Reflections on the Ins and Outs of Business and Professional Discourse Research

1
This book presents a collection of original chapters focusing on what,
for lack of a more precise term, we have come to call the “INs and
OUTs” of business and professional discourse research. Put simply,
this means that we zoom in on the two extreme ends of the scholarly
process investigating written, oral, non-verbal and digital commu-
nication in business and professional settings. On the one hand,
the volume includes a number of chapters that deal with issues of
gaining access to and collecting data, and addresses questions like:
how can we convince practitioners to let us observe, record, inter-
view, survey? What counts as data? How much data do we need? What
shape and form can the data take? How does our research interfere
with the professional practices we study? On the other hand, there
are a number of chapters that look at issues of feeding results back
in the form of recommendations to practitioners. Questions here
include: how can professional discourse research be applied to help
shape practice? How do we translate our methods and concepts for
the communities that we investigate, including industry, government
and non-profit organizations?