The Ins and Outs of Business and Professional Discourse Research. Reflections on Interacting with the Workplace

This edited volume offers a collection of original chapters focusing on the Ins and Outs of professional discourse research. The contributors discuss all aspects of the scholarly process, investigating written, oral, non-verbal and digital communication in professional settings. First the book analyses gaining access and collecting data by exploring questions such as, how can we convince practitioners to let us observe, record, interview, 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? The book then examines feeding results back in the form of recommendations to practitioners, asking questions such as, 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? Drawing on insights from LSP, ethnography and discourse analysis, this book will be of great value to researchers and practitioners of workplace settings.