Should it prove to be impossible to have unlimited access to the WU Campus, the class will be held in a rotation mode. This will involve half of the class attending alternate sessions in combination with some online sessions for the whole class. Further details will be provided in due course.

Amendment for the start of the course 1.12.2020: Due to further restrictions, the class will be held online via Zoom until further notice. It will be held in online "rotation mode" (with only half the class attending one session) in the first week only: on Tuesday 1.12, and Thursday 3.12.2020. The rest of the sessions will be held with all participants online until further notice.

The course introduces students to a range of topics, concepts and methods relevant to understanding internal communication within organisations. It explores key concepts in organisational studies from the perspective of language and communication and shows how these shape and constitute workplace processes, practices and decision-making. It takes a practice-oriented approach to familiarising students with a variety of communication channels, processes and formats used in spoken and written interactions between people in a range of organisational roles: between managers and subordinates as well as between co-workers.

The course covers key topics which are central to successful communication in any organisation in today’s business environment, including leadership, recruitment, change management, decision-making and conflict management. While students may be familiar with some of these topics from other courses, the communication focus of the course will illuminate these from a new perspective. Research from business and management is combined with research from linguistics in order to provide a rich account of the communicative processes and strategies that are relevant to each of these topics.

Students will be able to:

• understand and critically evaluate key concepts in internal communication, including corporate culture, leadership, diversity and the management of change, language and conflict,
• understand the role played by language in internal communication, with a focus on key written and spoken “genres" (communicative events and texts) such as emails and other forms of digital communication, letters of application, internal meetings and negotiations,
• apply a range of methods in order to analyse internal genres, including genre analysis, conversation analysis, politeness theory and metaphor analysis,
• describe and critically discuss the key concepts in internal communication with reference to relevant academic literature and apply the theories and methods dealt with in the course to specific business and workplace situations, events and texts.

Attendance is a requirement to pass the course. As a special concession, you may miss up to two (2) meetings.

Up front lecture, combined with class discussion, group work and group presentation.

1) Written Analysis task (40%)

2) Group project presented orally (20%)

3) Written project report (40%)

For information on the specialization in "International Business Communicaiton" - including organizational aspects regarding admission - please see here.