Handbook of Business Communication

Almut Koester

26 Spoken workplace discourse

1.Introduction

2.Defining and describing workplace discourse

3.Theoretical and methodological approaches: Institutional order versus interaction order

4.Linguistic approaches: Genre analysis, corpus analysis and CA

5.Conclusion

1Introduction

A chapter dealing with spoken workplace discourse in a book on business communication first needs to address two questions:

–How can “workplace discourse” be distinguished from “business discourse” or “business communication”?

–Why focus on spoken workplace communication?

To begin with the first question, “workplace discourse” refers to a broader range of communicative contexts, and can be seen as including contexts in which business communication occurs. So while ...