The contributions to this volume together confirm that though context and culture are complex and difficult notions, they are crucial to understanding the professional genres of modern business communication. In today's globalised business environment, professionals of all backgrounds are under pressure to employ new and different discourse standards to allow for smoother production and reception of business documents and dialogues. In this changing environment, the success of any commercial activity will depend on how competently business professionals respond to the cultural sensitivities and preferences of their partners. Taking a variety of approaches to professional genres, including customer complaints, mission statements, international contracts and decision-making meetings, the authors explore complex aspects of both cross-cultural and interpersonal issues in business discourse and suggest practical applications of their analytical findings.

Autorentext

The Editors: Anna Trosborg, Ph.D. (Doctor.ling.merc.) is Professor of English and Reader in business communication at Aarhus School of Business, Denmark. She has been doing extensive research on professional discourse since 1989. Her recent academic production is in the fields of L2 teaching and learning, business pragmatics, genre analysis, legal speech acts, and business communication. She is currently teaching 'Intercultural business communication and negotiation'.
Poul Erik Flyvholm Jørgensen, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in Organisational and Business Communication at Aarhus School of Business, Denmark. His main research interest lies in the field of interpersonal communication and persuasion theory in combination with discourse and, especially, applied genre analysis. Coming from a background in business in the UK, US and Denmark, he teaches international marketing communication and 'European media and documentation'.

Inhalt
Contents: Anna Trosborg/Poul Erik Flyvholm Jørgensen: Introduction Vijay K. Bhatia: Genres in Business Contexts Poul Erik Flyvholm Jørgensen: Constructing Business Messages: From Context to Message Production Karin Sode: Relevance and Coherence in Decision-Making Meetings Britt-Louise Gunnarsson: The Organization of Enterprise Discourse Maria Isaksson: Ethos and Pathos Representations in Mission Statements: Identifying Virtues and Emotions in an Emerging Business Genre Celina Frade: Asymmetries in the Negotiation of International Contracts in Brazil Akiko Okamura: What Do You Call Your Colleagues? Address-Forms in Cross-Cultural Communication Anna Trosborg/Philip Shaw: Acquiring Prescriptive Business Pragmatics: The Case of Customer Complaints Handling Philip Shaw/Ofelia A. Palermo/Paul Gillaerts/J. Piet Verckens/Midori Shinohara/Everett Jacobs: Prescriptive Business Pragmatics: How Valid Is It across Cultures?