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20230719T101520230719T1800Europe/Amsterdam[SYMP15] AILA ReN Social cohesion at work: shared languages as mortar in professional settingsHybrid Session (onsite/online)AILA 2023 - 20th Anniversary Congress Lyon Editioncellule.congres@ens-lyon.fr
Manufacturing paper crimes– merging genres, texts, styles and discourses in financial crime trials
Oral Presentation[SYMP15] AILA ReN Social cohesion at work: shared languages as mortar in professional settings06:00 PM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/19 16:00:00 UTC - 2024/07/19 16:00:00 UTC
Manufacturing paper crimes– merging genres, texts, styles and discourses in financial crime trials
Alexander Paulsson, Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Sweden Henrik Rahm, Swedish Linguistics, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Sweden Niklas Sandell, Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Sweden Peter Svensson, Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Sweden
Selected symposium: Social cohesion at work: shared languages as mortar in professional settings
Presentation language: English
The aim of the presentation is to investigate the construction of social cohesion by the merging genres, texts, styles and discourses in court proceedings. At the AILA conference, examples of social cohesion in this text setting will be presented, both from minor and major crimes.
The paper is based on an ongoing multidisciplinary project on the construction of three types of economic crimes – bookkeeping crime, tax evasion crime and fraudulence. The four researchers from the disciplines of Business Administration and Swedish linguistics cooperate since several years in projects on economic discourse, representing research perspectives of discourse, ideology, genre, organization and intertextuality. An important point of departure is the curious, innocent and inquiring mind of the researchers as none of them is a law scholar. Thus, this ignorance is seen as a possibility to reach an unprejudiced understanding of paper crimes.
In financial crime, a potential criminal (a suspect) meets his/her accusatory – a white-collar suspect meeting white-collar law professionals. The white-collar suspect can be the owner of a small business, standing trial for not delivering the annual report on time to the Swedish Companies Registration Office. At the other end, the white-collar suspect could be a CEO standing trial for fraudulence or tax evasion crime regarding millions of euros.
The court proceedings serve as a mortar and a meeting place for genres, texts, styles and discourses. Genres used are reports of interrogation, testimonies and judicial decisions but also texts without a genre label such as transcripts of text message conversations and other typos of evidence material. Styles represented are legal language (legalese), colloquial language, business language, political language and administrative language. Discourses discerned are discourses of order, emotions, responsibility, accountability, being a human, incompleteness, moral and morality.
References
Alalehto. T. (2003). Economic Crime: Does Personality Matter?, Int. J. of Offender Therapy and Comp. Criminology, 47(3), 335-355. Rahm, H. & Sandell, N. & Svensson, P. (2020). Corporate dreams – Appropriate aspirations and the building of trust in annual reports. Studies in Communication Sciences, 20(1), 77-91. Rothe, D.L. (2020). Moving Beyond Abstract Typologies?, J. of White Collar and Corporate Crime, 1(1), 7-15. Roulet, T.J. (2019). Sins for some, virtues for others. Human Relations 72(9), 1436-1463. Savelsberg, J.J. (1994). Constructing White-collar Crime, Power. UPP. Schoultz, I.& Flyghed, J. (2020). From "We Didn't Do It" to "We've Learned Our Lesson", Critical Criminology, 28, 739-757. Sutherland, E.H. (1940). White Collar Criminality, American Sociological R., 5(1), 1-12.
Tombs, S. & Whyte, D. (2020). The Shifting Imaginaries of Corporate Crime, J. of White Collar and Corporate Crime, 1(1), 16-23.
Problematising the Dominance of English as a Business Lingua Franca from an Individual Point of View
Oral Presentation[SYMP15] AILA ReN Social cohesion at work: shared languages as mortar in professional settings06:00 PM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/19 16:00:00 UTC - 2024/07/19 16:00:00 UTC
This paper aims to shed light on inequality, power relations and restrictions among users of Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF) to explore a more realistic picture of BELF in the diverse workplace worldwide. While BELF research has accumulated valuable insights into how businesspeople communicate in English, these issues have been downplayed in the previous BELF research. Thus, the notion of BELF has been sometimes criticised for promoting the "illusive success" of the monolingual approach by relying on English as a lingua franca. Building on the previous BELF research development, this paper reflectively explores BELF by focusing on the implications of language asymmetry and potentially negative consequences associated with BELF proliferating from the perspectives of the individual. Participants are 28 business people from Japan, where English is often positioned as a gatekeeper for engaging in the global workforce. The thematic analysis of the qualitative interviews revealed that such language asymmetry (Detzen & Löhlein, 2020) imposes significant challenges for BELF users as they experience the constraints caused by the language and confront them with distinct strategies.
Crystal, D. (2018). The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language. Cambridge university press. Detzen, D., & Löhlein, L. (2020). "Towards a Framework of Individuals'' Responses to Language Asymmetry." In S. Horn, P. Lecomte, & S. Tietze (Eds.), Managing Multilingual Workplaces (pp. 122–138). Routledge. Horn, S., Lecomte, P., & Tietze, S. (2020). Managing multilingual workplaces: methodological, empirical and pedagogic perspectives. Routledge. Kankaanranta, A., & Louhiala-Salminen, L. (2013). "What language does global business speak?" – The concept and development of BELF. Ibérica, 26, 17–34. Louhiala-Salminen, L., & Kankaanranta, A. (2011). Professional Communication in a Global Business Context : The Notion of Global Communicative Competence. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 54(3), 244–262. Neeley, T. B. (2012). Global business speaks English: Why You Need a Language Strategy Now. Harvard Business Review, 90(May), 116–124. Piekkari, R., Tietze, S., Angouri, J., Meyer, R., & Vaara, E. (2020). Can you speak Covid‐19? Languages and social inequality in management studies. Journal of Management Studies, 1–5.
An informal language of reasoning. Ways of talking about inference and explanations in communication between managers and financial analysts.
Oral Presentation[SYMP15] AILA ReN Social cohesion at work: shared languages as mortar in professional settings06:00 PM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/19 16:00:00 UTC - 2024/07/19 16:00:00 UTC
In our paper we present the shared professional language used to talk about reasoning and explanation by top managers of listed companies and financial analysts in quarterly Earning Conference Calls (ECC). . One of the key functions of ECC is to contextualise and "frame" financial results. Several studies of this dialogic professional genre suggest that advancing and challenging argumentative justifications plays a central role in this endeavour. Since these are conversations where not only managers introduce their arguments in order to persuade analysts and investors of their accountability, but also analystsintroduce their own reasoning and explanations around results and earlier disclosed information through complex dialogical moves (cf. Rocci and Raimondo, 2017). We will address the question of the shared language used by managers and analysts using both formal methods argumentation theory and empirical observational methods from corpus linguistics. A significant body of argumentation theoretical research is dedicated to how interaction field (Rigotti and Rocci, 2006) and types of dialogue (Walton, 1992) shape and constrain the way in which participants fashion their argumentation. Corpus linguistic approaches provide descriptive tools for investigating recurrent lexis and phraseology in argument and about argument. Finally, formal tools allow us to construct formally precise representations of reasoning, explanation and persuasion in dialogue. Bringing these three perspectives (context, corpus and formalization) demands an investigation of structured corpus, which currently becomes possible due to the development of annotation tools for annotation of linguistic units, genre specific discourse moves (INCEpTION[1]) as well as of the anchoring of reasoning to dialogue acts (OVA+[2]). Both, normative and descriptive methods provide a practical guidance on how reasoning and explanations are working in the field as also how it can be improved. Exploiting annotated corpora we will examine on the one hand the key words, which participants of the ECCs are using to indicate reasoning and explanative contextualisation of released data. On the other side, we will show how bits of the text can be connected with a relation of inference in order to show how particular standpoints are argued and data is explained this particular interaction. Finally, correlations between linguistic indicators and reasoning structures will be established.
References:
Rigotti, E. and Rocci, A., 2006. Towards a definition of communication context. Studies in communication sciences, 6(2), pp.155-180. Rocci, A. and Raimondo, C., 2017. Dialogical Argumentation in Financial Conference Calls: the Request of Confirmation of Inference (ROCOI). In Argumentation and Inference: Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Argumentation, Fribourg 2017 (Vol. 2, pp. 699-715). Walton, D., 1992. Commitment, types of dialogue and fallacies. Informal Logic, 14(1993), pp.93-103. [1] https://inception-project.github.io/ [2] https://arg-tech.org/index.php/ova/
Jargon as mortar in experts’ communication: the case of finance
Oral Presentation[SYMP15] AILA ReN Social cohesion at work: shared languages as mortar in professional settings06:00 PM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/19 16:00:00 UTC - 2024/07/19 16:00:00 UTC
Mutual exchange and teamwork are key for financial analysts in their workplace: the qualified feedback of work colleagues and peers allows for rethinking and reassessing calculations, conclusions, and recommendations. This requires a shared language that facilitates in-depth discussions of each other's considerations, assessments, and text products. At the same time, this shared language acts as separator from other stakeholders as financial jargon is difficult to understand for persons with low financial literacy (e.g., OECD, 2020).
Analyzing the multiple factors that shape and influence the shared language of financial analysts, reveals three key drivers. First, the double-bind situation (Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 2011) in their work environment puts financial analysts in a difficult position as they can never fulfil the (contradictory) requirements, no matter what they do: they have to provide accurate forecasts of future developments with low visibility and at the same time, their performance (that impacts their payroll) is measured by exactly these forecasts. This led to the development of an industry-wide shared language of financial analysts that is characterized by strategic formulations, and hedging phrases. Second, the profound knowledge of the mechanisms, interdependencies, and decisive factors in the financial industry requires a specialized vocabulary for an accurate and unambiguous exchange amongst work colleagues and peers. Fiancial analysts are highly dependant on peers since they influence each other with their forecasts and they are compared with each other with reference to the consensus estimates. And third, experts as the financial analysts tend to assume that all stakeholders understand their shared language, used as a matter of course in their professional setting, whereas there actually is a need for intralingual expert-to-layperson translation for the target audience.
In my presentation, I first provide an overview of the working context of financial analysts (part 1), based on several transdisciplinary collaboration projects and on 25 years of ethnographic research in the field (part 2). From a theoretical perspective, I then analyze the key drivers of shared languages in this professional setting (part 3), and from a practical perspective, I discuss the key drivers' effects on the workplace and on the work of financial analysts (part 4). I conclude by showing how shared languages in financial analysis impact the communication within the industry and which implications result for society at large.
No more talk of Hell in Latin: an analysis of stakeholder discourse on the use of the vernacular for Catholic liturgy, Post Vatican II
Oral Presentation[SYMP15] AILA ReN Social cohesion at work: shared languages as mortar in professional settings10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/19 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/19 16:00:00 UTC
I provide a thematic analysis of stakeholder discourse, namely Catholics concerning the use of the vernacular for worship on the social media platform Reddit.com. For centuries, a mutual suspicion has existed between the Catholic Church and the forces of modernity. Yet with Vatican II (1962-1965), the Church officially "opened its windows" to the modern world. For instance, the decree Sacrosantum Concilium allowed languages other than Latin. Significant for understanding a community of practice is that a preliminary review of the discourse on "R/Catholic", a subreddit, reveals a divided Catholic laity. These divisions have implications for engendering a community of practice for the transcendent within modernity.
"We live in a godless world". So begins Tara Isabella Burton's inquiry (2020) into religious practices in the Secular Age. Burton observes, like many others, that people are becoming more religiously unaffiliated, but proposes they still seek what religion traditionally provides, just differently. Many do not reject religion, instead they "remix" it through strange rites, having fun in a way that "John Milton's Satan is fun". The "Remixed", she says, desire "a sense of meaning in the world and personal purpose within that meaning, a community to share that experience with, and rituals to bring the power of that experience into achievable, everyday life" (Burton 2020: 10). Significantly, "the affirmation of life", writes the philosopher Charles Taylor (1996: 18), is "a powerful constitutive strand of modern western spirituality". Thereby, the religious and the religiously unaffiliated seem similar. Both seek the spiritual in ordinary life, welcoming participation from the "laity". The "Remixed" seem quite successful creating social cohesion, as they celebrate diversity, in such magical places as New York City's McKittrick Hotel, a performance art space. The elements shaping and influencing the "Remixed" as a community of practice are not my focus, yet I wonder about church-goers, such as Catholics, especially with the loss of Latin as a shared language of worship. To explore this question, I provide a thematic analysis of stakeholder discourse, namely Catholics concerning the use of the vernacular for worship on the social media platform Reddit.com. For centuries, a mutual suspicion has existed between the Catholic Church and the forces of modernity. Yet with Vatican II (1962-1965), the Church officially "opened its windows" to the modern world. For instance, the decree Sacrosantum Concilium allowed languages other than Latin. Significant for understanding a community of practice is that a preliminary review of the discourse on "R/Catholic", a subreddit, reveals a divided Catholic laity. These divisions have implications for engendering a community of practice for the transcendent within modernity. Following the thematic analysis, I discuss the significance of the themes in relation to the dynamics between social cohesion and the role of shared languages. I conclude by situating the stakeholder discourse within Taylor's "Catholic Modernity". Taylor's views may not provide the "mortar" (McKenna 2021) to strengthen communication and mutual understanding among Catholics, but it may shed some light on Satan's question in Milton's Paradise Lost about why God would favor "talking monkeys" over angels. For this case, it may have to do with the diverse ways humans create meaning and different communities within sacred and profane spaces, such as social media-not unlike the "Remixed"-using different languages and modalities in a globalized world, despite converging and diverging forces that may create more despair than joy, making the world feel godless.
Burton, Tara Isabella. 2020. Strange Rites. Public Affairs: New York.
McKenna, C. 2021. An invisible mortar. The essential role of speech acts within tri-segregated moviegoing. AILA Review. 34(1), 102–121.
Taylor, Charles. 1996. A Catholic Modernity? Marianist Award Lectures. 10. 7-37.
The shared language of transparency: A corpus-assisted analysis of sustainability reports in the fashion sector
Oral Presentation[SYMP15] AILA ReN Social cohesion at work: shared languages as mortar in professional settings10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/19 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/19 16:00:00 UTC
In corporate settings, transparency refers to the degree of openness in communicating with key stakeholders as well as the public at large. It is seen as a way for companies to convey an image of trustworthiness (Ball 2009) and distinguish themselves from competitors (Koskela, 2018). Transparency is typically associated with financial disclosure but, in recent years, non-financial disclosure relating to environmental and social issues has become increasingly important (Jackson et al. 2020), as reflected in the rise of non-financial reporting genres, such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) or sustainability reports in which companies seek to portray themselves as caring and trustworthy (Bondi, 2016).This paper focuses on the linguistic expression of transparency in sustainability reports of companies within the fashion sector. In particular, it aims to shed light on how companies use language to communicate transparency and to determine to what extent these companies may share the language of transparency as a strategy to enhance social cohesion within the global fashion community and to build public trust (Rahm, Sandell & Svensson 2020). The fashion industry operates on a global level, contributes significantly to world exports, and has millions of employees, and thus has a wide-reaching impact on people's lives. For this reason, transparency becomes an important message in an industry where social issues, such as the environment (i.e. ecofashion, Cucchi & Piotti 2016), working conditions, diversity, and animal welfare remain at the forefront (Fashion Revolution CIC, 2020). A corpus consisting of the sustainability reports of the top ten ranking companies in the Fashion Transparency Index 2020 was compiled and then queried with text analysis software to extract linguistic items encoding transparency and identify patterns of usage across the companies. Preliminary results indicate that all the companies share a clear concern to highlight transparency, but also communicate this message through other various conceptually related items (e.g., engagement, assurance, disclosure, dialogue, conversation). The findings can be applied in instructional settings in the area of fashion communication to help learners acquire linguistic and rhetorical skills useful for producing texts that promote a corporate image of transparency. ReferencesBall, C. (2009). What is transparency? Public Integrity, 11(4), 293-308.Bondi, M. (2016). CSR Reports in English and Italian: Focus on generic structure and importance markers. In: G. E. Garzone, D. Heaney, & G. Riboni (Eds), Language for specific purposes. research and translation across cultures and media (pp. 168-199). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.Cucchi, C. A., & Piotti, S. R. (2016). Eco-fashion lexicon: A never-ending story? L'analisi Linguistica e Letteraria, 2, 171-182.Fashion Revolution CIC (2020). Fashion Transparency Index 2020. https://issuu.com/fashionrevolution/docs/fr_fashiontransparencyindex2020?fr=sNmI5NzYxMDk0OAJackson, G.., Bartosch, J., Avetisyan, E., Kinderman, D., Steen Knudsen, J. (2020). Mandatory non-financial disclosure and its influence on CSR: An international comparison. Journal of Business Ethics, 162(2), 323-342.Koskela, M. (2018). Disclosing principles of IR communication: Rhetorical moves for constructing transparency. International Journal of Business Communication, 55(2), 164-193.Rahm, H., N. Sandell & P. Svensson. (2020). Corporate dreams – Appropriate aspirations and the building of trust in annual reports. Studies in Communication Sciences 20(1), 77–91.
The essential role of speech-acts within tri-segregated moviegoing.
[SYMP15] AILA ReN Social cohesion at work: shared languages as mortar in professional settings10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/19 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/19 16:00:00 UTC
This symposium aims to expand the use of a literary analysis technique-namely, speech act theory-to the examination of business writing and of the language of business as it has been used over time in order to "normalize" segregationist behavior. This transdisciplinary move enables historical research into the relationship between commercial businesses and subject populations in the United States particularly during the Jim Crow era. It does so by recognizing, through speech-act analysis, the non-denotative yet context-laden forces and messages wrapped within seemingly unobjectionable language-forces that underpinned the social and political hierarchies undergirding segregation in the United States.
The symposium seeks to apply the principles of J. L. Austin's speech-act theories to the study of local business segregation in the Jim Crow South. In particular, it borrows the notions of illocutionary and perlocutionary force when examining the seemingly bland and prosaic statements often used to normalize segregation within the business of commercial entertainment. For purposes of expanding the complexity of typical Manichaean (i.e., Black vs. White) ethnic studies, this analysis was developed within the context of tri-racial segregation as applied to rural moviegoing within Robeson County, North Carolina during the first half of the twentieth century. Notably, the development of Robeson's historical cinema-exhibition spaces eventually resulted in a highly unusual venue-i.e., the three-entrance theater-whose physical architecture reflected tensions between local ethnic demographics and desired social hierarchies. Yet even in the face of these unusual physical constructs, this study contends that seemingly everyday, objective/descriptive, and non-demonizing language remained an essential component in enforcing segregation.
Presenters Christopher McKenna Associate Professor, Stephen F. Austin State University
Narratives as key elements of the discursive component of professional expertise
Oral Presentation[SYMP15] AILA ReN Social cohesion at work: shared languages as mortar in professional settings10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/19 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/19 16:00:00 UTC
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the reflection carried out within the AILA2023 symposium devoted to shared languages, by elaborating on their three dimensions, namely "shared languages as tools and results of a negotiation process and the interplay between key drivers" and as "facilitators of communication and mutual learning to solve socially relevant problems" (Whitehouse et al. 2021: 12-14). Building on these dimensions, this proposal aims at developing perspectives for the study of professional fields in order to capture what Florence Mourlhon-Dallies has defined as "the logic of professions" (Mourlhon-Dallies 2008) through the analysis of professional narratives. This approach implies that, in a professional specialized context, professional discourse and expertise are intrinsically intertwined, as professional discourse appears as a declination of professional skills and competence. French-speaking researchers in language sciences have tackled this issue by focusing on the "linguistic part of work" (Boutet 2001). Then this proposal will also be part of a broader reflection on the place of writing and literacy in the professional worlds (Lillis & McKinney 2013). Indeed professional writing is gaining prominence, due to the evolution of economic activities, with the development of digital activities and methods of monitoring and quality control (professional writing is indeed directly involved in the standardization and codification of professional discourse). Researchers in applied linguistics are therefore led to question the status of professional autoethnographic and autobiographical narratives: Are they relevant objects for research? Are the data we gather reliable to analyze professional worlds, especially as they take part in the discursive component of professional expertise (Wozniak 2019)? In order to answer these questions, the analysis will be developed in three distinct points: the study of professional communities as discursive communities, related to specific professional specialized fields, that of the narratives themselves as scientific objects and finally, following a more reflexive point of view, the study of autobiographical and biographical narratives in professional identities' construction processes. Boutet, Josiane. (2001). La part langagière du travail : bilan et évolutions. Langage et Société 98, 17–42. Lillis, Theresa & Carolyn McKinney. (2013). The sociolinguistics of writing in a global context: Objects, lenses, consequences. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17(4), 425–439. Mourlhon-Dallies, Florence. (2008). Enseigner une langue à des fins professionnelles. Les Éditions Didier. Whitehouse, M., H. Rahm & S. Wozniak (ed.). (2021). Developing Shared Languages. The fundamentals of mutual learning and problem solving in transdisciplinary collaboration: Introduction. AILA Review 34(1), 1–18. Wozniak, S. (2019). Approche ethnographique des langues spécialisées professionnelles. Peter Lang.
Presenters Severine WOZNIAK Full Professor, Université Lumière Lyon 2
Marlies Whitehouse
Christopher McKenna
Severine WOZNIAK