Giuliana Garzone Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy

Rethinking genres in business communication: theoretical issues and pedagogical applications

In this lecture I shall look at recent developments in genre-based research and genre theory, and discuss their implications for business communication scholarship and teaching.

In genre-based research, after a period of relative stasis mainly characterised by the application of previously developed analytical tools (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993; Freedman & Medway 1994; Berkenkotter & Huckin 1995 ), the last few years have seen a revival of interest in response to a radical evolution and diversification in discursive practices and generic conventions, both oral and written, triggered by sea changes in social organization and in the media used for communication . In particular, crucial has been the spread of new technologies, and especially the use of computer-mediated and Web-based communication, which has often had unexpected systemic effects, bringing about pervasive changes in social systems (Sproull & Kiesler 1991; Jackson 2007).

Hence the emergence of new genres, some of which are in a position of continuity with pre-existing ones, often being the result of hybridization or mixing (e.g. e-commerce Websites and mail order catalogues), while others – above all in the Web-mediated environment – have been really shaped anew, e.g. Web pages, FAQs, Weblogs, newsgroups and all other Web 2.0 “social computing” applications.

In light of the foregoing, in this lecture I shall have a twofold focus. Firstly, I intend to look at the implications of these developments for business communication research. So far it has principally explored emerging genres with a view to describing them individually in a “difference question” perspective (cf. e.g. Bargiela-Nickerson 1999 on various written genres; Fortanet et al. 1999 on netvertising; Gimenez 2000 on e-mails; Garzone 2002 on e-commerce websites; Strobbe-Jacobs 2005; Catenaccio 2007, 2008 on press releases; Garzone 2004, 2005 and Nickerson & de Groot 2005 on ACRs and CEOs' Letters, etc.), while only in fewer cases has it specifically focused on genre variation and the principles underlying it (cf. e.g. the studies in Gillaerts-Gotti 2005 on business letters and those in Garzone et al. 2007 on multimodality). In this context, among the issues explored the question has also been raised of whether these changes have any implications for traditional genre theory and the tenets on which it rests, advocating adjustments aimed at improving its suitability to the current genre scenario (cf. e.g. Askehave I. 1999; Askehave I., Swales J.M. 2001; Askehave-Ellerup Nielsen 2004; Garzone 2007).

My second objective is to evaluate the impact of recent evolutions in generic conventions and in genre-based research on the teaching of business communication in English. In particular, I shall argue that reliance on notions developed in investigations on these aspects can play a key role not only in enhancing the learners’ability to recognize and/or enact linguistic and discursive variations in response to the semiotic co-ordinates of each single communicative event, but also in training them to acquire an adequate command of the methodological tools to be deployed in research on text genres, with a view to their scientific description and categorization, and possibly to an updating of genre theory.

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