The purpose of this introductory chapter, far from presenting the whole multifaceted scenario, is to underline some of the issues at stake, producing the synthesis of a case study as an example of intercultural business communication online. Considering the channel and the need for a company to construct its identity in relation to an unpredictable global audience, this study follows a three-dimensional concept of space (Soja 2001). A mixed methodological approach, both quantitative and qualitative, has been adopted, although reference to numerical data is made only to support discourse analysis (DA) and critical discourse analysis (CDA). Indeed, DA and CDA are, in this case, the best approaches to describing business communication that implies a high level of intercultural interaction.

Keywords: intercultural communication, space and identity, virtual en-counters, local/global culture.

This article describes and compares two parallel specialised corpora in the field of organizational and managerial discourse: firstly, recordings of a three-day workshop with clients overseas held by a large American multinational consulting group, and secondly, the audio data from a series of in-house employee training sessions, held by the same company in North America in webcast, audio-conferencing mode. The focus is on the role of discourse, together with differences in linguistic patterns and pragmatic objectives, which emerge in the BELF (business English as a lingua franca) intercultural context, as opposed to the mono-cultural North American context, in the achievement of learning objectives and the conveyance of professional knowledge and competence. The article concludes with a proposal for a model to describe these inter-relational, identity construal dynamics.

Keywords: corporate identity, organizational consulting, in-service training, webcasting modalities

This article describes and compares two parallel specialised corpora in the field of organizational and managerial discourse: firstly, recordings of a three-day workshop with clients overseas held by a large American multinational consulting group, and secondly, the audio data from a series of in-house employee training sessions, held by the same company in North America in webcast, audio-conferencing mode. The focus is on the role of discourse, together with differences in linguistic patterns and pragmatic objectives, which emerge in the BELF (business English as a lingua franca) intercultural context, as opposed to the mono-cultural North American context, in the achievement of learning objectives and the conveyance of professional knowledge and competence. The article concludes with a proposal for a model to describe these inter-relational, identity construal dynamics.

Keywords: corporate identity, organizational consulting, in-service training, webcasting modalities

The present analysis focuses on a corpus of texts, retrieved from the online news archive of an internationally operating company which has chosen English as the lingua franca for corporate communication. This study will argue that, since language is not a neutral vehicle and has far reaching implications on human perceptions, the analysis of the corporate lingua franca can prove particularly meaningful for the purpose of investigating corporate identity and its impact on the intended stakeholders. In fact, the evidence provided shows how the vocabulary and structure of the language employed for conveying the company’s ‘projected identity’ inevitably impact on the company’s ‘applied identity’ (Van Riel 2008), as the language used does not limit itself to mirroring objective realities, but leads the stakeholders to discover the kind of identity the company wants them to perceive.

Keywords: corporate identity, business communication, company language, language adaptation.

This paper proposes a metaphor-based approach to the discourse about the company’s past in a cross-cultural perspective. Specifically, it analyses the metaphorical schemata used to build corporate identity through the conceptualisation of “social forms” of organisational culture in a context of remembering. The paper contends that the discourse of Italian companies deployed for the construction of a corporate memory hinges on ‘specialised’ aspects of the war/game/building metaphors used to conceptualise company success in terms of collective achievements, stability and strategic leadership.

Keywords: company identity, memory, specialised aspects of a concept, metaphors

This paper explores the construction of brand identity in the fashion industry through a linguistic analysis of the English language communications of three internationally-renowned Italian fashion brands: Valentino, Dolce & Gabbana and Giorgio Armani. Three datasets were compiled from web-based communications of each fashion brand and subsequently analysed with text mining software to extract keywords and descriptive adjectives that reflected facets of brand identity. The results indicate that the three brands present broadly similar lexical profiles that are closely aligned with fashion products, designers and events. At the same time, there were interesting differences in terms of the attributes of identity that each individual brand chose to highlight. The findings are useful for understanding more about how companies seek to utilise web-based communications to shape brand identity in an increasingly globalised marketplace.

Keywords: corporate communication, company websites, brand identity, text mining.

This paper addresses the relationship between NNS proficiency and professional and national identity by examining the case of Fabio Capello, whose four-year management of the English national football team established an extended intercultural setting for assessing the impact of the limited L2 skills of a high-profile NNS professional in the public sphere. By referring to the Interlanguage (IL) model, a quantitative and diachronic analysis of Capello’s L2 competence during his tenure is carried out. The analysis is completed by drawing on aspects of identity theory to assess how closely and at what points L2 competence was involved in the mediated construction of his identity as a ‘fitting’ foreign manager of the English squad.

Keywords: L2 competence, interlanguage, professional identity, mediated identity construction

This paper investigates recurrent rhetorical strategies in the sustainability reports by three leading multinational companies, namely Adidas, Ikea and Vodafone, over the three-year period from 2008 to 2010. The companies are selected from distinct business sectors because the aim is to verify whether crosscutting phenomena can be identified, which would suggest the existence of genre-specific rhetorical patterns and, consequently, an increasing standardisation of this disclosure genre. The analysis is carried out using methodological tools from corpus linguistics (i.e. wordlists and concordances) and the study of phraseology, focussing on a selection of items, which are scrutinised for their most frequent collocates and co-occurring word.

Keywords: sustainability reporting, rhetorical strategies, phraseology, corpus-driven approach.

Following the economic crisis triggered in 2008, the presence of “green discourse” in politics and business has been growing steadily. As far as Italy is concerned, the growing presence of English to promote sustainable and environment-friendly activities is evident when observing well-known companies such as Lifegate, Slow Food or Eataly, which have chosen to use English even for their name. The aim of this paper is to explore the way English is employed to promote environment-friendly Italian activities, focusing on the use of Anglicisms on their Italian websites, and what the effects could be of this Anglicisation process.

Keywords: anglicisms in Italian, sustainability discourse, advertising, greenwashing.

This paper presents the initial results of a research carried out on a corpus of Corporate Annual Reports (ARs). Using a methodology which combines tools and perspectives from different linguistic fields, namely Genre and Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics, the research studies interdiscursivity in ARs as exemplifications of genre mixing. Specifically, we assume that the documents forming the AR, namely the CEO’s Letter to the Shareholders, the Chairman’s Letter and the Financial Statements, can be considered as representative of genres which provide conflicting representations of the same reality by adopting different communicative strategies. While each genre represents the same corporate facts differently, they shed light on each other, thus enabling the addressees, both shareholders and stakeholders, to make sense of the implicit and explicit messages of the documents. We also assume that the study of interdiscursivity can prove advantageous to linguists and translators, too.

Keywords: interdiscursivity, LSP, Annual Report, discourse analysis.

Over the last few years the interest of scholars working in the field of academic discourse has been directed towards language variation, and academic writing is no longer considered as a consistent and homogeneous form of discourse. The importance traditionally given to the consensual and static aspects of disciplinary communication has been coupled with the emphasis placed upon the analysis not only of interactions, practices and activities typical of various discourse communities, but also new terminologies and instances of interdiscursivity in genres as the results of the development of new communication media. The findings of the linguistic analysis conducted on the variation in the use of epistemic modality markers in the online research articles included in the corpus can be used to understand the socio-cultural implications of the virtual encounters of local and global practices and perspectives.

Keywords: academic writing, law journals, epistemic modality, argumentative strategies.

The paper will examine and compare the blogs posted by EU Commissioners which, as the official EU website says, will give ‘a personal, insider’s view on EU affairs’. They would appear to be a way of bringing the EU institutions closer to EU citizens. However, blogs contain a kind of inherent contradiction in them because of their very public, but private nature. In the case of EU commissioners this will probably lead to tension between the purpose of a blog – a more intimate and personal expression of ideas, attitudes and beliefs – and the institutional role of the Commissioner. The Commissioners come from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, which may lead to different approaches to this new genre and how each one exploits it to establish his/her own professional and institutional identity. A very eclectic methodological approach has been adopted in order to capture the many aspects of the use of blogs in an institutional context, drawing on Herring et al.’s classification for assessing the characteristics of blogs, Critical Discourse Analysis and Appraisal Theory.

Keywords: Blogs, EU commissioners, personal identity, institutional identity.

Blogs play a very important role in web-based communication as they represent ever-increasing worldwide tools in both everyday and professional interaction (Crystal 2007; Herring 1996, 2007). Similarly to all writers in general, bloggers use persuasive techniques to attract readers’ attention and make them share their points of view and opinions. The use of inclusive pronouns and possessives fulfils pragmatic persuasive functions. The aim of this study was to investigate how the first-person plural personal pronouns we and us and the first-person plural possessive adjective our were used in an intercultural blog in the medical field, namely Clinical blog, of the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The use of these words revealed itself to function as both the blogger’s expression of a sense of belonging to the same professional community and a persuasive technique to draw their peers’ attention to their statements and opinions. The three words were investigated by means of a concordancing analysis of a corpus of 199 posts published between 2009 and 2011.

Keywords: inclusive language, medical communication, intercultural blogs, persuasive techniques.