Commercial applications

With the ever-increasing commercial ties between Asia and the West, it is obvious that all practical studies targeted at business communication between these cultures will be of interest both academically and commercially.

About four years ago I set out to analyze Scandinavian management in Asia. To this end, I gathered personal long interviews during the course of a year, with Scandinavian and Asian top management personnel in Singapore and Sweden. The interviews were transcribed according to the Gothenburg Transcription Standard and the data from the interviews are currently being analyzed through a combined method of Grounded Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the latter being a textual method of language analysis.

Since my research is cross disciplinary in nature, I have worked under the supervision of various institutions and departments, namely the Gothenburg Research Institute (GRI) on Scandinavian Management, which is affiliated with the School of Business, Economics and Law in Gothenburg University; the Department of Linguistics and the Department of English Language, which are affiliated with the Faculty of Humanities, Gothenburg University.

In my research Grounded Theory and CDA is applied to cross-cultural business communication of both Scandinavian and Chinese top-level management of Scandinavian owned or Scandinavian related organizations in Singapore. The combined methods of analyses have yielded both quantitative and qualitative data. CDA as an analysis method is no doubt time consuming, it being manual but the quantitative data is in part machine readable which lends machine tabulated results. The two methods are meant to be complementary in nature, so that which one method does not cover, the other method tries to do. What I have found so far is that a combination of Grounded theory and CDA can reveal and uncover fundamental thoughts and attitudes that possibly might not even be consciously known to the person being interviewed, tapping the implicit knowledge of persons as it were. In this case, I would be prepared to argue that the methods can prove useful tools in the study of accessing implicit knowledge – knowledge that people may not know that they possess, in other words, tapping people potential.

Grounded theory as a method is well known in both business administration and in the field of patient healthcare, where it was first developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967). Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has mostly been applied to the critical study of language use and in the study of genre / discourse, but today it is successfully being applied in many other fields including gender studies, law, political science, organizational science and social studies (Gilbert Weiss and Ruth Wodak, 2003). CDA has also been applied in the study of advertising in the field of social semiotics as in the works of Michael Toolan and Teun A. van Dijk. There is much to be explored with CDA and its applications in the wider field of business administration, human resource management, international business management, marketing, knowledge management and information studies.

But why would CDA, which some may argue is mostly a textual method of analysis, be relevant to fields that relate to the private sector, to businesses and information studies in particular?

As spoken language is largely a reflection of thought (Edward Sapir, 1951 and Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1956), what we say in the course of interaction, often reveals an underlying subconscious that we may be quite unaware of ourselves. Language, like blood through veins, is pervasive in society, its intricacies wound up in social fabric so that all things that are done are accomplished through some form of language. To understand and better ourselves for the future, we need just to go back to our basics and that is to analyze our language.

It is this possibility to tap implicit knowledge that could prove a useful tool in the private sector, in the field of marketing as well as a much needed new tool for research in other related fields such as long term international investment plans, corporate management development, top management recruitment plans etc.

Based on my studies so far, just one much needed application for Grounded Theory and CDA could be in human resource management, in selecting staff to be commissioned with far going responsibilities to establish a corporate presence in new arenas, new countries, new cultures, as well as taking care of these highly qualified officials in foreign lands and also after they have come back to their home culture again.