Social Actors “to Go”: An Analytical Toolkit to Explore Agency in Business Discourse and Communication:

TL;DR: The authors argue that language awareness and discourse analytical skills should be part of business communication curricula and propose a three-step analytical model drawing on organizational and critical discourse studies, and approaches from systemic-functional linguistics.

Abstract: We argue that language awareness and discourse analytical skills should be part of business communication curricula. To this end, we propose a three-step analytical model drawing on organizational and critical discourse studies, and approaches from systemic-functional linguistics, to explore agency and action in business communication. Focusing on language and discourse helps students to analyze texts more systematically, researchers to gain deeper insights into organizational discourse, and practitioners to reflect on communication processes and produce texts with more impact. We view discourse as central to organizational processes and render a specific approach accessible and easy to integrate into business communication curricula.

Summary

Introduction

• In April 2017, the terrifying images of a passenger being "forcibly removed" from a United Airlines plane spread across the globe and left many in deep shock.
• There was no shortage of accounts, justifications and explanations from the airline, but whatever the lead-up to the events, the recorded images of the bleeding customer being forcefully dragged off a plane for not giving up his already occupied seat "voluntarily" were hard to misinterpret.
• The authors offer an analytical model which enables students, researchers and practitioners to shed light on the importance of linguistic choices and the role these choices play in how reality is constructed in communication.
• To illustrate the model, the authors present a brief sample analysis of one company's text on corporate social responsibility.

Language awareness and discourse analytical skills in business communication

• Business communicators are 'language workers': specialists for whom words are not only the means of completing their work, but the very focus and product of their work.
• For the past thirty years, the view of language as a mere medium of communication, and the view of communication as simply another tool for management and organizational practices, processes and activities, has been widely contested (e.g. Putnam and Fairhurst, 2015; Grant et al., 2004) .
• Coupled with analytical skills, such awareness helps students and practitioners become applied discourse analysts and, consequently, empowered communicators.
• This approach has been under scrutiny, however, since Williams'(1988) seminal work, in which she compared the language used in meetings to the language taught for meetings.
• In what follows, the authors briefly discuss the conceptual framework of agency before introducing an applicable analytical version, illustrating the framework with examples throughout.

Agency and action in language

• An agent is someone -or something -bringing about said transformation.
• As a result of the long-standing interest in agency (see e.g. Putnam and Cooren, 2004) there have been attempts to examine how agency is encoded linguistically in spoken or written communication.
• The agency-action distinction shows that there is still a lot of scope for looking beyond speech acts as manifested through specific verbs in communication and examining how agents and actors are -or are not -referred to in discourse.
• In their analysis of AOL TimeWarner's Internet policy document from the early 2000s, Amernic and Craig (2006) show how the document refers to human stakeholders outside of the corporation.
• Stakeholders on the other hand are represented as grammatically passive beneficiaries who are given access to products and services.

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• The above review shows that analyses exposing the linguistic encoding of agency and action can shed light on how these two categories are assigned by communicators.
• Beyond that, social actor analysis also illuminates what relationships between communicator, audience and third parties are constructed in a text.
• Thus far, however, as the authors have seen, attempts to capture the encoding of agency and action have been both limited and unsystematic.
• The authors propose the adoption of an analytical model that enables students, researchers and practitioners to examine, in a more systematic manner, a wider range of linguistic choices that can encode agency and action.

Social actor analysis

• While researchers in organizational scholarship typically focus on 'agents', critical discourse analysts usually operate with the concept of 'social actors', i.e. participants who are represented as doing something or having something done to them in texts.
• Two points are worth noting here to avoid confusion: firstly, the model the authors propose below adopts the wellestablished term 'social actors', but is intended to allow for the analysis of both semantic agents and grammatical actors.
• Yet critical analysis of language, including the way it is used to represent social actors and construct relationships between communicator, audience and third parties, is important in business discourse and communication, too: how the authors portray agency and action gives a different configuration to reality, portraying a parallel world and thereby helping to bring about that world.
• The steps following identification are to explain the findings to infer what ideologies inform the text and recognize the possible intentions of the communicator.
• In the next section, the authors will provide some background to this analytical framework, outline its steps in more detail and then illustrate it throughout with the summary analysis of a corporate text.

Social actor analysis "to go"

• The analysis of social actor representationor social actor analysiswas first proposed and later revised by van Leeuwen (1996; 2008, pp. 23-54) .
• Working with a simplified version of his elaborateand not always intuitivemodel, the authors will detail how social actors can be excluded or (implicitly or explicitly) included, activated or passivated, ascribed different degrees of agency, and referred to in personal or impersonal ways.
• Whatever the lexical or grammatical choices, analyzing them systematically enables us to discuss what beliefs and values are expressed in their text and what intentions communicators may have had when using language in a particular way.
• As for actions, in the discussion below the authors will inevitably refer to processes and actions, but due to space limitations these will not be discussed in detail.
• On occasion, the authors also rely on other examples from various sections of the 'About Avon' website or present their own realistic examples.

STEP 1a: Who is absent, implicitly or explicitly present in the text?

• If social actors are absent from a text, the authors might ask if they have been strategically excluded . [insert about here].
• Impersonalization can be achieved through a grammatical twist by which social actors are turned into non-social actors by changing word classes.
• Perhaps the most common of such transformations is known as nominalization, a process by which verbs are turned into nouns (e.g.
• For present purposes, the authors can establish that social actors can be excluded for "innocent" reasons (e.g. to avoid repetition or unduly long texts or utterances; van Leeuwen, 2008, p. 28) or, alternatively, to eschew responsibility and blame for potentially controversial actions.
• The social actors included in the Avon CSR text are the company's founder, an unspecified 'we' and the company itself.

STEP 1b: How are social actors represented: as active or passive, as more or less agentive, in personal or impersonal ways?

• In the Avon CSR text, the one mention of the founder casts him in an active role ('David H. McConnell committed his company'), while the 'we' is grammatically active twice ('We're the company', 'We are Avon') and passive once, as a beneficiary ('the authors are guided by their principles').the authors.
• These actions involve a high degree of semantic agency, and only in the minority of cases is the company allocated the more static actions of knowing, speaking, functioning and standing for something or someone.
• Simply put, function refers to what people do (e.g. 'Managers are talking to workers about their concerns') while identity refers to what people "more or less permanently, or unavoidably, are" (van Leeuwen, 2008, p. 42) .
• When they are specified, social actors can be referred to as individuals or be assimilated into groups.

STEP 1c: What is the relationship between communicator, audience and third parties?

• One of the values listed is 'integrity', which is elaborated thus: Integrity should be the hallmark of every Avon Associate.
• The 'we' here shows a shrinking referential range, starting out with potentially referring back to 'every Avon Associate', but successively limiting the range by mentioning functionalized ('Representatives and customers'), collectivized ('communities') and relationally identified social actors ('colleagues') in the third person.
• Indeed, it has been argued that ambiguity can be viewed as an inherent dimension in all complex organizations (Aggerholm et al., 2012) and to the extent that it communicates multiple, even conflicting, beliefs and values, it raises the question of how the authors can infer underlying ideologies.
• The identification of social actors suggests a strong focus on the collective self: the only individual mentioned is the founder of Avon, and the most prominent social actor who carries the highest social value is clearly the foregrounded, active, personified company itself.

STEP 3: Recognizing the communicator's possible intentions

• To conclude the social actor analysis, the authors ask what the communicator's linguistic choices reveal about his/her possible intentions.
• Representing social actors as active 'doers' or passive recipients can serve this purpose of influencing how the audience interprets what is depicted as reality.
• In the case of their Avon example, the authors have established a level of ambiguity about just who 'we' and its variants ('our business', 'our commitment') refer to.

Summary and concluding thoughts

• Any such inclusivity is temporarily abandoned when the text lists a range of activities about 'the company' (sentences 3-6 and 8) rather than 'our company'.
• The next two stages are interpretative, enabling us to infer underlying ideologies, values and norms as well as the speakers'/writers' possible intentions.
• Such knowledge can lead to the realization of how linguistic and discourse practices function in a given context, and it consequently equips students and practitioners with concrete strategies to choose from when they want to communicate in a range of organizational settings.

Full text

For Peer Review
Social actors “to go”:
An analytical toolkit to explore agency
in business communication
Journal:
Business and Professional Communication Quarterly
Manuscript ID
BPCQ-17-007.R2
Manuscript Type:
Article
Keywords:
Social Actor Analysis, Agency, Discourse Analysis, Critical Language
Awareness, CSR
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Business and Professional Communication Quarterly

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Social actors “to go”: An analytical toolkit to explore agency in business discourse and
communication
Abstract
This paper makes a case for raising critical language awareness in business communication
education and proposes that the development of discourse analytical skills should be made
part of management and business communication curricula. As one specific approach to train
such awareness and skills, we propose a three-step analytical model to explore agency and
action in business discourse and communication. The proposed model draws on
organizational discourse scholarship, critical discourse studies and approaches from
systemic-functional linguistics, and allows for gaining a better understanding of how agency
is assigned in organizational texts. The method draws attention to linguistic and discourse
practices and thus helps students to analyze texts more systematically, enables researchers to
gain deeper insights into agency and action in organizational discourse, and assists
practitioners to reflect on communication processes and consequently to improve their
practice and produce texts with more impact. The study is thus part of a broader agenda that
sets out out to fully realize the linguistic turn: it promotes an approach that views discourse as
central to organizational processes, and by making the analytical framework accessible, it
renders the approach easy to adopt by business and management curricula.
Keywords: social actor analysis, agency, critical language awareness, discourse analysis
Introduction
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In April 2017, the terrifying images of a passenger being “forcibly removed” from a United
Airlines plane spread across the globe and left many in deep shock. There was no shortage of
accounts, justifications and explanations from the airline, but whatever the lead-up to the
events, the recorded images of the bleeding customer being forcefully dragged off a plane for
not giving up his already occupied seat “voluntarily” were hard to misinterpret. Yet, the
picture that the company’s CEO, Oscar Munoz, painted in his email to United Airlines
employees is rather different. In his account Munoz wrote:
United gate agents were approached by crew members that were told they needed to
board the flight. We sought volunteers and then followed our involuntary denial of
boarding process ... and when we approached one of the passengers to explain
apologetically that he was denied boarding, he raised his voice and refused to comply with
crew member instructions. He was approached a few more times after that in order to gain
his compliance to come off the aircraft, and each time he refused and became more and
more disruptive and belligerent.
Consequently, in a sentence that Dickey (2017) labels the epitome of bureaucratic style,
Munoz said: “Our agents were left with no choice but to call the Chicago Aviation Security
officers to assist in removing the customer from the flight. He repeatedly declined to leave.”
The above communication reveals just how important linguistic choices are when describing
an event. Note that in Munoz’s statement “agents” (i.e. the airline workers) are depicted in
two ways: if they are active, they act ‘apologetically’, but for the main part of the story they
are passive: they ‘were approached’ and ‘left with no choice’. Also note that in the part that
supposedly contains the most information about the series of confrontations which left the
customer with a bleeding face, the only active actor is the customer: he ‘raised his voice’,
‘refused to comply’ and ‘declined to leave’. We do not have to look too deep to see who
takes the blame for the events in Munoz’s story.
The close look at Munoz’s linguistic choices reveals how he manages to shift agency and
hence responsibility from the company and its representatives to the customer. This is an
interesting observation for business and professional communicators and an important
process to understand. In this paper we demonstrate why such knowledge is crucial: firstly,
we explore and make a case for (critical) language awareness in business communication
education, before we zoom in on the importance and linguistic manifestations of agency and
action. We offer an analytical model which enables students, researchers and practitioners to
shed light on the importance of linguistic choices and the role these choices play in how
reality is constructed in communication. To illustrate the model, we present a brief sample
analysis of one company’s text on corporate social responsibility.
Language awareness and discourse analytical skills in business communication
Business communicators are ‘language workers’: specialists for whom words are not only the
means of completing their work, but the very focus and product of their work. For language
workers, language is something to be crafted and designed in highly considered,
institutionalized ways (Thurlow, 2017), as we have seen in the United Airlines example
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above. Considering the importance of linguistic knowledge and awareness in such language
work in organizational and business contexts, it is unsurprising than more and more scholars
call for a greater acknowledgement of, and attention to, language in organizations in general
and the communication that takes place within them in particular (e.g. Weninger & Kan,
2013; Cooren et al., 2014; Musson & Cohen 1999; Mautner, 2016).
In organization studies, the “implicate relationship” between language and organization has
been a focus since the 1980s (Westwood and Linstead, 2001, p. 2). For the past thirty years,
the view of language as a mere medium of communication, and the view of communication
as simply another tool for management and organizational practices, processes and activities,
has been widely contested (e.g. Putnam and Fairhurst, 2015; Grant et al., 2004). Instead,
much greater attention is now paid to discourse, understood as language use as social
practice. This view focuses on the constitutive role of language, for instance how it is used to
project certain identities vis-à-vis others and relate to them in particular roles. Discourse is
seen as being realized in texts and the way language is used in them, and as being embedded
in a so-called discourse practice context referring to the production, distribution and reception
of texts, as well as in larger social contexts, be they situational, institutional or societal. These
contexts are dynamic within and across interactions, and shape language use just as they are
shaped by them (cf. Fairclough, 2010, pp. 3-5, Boje et al. 2004)
In spite of this realization, the fundamental role that language - and consequently discourse -
play in organizational realities is rarely mentioned, let alone addressed in business and
management training (Cohen et al., 2005; Mautner, 2016; Tietze et al., 2003). How language
works as a constitutive force in organizational contexts is crucial knowledge though: critical
language awareness leads to the acknowledgement of the role of language in shaping
individual lives and social realities, for example how it contributes to sustaining and
reproducing unequal power relations. In the United Airlines example above, such critical
awareness sheds light on how the CEO’s strategic language use contributes to depicting the
company and its processes as given and unmovable, and consequently makes the victim the
only participant who knowingly and consciously acted, and who should be held responsible
for bringing the the situation upon himself. Coupled with analytical skills, such awareness
helps students and practitioners become applied discourse analysts and, consequently,
empowered communicators. Apart from raising critical awareness of discourse, the language-
centered exploration of texts and interactions also has a practical benefit in business
communication teaching and training: it exposes effective and ineffective linguistic and
discourse practices and thus equips students with concrete strategies to choose from when
they intend to communicate across a range of organizational settings.
Yet, and in spite of extensive scholarly efforts that aim to reconcile the prescriptive ambitions
of the US-centered business communication education with empirical, language focussed
scholarship (see Alessi & Jacobs, 2016), business communication education is still dominated
by a simplistic view of language. Weninger and Kan notice that such view fits well with the
instrumentalism that characterizes mainstream management theory and practice (2013, p. 60):
higher education curricula and communication training programmes are both predominantly
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focused on decontextualized repertoires of formulae (‘best practice examples’) that aim at
mastering a genre to reflect (often hypothesized) business needs. This approach has been
under scrutiny, however, since Williams’(1988) seminal work, in which she compared the
language used in meetings to the language taught for meetings. The study found only limited
overlap between the two, leading her to call for an approach that breaks with the traditional
“listing of repertoire of exponents” (p. 46) and instead focuses on the exploration of language
in ongoing discourse.
Thirty years later, there are now increasing calls that advocate steering away from scripts,
formulae and linguistic regulation in business communication education. Instead, the
emphasis is on the development of strong (discourse) analytical skills. These skills are
thought to help to address a range of practical concerns, for example, how to meet the needs
of learners from a wide range of backgrounds, with diverse career trajectories and different
workplace goals (Marra, 2013) and how to offer sustainable skill-development in a rapidly
changing professional communicative environment (Mautner, 2016). Exposing unnoticed
linguistic and discursive resources can empower students and practitioners to choose how to
operationalize and achieve a range of business (e.g. Levin and Behrens, 2003) or
management aims (e.g. Clifton, 2012). Equally, discourse analytical insights can lead to the
crucial realization that the outcome of a communicative performance does not merely depend
on the intentions of the communicators. Instead, language awareness and discourse analytical
skills allow students and practitioners to understand that meaning is jointly constructed and is
just as much the product of the speaker as of those who attend, interpret and respond to it (see
Cornelissen et al., 2015).
We would add that a move towards nurturing analysts instead of communicators should not
stop at the noticing and exposing stage: it is vital for students and practitioners alike to
understand the linguistic principles behind case studies and best practice examples so that
they can understand the complex effects of linguistic and discursive devices, and importantly,
apply them strategically across different contexts themselves. Thus, we argue, directing
attention to language-in-action will allow current and future professionals to observe, reflect
on and internalize linguistic and discursive practices that enable them to identify how
linguistic strategies function in given contexts and how they might be interpreted and
perceived.
In this paper we propose a specific linguistic lens which enables students, researchers and
practitioners alike to critically examine business and corporate texts: social actor analysis.
As we saw in the United Airlines example above, this discourse analytical framework -
which in discourse studies is often complemented with modality, evaluation and other
analytic parameters (Koller, 2012) - draws attention to how language can be used to further
strategic communication aims. In what follows, we briefly discuss the conceptual framework
of agency before introducing an applicable analytical version, illustrating the framework with
examples throughout. Finally, we argue how the results can benefit students, researchers and
practitioners.
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Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in this paper?

This paper makes a case for raising critical language awareness in business communication education and proposes that the development of discourse analytical skills should be made part of management and business communication curricula. As one specific approach to train such awareness and skills, the authors propose a three-step analytical model to explore agency and action in business discourse and communication. The study is thus part of a broader agenda that sets out out to fully realize the linguistic turn: it promotes an approach that views discourse as central to organizational processes, and by making the analytical framework accessible, it renders the approach easy to adopt by business and management curricula.