Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2006

Taking an ethnographic approach, this research investigates workplace interaction in English in a Japanese chemical company, a subsidiary of American multinational corporation. While previous research on business communication has focused on specific linguistic or rhetorical features, this study offers new insight through the incorporation of socio-economic, historical, and cultural elements in the analysis, and by taking a dynamic view of language, human beings and organisations. The researcher collaborated with the human resource manager of the participating corporation as a hired consultant in an intra-organisational communication development project. The data was collected through interviews, observations, and email exchanges. Initial analysis showed that the dominant Discourse in the company was based on western business values. Further analysis unveiled the changing nature of the Discourse as it is influenced by the local and American education systems, human resource ideologies, learners’ learning, and transformation business philosophies.

This article argues for an interactional model of English as contextualised language use for localised business purposes. Two observations on the ground provided the impetus for the argument. One, that business communication skills training in English in Malaysia is invariably based on the prescribed usage of commercially produced materials. Two, that communication skills training in English is a lucrative model-dependent industry that supports the logic of the triumphalism of specific models of English as an international or global language (Smith 1983; Crystal 1997), or as the language of international capitalism. Yet a functional model of interaction operates actual workplace settings in Malaysia. Such evidence counters marketing mythologies of purportedly universal forms of language use in business contexts worldwide. It exposes the dichotomy that exists between the prescribed patterns of English usage such as those found in the plethora of commercially produced materials, and those of contextualised language use, as business discourse in real-time workplace interactions. Not least of all, it provides support for an indigenous model as an appropriate response to a pervasive global ideology at work. To ignore this phenomenon is to deny the pragmatic relevance of speaking English as one of the languages of localised business which is just as vital for national economies as the big business of international capitalism.

In this paper, the frequency, semantic type and sequencing of accounts in internal company emails with directive elements are examined. It is found that subordinates justify most frequently when they make requests to their superiors, while managers tend to justify their requests to their subordinates more frequently than peers justify requests among themselves. The latter finding is attributed to the dilemma that is faced by modern institutions of controlling workers to accomplish institutional goals on the one hand, and allowing individuals to work as autonomous workers on the other hand. Nevertheless, managers, when requesting their subordinates, tend to use more accounts that are not typically associated with justification for action or accounts that are in line with the ideology of control and regulation. The sequencing of accounts is argued to be the result of a number of factors, including coherence, agent reference and the relationship between addressor and addressee.

This article sheds light on the rhetoric of cross-cultural letters of request in the Thai business context. The focus is on the contrastive analysis of 80 authentic letters of request written in English by Thai speakers and native English speakers. The corpus consists of 38 Thai (TH) letters, and 42 Non-Thai (NT) letters. The cross-cultural variation is investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively from the perspectives of contrastive text linguistics and pragmatic. The quantitative analysis explores the lengths of the TH and NT letters in relation to the distribution and position of requests. Contrastive text linguistics was used in this study to examine the rhetorical structures (e.g. structural representation) in letters of request and their linguistic realisations (e.g. linguistic features). From a pragmatic perspective, the analytical focus was on persuasive strategies (i.e. rhetorical appeals — logos, ethos, pathos), and politeness strategies, some of which are culture-bound. The overall investigation manifests the diversity in language use which distinguishes Thai-style business requests from western-style ones. What Hinds (1990) calls a quasi-inductive style of writing or delayed introduction of purpose is a unique hedging strategy found exclusively in the TH letters. The NT requests tend to be more direct, often involving a ‘baldly on record’ strategy. In contrast in a similarly formal context, the TH request letters typically use more negative politeness in that they include more indirect, deferential and self-effacing strategies. According to the Aristotelian concept of persuasive rhetoric, the TH letters generally use a combination of logos, ethos and pathos whereas the NT letters tend to predominantly use a strong logos. These three rhetorical appeals can be regarded as persuasive strategies; the findings reveal some culture-specific differences in the persuasive strategies used in TH and NT letters of request.