patient satisfaction data located on the internet. Journal of Health Organization and Management, 29(2): 221-233. DOI 10.1108/JHOM-12-2011-0129   In the context of this episode, we want to distinguish between corpus linguistics and computational linguistics. Although language corpora are used to train systems in machine learning, corpus linguists engage in the computer-assisted analysis of large text collections, often combining automated statistical analysis with manual qualitative analysis. A company using such mixed corpus linguistic methods to provide their customers with insights about their products and services is Relative Insight. (We did not receive any funding from them for this episode, but they are a spin-off company that started at Lancaster University.) A critical evaluation of another area of computational linguistics, topic modelling, written by two corpus linguists is:    Brookes, G.,  & McEnery, T. (2018). The utility of topic modelling for discourse studies: A critical evaluation. Discourse Studies, 21(1): 3-21. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445618814032   (Incidentally, the above paper is also based on data about patient satisfaction.)   The PhD thesis on automatic irony detection that Bernard mentions was written by Cynthia Van Hee and is available here.    The second interview quest is another one of Bernard’s colleagues from Ghent University, Orphée De Clercq. Her recent publications include:    De Bruyne, L., De Clercq, O., & Hoste, V. (2021). Annotating affective dimensions in user-generated content. Language Resources and Evaluation, 55(4): 1017-1045. De Clercq, O., De Sutter, G., Loock, R., Cappelle, B., & Plevoets, K. (2021). Uncovering machine translationese using corpus analysis techniques to distinguish between original and machine-translated French. Translation Quarterly, 101: 21-45.   And finally, we talk to Doris Dippold from the University of Surrey in the UK. Her work on chatbots can be found in:  Dippold, D., Lynden, J., Shrubsall, R., & Ingram, R. (2020). A turn to language: How interactional sociolinguistics informs the redesign of prompt: response chatbot turns. Discourse, Context & Media, 37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2020.100432

We eavesdrop on police interrogations, wire-tapping and immigration interviews, and sneak on a Keolis bus (on board entertainment: The Interpreter) to explore the complex processes of translation and interpreting in high stakes contexts. Joining us are a forensic linguist, an expert in asylum seeking procedures and a researcher on multimodal translation, who illustrate the pervasive impact of translators as important decision-makers that may affect the future, safety and prosperity of people and businesses.   For more information, references and a full transcript head over http://wordsandactions.blog.   This episode opens with one of the guests, Krzysztof Kredens, talking about the machine metaphor for translating and interpreting, which still dominates the non-linguistic understanding of those professions. It can be linked to the famous Shannon-Weaver model of communication: first proposed by mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon in 1948 (and later popularised by fellow mathematician Warren Weaver), it conceives of communication as involving a sender or encoder, a message and a receiver or decoder. Message transmission can be affected by channel and noise.   Because human communication does not follow the rules of mathematics, this model has often been criticised as inappropriate and even distorting. Erika calls it a destructive metaphor, citing  Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By. London: Routledge.  Our discussion of equivalence in translation draws on the following two works:  Baker, M. (2011). In Other Words: A coursebook on translation. London: Routledge. Koller, W. (1995). The concept of equivalence and the object of translation studies. Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, 7(2), 191-222. Listeners of a certain age may remember, if not Nikita Khrushchev’s wrongly interpreted words from an address at the Polish embassy in Moscow (1956), then perhaps Sting citing them in his song Russians (1985).   When discussing pragmatic equivalence, we give an example of a direct vs. indirect speech act: in the former, a directive is used to make a request (‘Sit down’) while in the latter, the speaker uses a rogative form to realise the request function (‘Would you like sitting down?’).   Bernard reels off a whole list of films involving translators and interpreters; the excerpt from The Interpreter (2005) that we enact can be found at 1:40. If you would like to watch films with a language and linguistics angle, follow @LinguistsMovies on Twitter for updates on their virtual watchalong nights.  Our main interview guest for the episode is Katrijn Maryns, whose relevant publications include: Jacobs, M., & Maryns, K. (2021). Managing narratives, managing identities: Language and credibility in legal consultations with asylum seekers. Language in Society, 1-28. Maryns, K. (2014). The Asylum Speaker: Language in the Belgian asylum procedure. London: Routledge. Maryns, K. (2017). The use of English as ad hoc institutional standard in the Belgian asylum interview. Applied Linguistics, 38(5), 737-758. In the final part of the analysis, Victoria Nydegger Schrøder analyses the values statement of the headquarters and local subsidiaries of global transport operator Keolis. You can see the screenshots on our blog: http://wordsandactions.blog   Victoria kindly mentions two publications by Erika and Veronika (we did not tell her to!): Darics, E., & Koller, V. (2018). Language in Business, Language at Work. London: Palgrave. Darics, E., & Koller, V. (2019). Social actors “to go”: An analytical toolkit to explore agency in business discourse and communication. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 82(2), 214-238. In her analysis, Victoria, among other things, comments on the use of ‘we’ and how it can refer to different groups of people throughout a text and often stay ambiguous. This feature of corporate discourse has also been observed by Veronika: Koller, V. (2009). Corporate self-presentation and self-centredness: A case for cognitive critical discourse analysis. In: Pishwa, H. (ed.) Language and Social Cognition: Expression of the social mind. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 267-287. In our next episode, we will discuss machine translation and other applications in language technology - see you then!    

“I’m not hungry. One egg is an oeuf”. Is the author funny? Debatable. Is the author multilingual? Ça dépend. In this multi-voiced episode on multilingualism we tackle different interrelated aspects ranging from translanguaging over accommodation to effectiveness and proficiency and we cast more light on multilingual settings and the role of BELF in them. In the process, we make Bernard eat humble pie by interviewing a very, very multilingual person and we raise multilingual voices to stop cruelty against animals, topped off with nice examples on language accommodation. Bon appétit!   The Words and Actions podcast features and accompanying website, http://wordsandactions.blog. Here we publish a blog post that goes with the podcast, including references to research and a full transcript.  Episode 20 features various researchers who attended the 2021 regional conference (Europe, Middle East and Africa) of the Association for Business Communication, The programme and abstracts are available here.  In the introduction, we talk about the notion of translanguaging. The following references are central papers and overviews:  Bradley, J., Moore, E., & Simpson, J. (2020). Translanguaging as Transformation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Conteh, J. (2018). Translanguaging. ELT Journal, 72(4), 445-447. García, O., & Wei, L.. (2014).Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism, and education. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Wei, L. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9-30. Williams, C. (1996). Secondary education: Teaching in the bilingual situation. In C. Williams, G. Lewis, & C. Baker (eds), The Language Policy: Taking stock. Llangefni: CAI, pp. 39–78 We also talk about communication accommodation theory (CAT) and return to that phenomenon in the analysis part of the episode. Here is a recent overview of the theory:  Zhang, Y. B., & Giles, H. (2018). Communication accommodation theory. In Y. Y. Kim (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication (pp. 95-108). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley,pp.  95-108.  Another concept that is central to this episode is (Business) English as a lingua franca. One scholar who has written prolifically on accommodation in ELF is Jennifer Jenkins, most recently in this publication: Jenkins, J. (2021). Accommodation in ELF: Where from? Where now? Where next? In Walkinshaw, I. (ed), The Pragmatics of ELF. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Available here.   Still in the introduction, Bernard offers a definition of BELF that is based on this paper:  Louhiala-Salminen, L., Charles, M.,  Kankaanranta, A. (2005). English as a lingua franca in Nordic corporate mergers: Two case companies. English for Specific Purposes, 24, 401-421. Our interview guest is Gladys Nyarko Ansah, an expert in multilingualism from the University of Ghana. Here are some of her publications, including the one on linguistic landscapes, which she talks about in the interview: Anderson, J.A., Wiredu, J.F., Ansah, G.N., Frimpong-Kodie, G., Orfson-Offei, E., & Boamah-Boateng, D. (2020). A linguistic landscape of the central business district of Accra. Legon Journal of the Humanities, 31(1), 1-35.  Afrifa, G.A., Anderson, J.A., & Ansah, G.N. (2019). The choice of English as a home language in urban Ghana. Current Issues in Language Planning, 20(4), 418-434 Ansah, G.N. (2014). Cognitive models of anger in Akan: A conceptual metaphor analysis. Cognitive Linguistic Studies, 1(1), 131-146 In the hosts’ reflection on the interview, Veronika mentions ‘sounds being swapped around’; the technical term for this is metathesis.  In the analysis , Veronika contributes two examples from this study: Rogerson-Revell, P. (2010). “Can you spell that for us nonnative speakers?” Accommodation strategies in international business meetings. The Journal of Business Communication, 47(4), 432-454. Bernard reproduces an example from a talk at the ABC conference, which illustrates productive phonetic accommodation, i.e making the sounds of spoken language more like that of the interlocutor. Receptive phonetic accommodation is often taught as part of listening skills; here are some alien resources for this:  The Speech Accent Archive (http://accent.gmu.edu) The English Listening Library Online (www.elllo.org) My English Voice (http://myenglishvoice.com) YouGlish (http://youglish.com)  Finally, Erika draws on paper by Jane Lockwood and Ying Song: Lockwood, J., & Song, Y. (2020). Understanding each other: Strategies for accommodation in a virtual business team project based in China. International Journal of Business Communication, 57(1), 113-144.  The next episode will continue with the theme of different languages, looking at high-stakes translating and interpreting - see you again!

For more info and a transcript please head over to www.wordsandactions.blog. In the introduction to this episode on negotiations, we mention the haggling scene in the Monty Python film Life of Brian (1979). Treat yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2iZjxSGca8 On a more serious note, we mention this academic definition of negotiations:  Roloff, M.E., & Jordan, J.M. (1992). Achieving negotiation goals: the “fruits and foibles” of planning ahead. In L.L. Putnam and M.E. Roloff (eds)  Communication and Negotiation. Newbury Park: Sage, pp. 21-45.  A popular book on the subject is  Fisher, R., Ury, W., & Patton, B. (2012). Getting to Yes: Negotiating an agreement without giving in. 3rd ed. London Random House.  If you would like to see a nice collection of metaphors in different types in negotiation, have a look at  Smith, T. H. (2005). Metaphors for navigating negotiations. Negotiation Journal, 21(3), 343-364. [See what the author did there?] More on non-violent communication can be found at https://www.nonviolentcommunication.com/. Erika and Veronika have given an account of who ‘we’ can refer to in this paper:  Darics, E., & Koller, V. (2019). Social actors ‘to go’: An analytical toolkit to explore agency in business discourse and communication. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 82(2), 214-238.  Erika also mentions a study that shows just how important language use, including use of pronouns, is in negotiations: Neu, J., & Graham, J. L. (1995). An analysis of language use in negotiations: The role of context and content. In K. Ehlich and J. Wagner (eds) The Discourse of Business Negotiation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 243-272. We close the first part of the episode with another film reference, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). You can watch the scene with the Swiss bankers at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndTbiDQjbiE  We conduct the first of two interviews for this episode with Judith Large, a professional negotiator and academic. Her experience of post-war Sri Lanka is captured in  Large, J. (2016). Pushback: Sri Lanka’s dance with global governance. London: Zed Books.  Different accounts of the peace negotiations in Indonesia, including Judith’s, are collected in this 2008 publication:  https://www.c-r.org/accord/aceh-indonesia Between interviews, we talk about different strategies used by negotiators to manipulate others into agreement, not necessarily for our listeners to apply them but to become aware of them and, where appropriate, counter them. We discuss “salami slicing”, “lowballing” and “disrupt and reframe”; for the last one, see Davis, B. P., & E.S. Knowles (1999). A disrupt-then-reframe technique of social influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(2), 192-199. Other than that, the following two strategies are often mentioned: Foot in the Door: The negotiator starts with a small request before gradually increasing their demands. Doing so increases the likelihood that a respondent will agree to the later request. This strategy is based on the principle of compliance:  Freedman, J.L., & S.C. Fraser (1966). Compliance without pressure: The foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4(2), 195-202.  The authors found that if an initial request to put up a small signpost outside one’s home (‘Drive safely’) was followed by the request to put up a much larger sign, 55% of respondents would comply, compared with 20% compliance if asked for the larger sign straightaway.  Door in the Face: The negotiator makes a large request that the respondent will most likely turn down. This request is followed by a second, more reasonable request. Studies show that the second request is more frequently complied with than if that same, smaller request is made in isolation: Cialdini, R.B., Vincent, J.E., Lewis, S.K., Catalan, J., Wheeler, D., & B.L. Darby (1975). Reciprocal concessions procedure for inducing compliance: The door-in-the-face technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31(2), 206-215.  The authors’ example is a request to be a regular blood donor vs the request to donate blood only once. When exposed to both requests, 50% of subjects complied with the second request while a mere 32% complied when they were only presented with the second, smaller request.  Parents and carers may be interested in this application of the two techniques described above:   Chan, A.C., & T.K. Au (2011). Getting children to do more academic work: Foot-in-the-door versus door-in-the-face. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27(6), 982-985 [Spoiler: Door-in-the-face works best.] Across studies though, both are equally effective:  Pascual, A., & N. Guéguen, N. (2005). Foot-in-the-door and door-in-the-face: A comparative meta-analytic study. Psychological Reports, 96(1), 122-128.  Our own meta-analysis is based on a clip of us preparing this episode and having a negotiation ourselves. You can hear us reach agreement here: https://youtu.be/m7Lci3jCiyM By analysing our own talk during preparation, we take our listeners to the backstage of Words & Actions. You can watch a bite-sized introduction to sociologist Erving Goffman’s notion of frontstage and backstage communication here (narrated by Stephen Fry, no less!): https://youtu.be/6Z0XS-QLDWM​  Finally, at two points in the episode we mention zero-sum thinking, a notion from psychology that is often applied in economics and consumer behaviour research. A recent article is  Johnson, S., Zhang, J., & F. Keil (2018). Psychological underpinnings of zero-sum thinking. Available at https://psyarxiv.com/efs5y/   Another topic that kept popping up throughout was translation and multilingualism. We will address it in our next episode – see you for that!

Are you suffering from zoom fatigue, meeting migraines or the occasional shark bite? Have a listen to our next episode and find out more about office diary sweet spots, biochronology, meeting categorizations and how to deal with sharks in conflict resolution. As always, we bring in the expert advice of an academic and we’ll discuss the added value of the Quaker peace testimony with a workplace mediator. In the analysis, we’re heading for the deep waters of the notorious Handforth parish council meeting. There will be blood. For more info and a transcript head over to www.wordsandactions.blog. Episode 18 is on meetings and conflicts, so for the academically minded among our listeners, here are three sources of linguistic and conversation analytical research into meetings: Handford, M. (2010). The language of business meetings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Incidentally, Michael Handford was our first ever interview guest, way back in episode 1.] Handford, M., & Koester, A. (2019). The construction of conflict talk across workplace contexts: (Towards) a theory of conflictual compact. Language Awareness, 28(3), 186-206. Holmes, J., & Marra, M. (2004). Leadership and managing conflict in meetings. Pragmatics, 14(4), 439-462. The study about “collaboration overload” that Bernard cites at the beginning of the episode is reported on here. The second study he refers to, by online scheduling service When Is Good, is reported on here. (Note that the article also mentions the Quaker practice of starting a meeting with silence, which anticipates our first interview later in the episode.) Erika follows up on this with a study that demonstrates how the time of day when an earnings conference call is scheduled can influence the positivity (or lack thereof) of analysts’ and managers’ tone: Chen, J., Demers, E., & Lev, B. (2018). Oh what a beautiful morning! Diurnal influences on executives and analysts: Evidence from conference calls. Management Science, 64(12), 5461-5959. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2888 It’s important to note that meetings take very different forms, involve different people and have different purposes. We describe a diagram which can be found on our website www.wordsandactions.blog. Moving on to conflicts, Erika and Veronika have written about types and stages of conflicts, and about people’s conflict styles, in chapter 9 of their textbook: Darics, E., & Koller, V. (2018). Language in Business, Language at Work. London: Palgrave Macmillan Education. You can test your own conflict resolution style with the Thomas-Kilmann questionnaire. In the first interview, with coach and workplace mediator Allegra Stone, we talk about how her Quaker beliefs influence her work. Quakers in Britain have published a toolkit about engaging with conflict that is based on their peace testimony. Our second interview guest, Bernadette Vine, is a member of the Language in the Workplace project at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (Te Herenga Waka, Aotearoa). A few of her recent publications are: Lazzaro-Salazar, M., Marra, M., Holmes, J., & Vine, B. (2015). Doing power and negotiating through disagreement in public meetings. Pragmatics and Society, 6(3), 444-464. Vine, B. (ed.) (2018). The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace. Abingdon: Routledge. Vine, B. (2020). Introducing Language in the Workplace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In the last part of the episode, we analyse the now infamous Handforth parish council meeting from February 2021. In the next episode, we’ll be looking at the related topic of negotiations.

In this episode we talk about creativity in language and visual communication. We published many of the images and logos we mention on our website, http://wordsactions.blog. Here you can find the full transcript, too.  In the first part of the episode, Erika mentions the following study on how colour influences investment decisions:  Chan, C. R., & Park, H. D. (2015). How images and color in business plans influence venture investment screening decisions. Journal of Business Venturing, 30(5), 732-748. Veronika published some of her work on the links between colour and language in this article:  Koller, V. (2008a). ‘Not just a colour’: Pink as a gender and sexuality marker in visual communication. Visual Communication, 7(4), 433-461.  Moving on to individual logos, here are  the Toblerone bear and the crest of the city of Bern. Veronika’s research on city brands, including a categorisation of their logos, was published as Koller, V. (2008b). ‘The world in one city’: Semiotic and cognitive aspects of city branding. Journal of Language and Politics, 7(3), 431-450.  We specifically mention the logos of three places where we live or were born, resp.: Ghent (Belgium), Dunaszerdahely (Slovakia) and Stroud (UK). We also discuss what changes in logos and type fonts can signalise, and Veronika mentions the case of Lancaster University, which had such a change in 2014. Some fonts can indeed elicit strong reactions, as evidenced on the website comicsanscriminal.com. The form and connotations of type fonts were theorised by Theo van Leeuwen: van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Towards a semiotics of typography. Information Design Journal, 14(2), 139-155.  For a general interest read, try this book:  Garfield, S. (2010). Just My Type: A book about fonts. London: Profile Books.  Bernard then reveals a different side of himself when he talks about the irregular type fonts and idiosyncratic spelling used by heavy metal bands. At the end of the first part, we talk about names for a company and Erika mentions a study showing a correlation between length of a domain name and visits to a website.  In the interview, Chris Arning mentions, among other works that have influenced him: Jakobson, R. (1981). Linguistics and poetics. In Selected Writings. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, pp. 18-51.  In the third part of the episode, we analyse linguistic creativity on the website visiticeland.com. This is not an overview website but one to be explored through interacting with it, so have a look. Erika observed that the designers seemed to have followed a model developed under the name of ‘brand linguistics’: Carnevale, M., Luna, D., & Lerman, D. (2017). Brand linguistics: A theory-driven framework for the study of language in branding. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34(2), 572-591. The red thread for this episode has been travel. You can take a flight of fancy and read about the language and semiotics of luxury destinations here Thurlow, C., & Jaworski, A. (2012) Elite mobilities: The semiotic landscapes of luxury and privilege.  Social Semiotics, 22(4), 487-516 or learn about Gosia Drewniok’s research on the language branding of luxury hotels here – happy travels and see you again for the next episode. 

Yes, we are glad to see the back of 2020. But so much happened over those 12 months that we think it warrants a special New Year’s episode. We invited four guests to come with us on a tour of the year, from Brexit Day to university strikes, Black Lives Matter and the US elections. Oh, and we also mention that pandemic that just went and upended everyone’s lives. Please visit our blog, www.wordsandactions.blog for information about our guests, further links and resources. In this episode we start our review of 2020 by talking about the language use around Brexit. Anyone interested in that topic can find relevant publications listed in Veronika’s bibliography-in-progress on Brexit and language, which is available at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fZClWyLA-_tmfdspLAVel9YKt3Xkm8E2YbBXw_14PaA/edit. Sten Hansson’s publications on the topic are: Hansson, S. (2019). Brexit and blame avoidance: Officeholders’ discursive strategies of self-preservation. In Koller, V., Kopf, S., & Miglbauer, M. (eds) Discourses of Brexit. London: Routledge, pp. 191-207. (see also this blog post: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/11/20/the-rhetoric-of-self-preservation-brexit-and-blame-avoidance/) Hansson, S., & Kröger, S. (2020). How a lack of truthfulness can undermine democratic representation: the case of post-referendum Brexit discourses. British Journal of Politics and International Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120974009 Veronika at one point mentions prison metaphors in the Brexit debate (e.g. ‘free from the shackles of the EU’), which she has written about here: Koller, V. (2020). Analysing metaphor in discourse. In Hart, C. (ed.) Researching Discourse: A guide for students. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 77-96.  Our subjective look back on 2020 continues with the university strikes in Britain early that year. We talk to Liz Morrish, who was a speaker at some of the events around the industrial action. Her critical studies of contemporary universities, in the UK and elsewhere, are collected in her blog Academic Irregularities (https://academicirregularities.wordpress.com/) and have also resulted in a book she wrote with fellow linguist Helen Sauntson:  Morrish, L., & Sauntson, H. (2019). Academic Irregularities: Language and neoliberalism in higher education. Abingdon: Routledge.  Liz mentions various frameworks for evaluating research, teaching and knowledge exchange at British universities, known respectively as REF, TEF and KEF.  Inevitably, our review of 2020 takes us to March and the arrival of Covid-19 in Europe. We look at the pandemic through the metaphor lens (pun very much intended) and talk to Paula Pérez Sobrino, one of the founders of the #ReframeCovid initiative. The collection of alternatives to the war metaphor for Covid-19 is available to view and download here: bit.ly/ReframeCovid – the link also leads to a form where listeners/readers can submit further examples. A group of scholars involved with the initiative have started to write about some aspects of metaphors for Covid-19 and about the initiative itself: Olza, I., Koller, V., Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I., Pérez Sobrino, P., & Semino, E. (forthcoming). The #ReframeCovid initiative: From Twitter to society via metaphor. Metaphor and the Social World. (see also this roundtable discussion: https://media.inn.no/Mediasite/Channel/raam2020/watch/944ce34e07c94f459b6d7825cc4ba0871d)   Pérez Sobrino, P., Semino, E., Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I., Koller, V., & Olza, I. (forthcoming). Acting like a hedgehog in times of pandemic: Metaphoric creativity in the #ReframeCovid collection. Metaphor and Symbol. Semino, E. (2021). “Not soldiers but fire-fighters”: Metaphors and Covid-19. Health Communication, 36(1), 50-58. (see also this blog post: http://cass.lancs.ac.uk/a-fire-raging-why-fire-metaphors-work-well-for-covid-19/)  2020 was an eventful year and we could not fit all important events into the episode. In the summer, the killing of George Floyd by police in the US led to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and protests against racism and racist violence around the world. In Britain, the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol, inspiring the poem Hollow by Bristol City Poet Vanessa Kisuule: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3DKfaK50AU&t=2s  Detractors of the BLM movement sometimes counter that ‘All lives matter’, but this misunderstands the pragmatic meaning of the original statement: ‘Black lives matter’ is not an answer to the question ’Whose lives matter?’ but to the question ‘Do black lives matter?’.  In the final interview, we reflect on the US elections and talk to Ulrike Schneider, co-editor of a book on the language of Donald Trump (which should win a prize for best book cover of the year!): Schneider, U., & Eitelmann, M. (eds) (2020). Linguistic Inquiries into Donald Trump’s Language: From 'fake news' to 'tremendous success'. London: Bloomsbury.  In our conversation, we touch on Trump’s use of Twitter; after the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, Twitter suspended the President’s account indefinitely on grounds of incitement to violence.  This brings Words & Action’s special New Year’s episode to a close, but we hope you will stay with us over the course of the year!  

In the second part of our mini-series on the language of entrepreneurship, we enter the dragon’s den, meet an angel and look for gold among the crowds. Episode 15 is all about business pitches and how (not) to use language to find investors. We talk to an expert about how to pitch across cultures, get helpful advice from a venture capitalist and analyse a crowdfunding video. For further details and a full transcript please visit our website at wordsandactions.blog. This episode was sponsored by BSEEN, a support programme for students and graduates who want to start their own business: www.b-seen.biz In the first part of the episode, we talk about the difference between written and spoken grammar, analysing parts of a Dragon’s Den pitch to show why it sounds so unnatural. Here is an excerpt:  “We are here today today to introduce Ting-a-tang and ask for an investment of a 100,000 pounds for a 20% share in our business.  Looking for love is a big business in the UK.  By the year 2010 it is estimated that 45% of the UK’s adult population will be single. Today 75% of singletons are actively dating, spending a whopping £8 billion per year in their search for someone special. And so Ting-a-tang was born, to provide a unique and distinctive symbol for single people. Just as wearing a wedding ring showing that you are in a partnership, now you can wear a Ting-a-tang to reveal your single status.”  In the first of two interviews, we speak to Dennis Davy, whose publications include Daly, P., & Davy, D. (2016a). Crafting the investor pitch using insights from rhetoric and linguistics. In Alessi, G., & Jacobs, G. (eds) The Ins and Outs of Business and Professional Discourse Research. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 182-203. Daly, P., & Davy, D. (2016b). Structural, linguistic and rhetorical features of the entrepreneurial pitch. Journal of Management Development, 35(1), 120-132. . Davy, D., & Daly, P. (2020). French entrepreneurial pitches in English: Analysis of linguistic errors and perceptions of error gravity. In González-Araujo, V., Álavarez-Delgado, R-C., & Sancho-Rodríguez, A. (eds) Ethics in Business Communication: New challenges in the digital world. Brussels: Peter Lang, pp. 33–48. At the end of the interview, Dennis mentions research into Dragon's Den versions in languages other than English. Here are two examples about the Spanish version: Fernández-Vázquez, J. S., & Álvarez-Delgado, R. C. (2019). The interaction between rational arguments and emotional appeals in the entrepreneurial pitch. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 26(3), 503-520.  García-Gómez, A. (2018). Dragons’ Den: Enacting persuasion in reality television. Discourse, Context & Media, 21, 1-9. Our second interview guest, Alex Toft, is Head of Minerva Business Angels. Information for both entrepreneurs and investors is available at https://minerva.uk.net/. . In the final part of the episode, we analyse a video for a crowdfunding campaign. The videos is available here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1341606466/lets-clean-up-canadas-climate-and-energy-debate  Erika’s work on the text type of crowdfunding is from her most recent volume. At the time of publishing this post (15/12/2020) it is in press but if you would like a copy, do email her. Parhankangas, A. and Darics, E. (in press) Linguistic style and crowdfunding success among social and commercial entrepreneurs: An example of a language study in the field of entrepreneurship. In E. Darics (ed.) Language awareness in business and the professions. Cambridge University Press In the final episode on language and entrepreneurship, we will look at creativity in selling ideas, services and products - see you then!

From Steve Jobs strutting the stage at Apple to that hairdresser with the quirky name on your local high street: in this episode, we start a new mini-series on the language of entrepreneurship. We look at intrapreneurs, social entrepreneurs and mumpreneurs, talk to an entrepreneur with a background in linguistics and analyse how language is used in a business plan. Whether you’re thinking of starting your own business, want to help people do so or can look back on years of running your own company — this episode is for you. Visit our website for a full transcript and further references: https://wordsandactions.blog We begin the first episode of the new mini-series on the language of entrepreneurship by discussing associations with, and definitions of, entrepreneurs. Bernard quotes one definition from Investopedia, a website for investors: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/entrepreneur.asp We then go on to talk about local businesses and what they call themselves. Bernard mentions various categorisations of entrepreneurs and how one type may not regard the other as a “real” entrepreneur. One category of entrepreneur is the ‘mumpreneur’. For academic work on mumpreneurs, and female entrepreneurs more widely, see: Surangi, H. A. K. N. S., & Ranwala, R. S. (2018). A discourse analysis of research texts on mumpreneurs. Kelaniya Journal of Management, 7(1), 1-12. http://doi.org/10.4038/kjm.v7i1.7550. Ahl, H. (2006). Why research on women entrepreneurs needs new directions. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 30(5), 595-621. Marlow, S., & McAdam, M. (2013), Gender and entrepreneurship: Advancing debate and challenging myths; exploring the mystery of the under‐performing female entrepreneur. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 19(1), 114-124. https://doi.org/10.1108/13552551311299288 We continue the first part of the episode by talking about the value set on entrepreneurial thinking and attitudes, especially at universities. Veronika mentions examples from the hosts’ employers: University of Ghent (Bernard): Centre for Student Entrepreneurship, https://www.durfondernemen.be/en/ Aston University (Erika): Start-up support for graduate entrepreneurs, https://b-seen.biz Lancaster University (Veronika): Entrepreneurs in Residence, https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lums/business/community/entrepreneurs-in-residence/ During the interview with Munene Khoza, Veronika mentions an interview study she did with language professionals. Here’s the reference: Koller, V. (2017). Language awareness and language workers. Language Awareness, 27(1-2), 4-20. The business plan we analyse in the final part of the episode, and other examples, can be found at https://www.startups.com/library/expert-advice/top-4-business-plan-examples See you again for the next part of the mini-series on the language of entrepreneurship!    

In this first episode of the new series we talk about change management and the role of language in successfully bringing this change about.    In the introduction, we underscore the importance of language in terms of its potential to construct and mold reality (which was also addressed in episodes 1 and 2 of season 1), especially during sensemaking processes of a reality that does not exist yet. In order to make sense, it is established there need to be obvious reasons for the changes that are implemented, but at the same time we observe there are different types of changes, the justification of which is obvious in some cases (think of the COVID-19 measures), but less so in others (think of evolutionary changes, which require a response now, but which will only have a noticeable impact in the long run). Climate change is one example, but reference can also be made to necessary changes fed by technological revolutions (e.g. the implementation of social media in corporate communication), and interestingly, cases where change is fueled by a discrepancy between the corporate values and the actual communicative practices within the company that seem to undermine or at least question their truthfulness. We have a chat with Katie Best about this phenomenon of ‘culture leaks’ in a short interview. She's the founder and director of the agency Taylorbest (https://www.taylorbest.com/) and she is also a visiting researcher at King's College London Business School and head tutor on the LSE's MBA essentials programmes. The examples she gives nicely illustrate the contrast between sometimes rather formal style of communication one would, for instance, associate a Westbrooks bookshop with and the fairly direct A4 message by the exasperated employee addressing the customer "Please, please shut the door behind you”. These ‘leaks’ provide an insight into what may actually going on behind the scenes in terms of corporate value, so much so that the company’s adherence to these values may be questioned (check our episode on the toxic company culture at Enron, if you haven’t done so already).    Reference can also made to the many (more harmless) examples we can see nowadays urging people to follow the health and safety rules, many of which are directive, creative and even humoristic in nature, regardless of company culture ("Don't sit at this table. This chair can't be used. Make sure you keep a gap between yourselves”). And there are plenty of other examples out there where the urgency of the situation justifies the type of language and imagery that is being used, regardless of the official image the company wants to associated with.    These examples also bring us back to the importance of language use in bringing about these changes. Many of these instantiations are short, clear, snappy and directive sentences, which may not only work well when it comes to giving concrete instructions, but also during the important process of sense-giving as well. Erika gives a nice example from the Apollo space programme in flight director Gene Kranz’s speech, which came to be known as "The Kranz dictum". On his watch, the United States had lost 3 of its finest members of the astronaut corps, and it had happened during a routine simulation session. This is part of his speech:   From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: “Tough“ and “Com- petent.“ Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for.   Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office, and the first thing you will do there is to write “Tough and Competent” on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room, these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee.   For a complete rendition listen to the interesting podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon, episode 4: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2   Tough and competent. Short sentences. Clear language. A message that makes sense of the lives that were lost. Plain and simple, repetitive and effective. And the NASA programme went ahead. As a final note regarding language use, Bernard also introduces a mythbuster that does away existing fixations on the ‘right’ average sentence length; topped off by Veronika’s remark on the dangers of verbosity. For more information on readability and sentence length, see   Smeuninx, Nils. 2018. Dear Stakeholder. Exploring the language of sustainability reporting:a closer look at readability, sentiment and perception. PhD Ghent University.   The sentences below shows how reduced length need not always lead to improved comprehensibility as the telegram style affects rhythm and cohesion. Less is not always more and more is not always less.  Conducting our business in an ethical, transparent and responsible manner, will help us retain our social licence to operate. This requires a particular focus on managing and controlling risk and consequential impacts through understanding risk drivers and how these relate to our business processes.    Our business must be ethical, transparent and responsible. Only then can we keep our social licence to operate. We must manage and control risks and impacts. Understanding risks helps us control them.    The importance of message clarity provides a nice transition to the interview with our second guest, Dr Paul Lawrence, who is the co-director of the Centre for Coaching in Organisations, or (CCO). On the CCO website, they generously share journal articles and white papers. A really great resource if you're interested in coaching [or] change management, both in practice and teaching. In the interview he explains the notion of dialogue (as opposed to conversation) as it is introduced and used in the Tao of Language, a book he co-authored with six other experts in the field and the single authored book Leading change, based on interviews with 50 leaders around the world. The notion of dialogue very much stresses the importance of listening (he distinguishes between four types) and an agenda-free approach to change communication, rather than a top-down, one way delivery of the message.    Lawrence, Paul. 2014. Leading Change: How Successful Leaders Approach Change Management. Kogan.  Lawrence, Sarah Hill, Andreas Priestland, Cecilia Forrestal, Floris Rommerts, Isla Hyslop, Monica Manning. 2019. The Tao of Dialogue. London, United Kingdom: Routledge.   Lawrence, P. & Moore, A. (2019). Coaching in Three Dimensions: Meeting the Challenges of a Complex World. London, United Kingdom: Routledge. In the final part of the episode we have a closer look at the use of metaphors in change management language and illustrate their cognitive, affective and narrative function by focussing on one particular metaphor that is often used in change management, i.e. the journey metaphor. We first illustrate the abundant use of nautical expressions in some of languages we speak and then move to examples from political speeches that feature the journey metaphors to depict the Covid-19 pandemic (and there is an example that goes back to Erika’s hobbyhorse: space exploration☺), rounding off with examples of narrative metaphors in newspaper articles portraying the arrival of Spanish companies in the UK as a (successful) invasion of the  Spanish Armada. The latter examples are based on research by:    Vandenberghe, J. (2017) The evaluative potential of colonial metaphor scenarios in (written) media representations of Spain’s economic expansion. Spanish investors as forceful aggressors or audacious pioneers? In: R. Breeze & I. Olza (Eds.), Evaluation in media discourse: European perspectives. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.   Vandenberghe, J., Goethals, P., & Jacobs, G. (2014). 'Economic conquistadors conquer new worlds': Metaphor scenarios in English-language newspaper headlines on Spanish Foreign Direct Investment. In A. Musolff, F. MacArthur & G. Pagani (Eds.), Metaphor and Intercultural Communication (pp. 167-183). London: Bloomsbury.  

As always, you can find our longer notes on our blog: wordsandactions.blog. In this episode, we discuss job interviews. In the introduction, Bernard mentions the finding that employers give lower ratings to candidates who interview on video. This is reported in  Blacksmith, N., Willford, J. C., & Behrend, T. S. (2016). Technology in the employment interview: A meta-analysis and future research agenda. Personnel Assessment and Decisions, 2(1), Article 2. Available at: https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/pad/vol2/iss1/2  The first part of the episode also features a short interview with Dorottya Cserző, whose recently completed PhD thesis was on video chats. Her relevant publications are:  Cserzo, D. (2016). Nexus analysis meets scales: An exploration of sites of engagement in videochat interviews. In Singh, J. N., Kantara, A., & Cserző, D. (eds) Downscaling Culture: Revisiting intercultural communication. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 337-365. Cserzo, D. (2020). Intimacy at a distance: Multimodal meaning making in video chat tours. In Thurlow, C., Durscheid, C., & Diemoz, F. (eds) Visualizing Digital Discourse: Interactional, institutional and ideological perspectives. Berlin: Mouton DeGruyter, pp. 151-169. As Bernard mentions during the interview, the surge in video interactions due to the Covid-19 pandemic has brought much well-meaning advice on Zoom backgrounds and the like (e.g. https://twitter.com/bcredibility), which in turn have spawned critical reflections:  https://academicirregularities.wordpress.com,  http://musicfordeckchairs.com/blog/2020/05/09/background/ In reply, Dorottya cites research on sound vs image problems in video chats:  Rintel, S. (2010). Conversational management of network trouble perturbations in personal videoconferencing.  ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, 304–311. https://doi.org/10.1145/1952222.1952288   Rintel, S. (2013). Video Calling in Long-Distance Relationships : The Opportunistic Use of Audio / Video Distortions as a Relational Resource. The Electronic Journal of Communication, 23(1 & 2). Still in the first part, we introduce the cooperative principle and conversational maxims (see glossary). The series Big Bang Theory includes lots of examples where the main character breaks one or several of those maxims, e.g. in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEM8gZCWQ2w Can you identify which maxim(s) he breaks?  The second part of the episode features an interview with linguist Celia Roberts. (There is also a sociologist of the same name, and a colleague of one of the hosts once declared that he would like to supervise a PhD student who could be examined by both Celias.) As an emerita professor, she can look back on a number of projects and publications; the ones most relevant to the topic of job interviews are (in chronological order): Roberts, C. (1985). The Interview Game and How It's Played. London: British Broadcasting Corporation.  Roberts, C., & Sarangi, S. (1999). Hybridity in gatekeeping discourse: Issues of practical relevance for the researcher. In Sarangi, S., & Roberts, C. (eds) Talk, Work and Institutional order. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 473-503. Roberts, C., & Campbell, S. (2005). Fitting stories into boxes: Rhetorical and textual constraints on candidates' performances in British job interviews. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2(1), 45-73.  Campbell, S., & Roberts, C. (2007). Migration, ethnicity and competing discourses in the job interview: Synthesizing the institutional and personal. Discourse & Society, 18(3), 243-271. Roberts, C. (2011). ‘Taking ownership’: Language and ethnicity in the job interview. In Pelsmaekers, K., Rollo, C., Von Hout, T., & Heynderickx, P. (eds) Displaying Competence in Organizations: Discourse perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 10-26.  Roberts, C. (2013). The gatekeeping of Babel: Job interviews and the linguistic penalty. In Duchêne, A., Moyer, M., & Roberts, C. (eds) Language, Migration and Social Inequalities: A critical sociolinguistic perspective on institutions and work. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 81-94. [A summary by Ingrid Piller can be found here: https://www.languageonthemove.com/linguistic-penalty-in-the-job-interview/] In the interview, Celia refers to the notion of the ‘entrepreneurial self’, which was advanced both by Paul Du Gay and, in German, by Ulrich Bröckling: Bröckling, U. (2013). Das unternehmerische Selbst: Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform. [The entrepreneurial self: Sociology of a form of subjectivation] Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Du Gay, P. (1996). Organizing identity: Entrepreneurial governance and public management. In Hall, S., & Du Gay, P. (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity. London: SAGE, pp. 151-169 She also mentions the STAR structure for job interviews. This is indeed widely used and advice on it abounds online (e.g. at https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/interviewing/how-to-use-the-star-interview-response-technique).  Celia uses a number of metaphors to talk about the interview process and the positions of interviewer and interviewee. One is that of the Roman god Janus, who is depicted with two faces looking in different directions.  Unfortunately, the FAQ video that she mentions is not publicly available.  The episode of “The Job Interview” that we analyse in the third part of the episode was broadcast on  Channel 4 on 19 March 2018. Listeners outside the UK can view it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esLbDihhtfY (starts at 31:25). If you live in the UK, you can register with Channel 4 for on-demand programmes and watch the second half of series 2 episode 5 at https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-job-interview/on-demand/66105-005. Alternatively, if you work in education, your school, college or university may have access to Box of Broadcasts at https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand We hope you enjoyed the mini-series and indeed the whole of our first season. Say hi to us on our twitter @_wordsactions_ or on our Facebook page: @WordsandActionsPodcast.  See you again for the start of our new season in October!

This episode of Words and Actions starts with Veronika mentioning that the chief adviser to the UK government, Dominic Cummings, used his blog to ask “weirdos and misfits with odd skills” and “true wild cards” to apply for a position as his personal assistant. We also made the point that how much time recruiters spend on filtering CVs is a matter of seconds. These two studies provide evidence for this claim and suggest that the initial time screening a CV has actually gone down from 30 seconds to 6 seconds:   Barnum, C. M. (1987). Writing résumés that sell. Management World, 16, 10-13. Wallwork, A. (2019). English for Academic CVs, Resumes, and Online Profiles. Springer, Cham.   As promised, here is the list of studies on unconscious bias in recruitment decisions:  https://users.ugent.be/~sbaert/research_register.htm    We focused on biased decisions with regard to ethnic background, including that indicated by names. A recent study is    Derous, E., & Ryan, A. M. (2019). When your resume is (not) turning you down: Modelling ethnic bias in resume screening. Human Resource Management Journal, 29(2), 113-130   while the following article looks at whether anonymous CVs could be a solution (spoiler: possibly, but for high-status jobs, ethnicity tends to matter less to begin with):  Lacroux, A., & Martin‐Lacroux, C. (2020). Anonymous résumés: An effective preselection method? International Journal of Selection and Assessment 28(1), 98-111.  We then talked a bit about cross-cultural differences in content, layout and language use in CVs. One study, summarised by Veronika, compares German and Italian CVs: Hepp, M. (2006). The text type "curriculum vitae" in an intercultural perspective. indications for a linguistically based german as a second language instruction at university. Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online, 4(1), 109-129. http://www.humnet.unipi.it/slifo/ [in German]   Bernard then mentioned the DISCO tool, short for European Dictionary of Skills and Competences): http://disco-tools.eu/disco2_portal/ Moving on to digital footprints and digital shadows, Bernard referred to the relevant work of his colleague Stijn Baert (who also compiled the list of studies on unconscious bias):  Baert, S. (2018). Facebook profile picture appearance affects recruiters’ first hiring decisions.  new media & society, 20(3), 1220-1239. To find out more about the consultancy business of our interview guest, Anna Marie Trester, go to https://careerlinguist.com/. Her latest book is  Trester. A. M. (2017). Bringing Linguistics to Work. Lulu Publishing.  During the interview, Anna Marie mentions Erving Goffman (1922-1982), a Canadian sociologist whose work became very influential for conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics.   Finally, for the analysis part of this episode, we did an audit of each other’s internet presence. Here are some of our profiles we scrutinise:  https://research.flw.ugent.be/en/bernard.declerck  https://www.linkedin.com/in/erika-darics-35610448/?originalSubdomain=uk https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Veronika_Koller    Do come and say hi to us on any of the social media platforms! See you again for episode 12!

At the beginning of this part of a miniseries on finding a job, Erika sets the scene by referring to a very recent study on the specific challenges faced by people who start their careers in times of crisis:   Arellano-Bover, J. (2020). The effect of labor market conditions at entry on workers' long-term skills. IZA Discussion Paper No. 13129. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3573299.    We then talk a bit about different ways a company or business can advertise positions they hope to fill. The most basic one is perhaps the sign in the window or at a roadside. We also touch on the use of English in job ads in non-English speaking countries and Bernard mentions two studies showing, respectively, that job ads in English make the position seem more challenging, but also that this effect may be waning: van Meurs, F., Korzilius, H., Planken, B., & Fairley, S. (2007). The effect of English job titles in job advertisements on Dutch respondents. World Englishes, 26(2), 189-205. Hilberink-Schulpen, B., Nederstigt, U., van Meurs, F., & van Alem, E. (2016). Does the use of a foreign language influence attention and genre-specific viewing patterns for job advertisements? An eye-tracking study. Information Processing & Management, 52(6), 1018-1030. The effect that wording in job ads can have on who applies, especially from a gender perspective, is detailed in this study, referenced by Erika: Abraham, Lisa, & Stein, A. (2019). Words matter: Experimental evidence from job applications. Working Paper. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YKifRzy_kWuIIdB3MLS4VHht3okJa8pa/view  Bernard then cites an example showing that even repetitive manual jobs - mushroom picking, in this case - can be advertised to make them sound attractive. This does not always work though: not even the patriotic colours, the request to do something for your country or the direct gaze at the viewer in the ad below helped to recruit enough British people to pick fruit — in the end, the UK government and National Farmers’ Union chartered flights to bring fruit pickers from Romania to the country. Our final example in the first part of the episode anticipates both the subsequent interview and the analysis: it advertises a placement for graduates and is taken from Ruth Breeze’s book Corporate Discourse (Continuum, 2013, p. 61). As Bernard says, it sounds like the kind of  job Buzz Lightyear, a character from the film Toy Story, might apply for...  Apart from her book on corporate discourse, our interview guest, Professor Ruth Breeze, has also studied learner autonomy and, more directly related to the topic of this episode, the language and images on recruitment websites: Breeze, R. (2002). Attitudes towards learner autonomy among Spanish university students. Atlantis, 24(1), 23-36. Breeze, R. (2019). Recruitment websites and the socialization of new employees: dialogicity and graduation. In Sancho Guinda, C. (ed.) Engagement in Professional Genres. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 197-216. The text and image we analyse in the final part of the episode can be found here: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/jobs/2018/09/13/being-the-futures-of-ibm/ And that’s it — see you for episode 11, which will be on how to reply to an interesting vacancy.  At wordsandactions.blog  you can find details about the data analysis, glossary and the complete transcript. 

  Episode 9 is a co-production by the Words & Actions and en clair podcasts, sponsored by the Aston Institute of Forensic Linguistics. For further info, references and a full transcript please visit our blog https://wordsandactions.blog. The way we decided to work together is by having the usual parts of a W&A episode ‒ introduction, interview and analysis ‒ bracketed by the en clair host, Claire Hardaker, tell the story of the rise and fall of Enron. In the introduction part after Claire’s first narration, Veronika reads out parts from an email that a former employee wrote to Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, a few months before the scandal broke. Here is the full email:  On Behalf Of Pamela.J.Allison@dynegy.com Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2001 5:39 PM To: Lay, Kenneth  Subject:  Jeff’s Leaving   Mr. Lay,  I am not writing this in malice but in hopes that it helps get Enron back the way it used to treat their employees and makes it the number one employer of choice again. I hope you can get back the feeling that I had when I first started there and get the stress level down in your organization for the sake of your employees. I am a former employee who worked at Enron for 10 years – my husband was,at one time, in charge of A/P.  My one big disappointment was that I never got to meet you. During that time, I made a lot of friends who I continue to see from time to time.  I left last year and have missed the company since I left but would not contemplate coming back unless several people have been replaced.  (Joannie Williamson and Sheri Sera know my story.) I “knew” Jeff but I don’t think he knew me by name, only by sight, even though I worked in ENA when it only had 400 employees with 3 of us in HR. He was NOT what I would call a people person! Unless you were in an upper level position, he did not take the time to find out your name. (Ron Burnsis still one of my favorite people because of his talent with people – we need more like him in the business world!) As you can see, I am now working for a competitor and since I work in HR, I continually run into former Enron workers who have also left – most of their reasons are the same. It is not that they have lost faith in Enron as a company but because of the way they were treated by their managers. During the last 5 years I was there, I noticed a change in direction in the way employees were treated by upper management – and upper management was getting away with it.  Not only were they getting away with it, these people were being rewarded for this behavior.  I have heard stories of lower level employees being screamed at and in one instance, one of the VP s who was brought down from Canada was heard in his office screaming and pounding his telephone on his desk. Heaven only knows how he treats his subordinates. Believe me, the way employees are treated at Enron is being talked about on the streets of Houston and on the different college campuses.  You might also at some point take the time to find out why so many good people have left the HR community at Enron and it is not because they wanted to. I don’t know if you will see this, but I hope so.  Good luck on bringing Enron back to way it was – I still own stock!! Thanks for listening…Pam Allison    We then go on to interview David Wright, a forensic linguist who has worked with the large collection of publicly available emails from inside Enron. After the interview, we mention Andre Spicer’s book to refer to a communication strategy that we saw at work with Enron, but that is also used frequently in politics. We can certainly detect this kind of communication in the email that Ken Lay sent in reply to the message above. Here is the text of the full email that we analyse:  Dear Pam, Thank you for your e-mail of August 15th.  It is always a pleasure to hear from former employees.  Thank you also for calling attention to instances which, on the surface, do not appear to be representative of our expectations of Enron leadership. Part of our continuous improvement involves an on-going review of our management and the diversity of styles therein. True, not everyone is agreeable to Enron’s culture or the many different management styles at Enron. We do, however, expect all of our employees – not just management – to adhere to our core values of respect, integrity, communication and excellence. These values become even more significant as we continue to grow and expand our scope of business, and more critical as we become a more culturally diverse workforce. We enjoy our status as one of the best places in America to work according to Fortune and other sources thanks in part to our willingness to examine our organization and make needed change. Our employee surveys, belief in open communication, and exit interview process for employees choosing to leave Enron are examples of our efforts to seek out feedback and scrutinize the way we do business.  Your feedback will help play a role in that process. Sincerely, Ken Lay This email features many of the ways in which companies often respond to complaints (even though the first email, by Pam Anderson, was intended as a warning). In the second part of her narration, Claire mentions the “‘this is fine’ dog’s coffee meme”. You may well have seen it on social media, where it is often used to indicate denial in the face of a crisis:   And finally, if you haven’t had enough of the Enron scandal yet ‒ and it is a fascinating story! ‒, here is some further reading:  Swartz, M., &  Watkins, S. (2004). Power Failure: The inside story of the collapse of Enron.  New York: Doubleday.