This volume aims to explore what the field of business communication has accomplished so far and where it is heading. In addition to presenting new research, a number of the contributions included address the question of how business communication scholarship may be relevant to education and practice. While the multidimensional nature of the field does not allow a single answer to that question, the contributors generally agree that the 'language factor' in international business is an intriguing mix of communicative skills that are receiving increased attention across disciplines. The contributions deal with a wide spectrum of business settings, including leadership and management situations, gatekeeping encounters in a variety of organizations and through a range of media and cultures, oral interaction in the workplace, marketing and PR discourse, on-line communication, management, organizational and corporate communication, and, finally, global aspects of integrated marketing communications. Methodologically, it includes a broad range of approaches, including work in discourse analysis and ethno-methodology, rhetoric and document design, intercultural pragmatics and writing studies, genre analysis, e-semantics and sociolinguistics.

The contributions of this volume approach the genres of employee, CEO and organizational communication from different angles. They analyze how the author's position in the company influences the construction of these genres, what content and linguistic style characterize them, and how the discourse of these genres is related to other resources. They look at linguistic and rhetorical strategies in a range of communicative settings: email correspondence among (male versus female) co-workers, collaborative writing of formats in the workplace, leadership messaging by the CEO, financial disclosures for (non-)financial audiences and expressions of the corporate philosophy. Two methodologies in particular are prominent in the genre-based chapters: corpus analyses and case studies.