Social Actors “to Go”: An Analytical Toolkit to Explore Agency in Business Discourse and Communication:
Summary (4 min read)
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.
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Citations
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Cites background from "Social Actors “to Go”: An Analytica..."
...…of workplace activities (Alvesson & Billig, 1997; Angouri, 2010, 2018; Baxter, 2011) to exposing the role of language in justifying questionable business decisions (Amernic & Craig, 2006; Spicer, 2018) or shifting blame and avoiding responsibility (Darics & Koller, 2019; Hargie et al., 2010)....
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Cites background from "Social Actors “to Go”: An Analytica..."
...Within BPC, CDA, has allowed researchers to analyze discourse while staying attuned to social contexts, such as crisis communication (Dunn & Eble, 2015) and exploring agency and action across communication situations (Darics & Koller, 2019)....
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Cites methods from "Social Actors “to Go”: An Analytica..."
...…sample, we used Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2004: 170-175) transitivity system both to count and to categorize each of the verb phrases in relation to which women are positioned as agentive (for a discussion of how agency and action are encoded linguistically, see Darics and Koller 2019)....
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References
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Introduction