Making Applied Linguistics Applicable to Business Practice. Discourse Analysis as a Management Tool

Abstract

This article makes a case for increasing the discursive awareness of practitioners and developing their discourse analytical skills. Although the importance of such an awareness is being increasingly recognized by scholars and practitioners alike, the insights of fine-grained discursive analyses of talk-in-interaction have rarely been seriously considered as resources for accomplishing managerial objectives. Consequently, reflecting on naturally occurring talk as a way of managing remains rare. In this article, we provide an illustration of how the in situ practice of telling stories of organizational change could give change initiators the tools with which to make visible, and thus actionable, the seen but unnoticed underlying assumptions, unshared information, and patterns of collective thinking about change. We close the article with a call for discourse analysis to be taken more seriously in management practice and training.