Words and Actions

Why is it that many commercial spots on fragrances and cosmetics resort to French words or French accents? How come that 'The Gates of Mordor' sounds more frightening than 'The Gates of Mirdir' and why is that a New York-based ice-cream maker decided to go for a Scandinavian sounding brand name? Find out more about the impact and use of language in and on branding and advertising in our third episode in which we talk about sound symbolism, linguistic fetishism, language choice and how they connect to brand identities. These concepts will be further explained and illustrated in an interview with Prof. Helen Kelly-Holmes who is an expert on language use in multilingual advertising and global branding and we will analyse data from VW's video on the departure of the VW Kombi as a prime example of personification. And talk about beer is fairly prominent, too. Even cider.

In this episode the hosts talk about how communication and language actually create our social realities; how they influence or even determine how we perceive what we think is true, and how language is used by others to mould or even manipulate our perceptions of reality. They demonstrate the power of language in psychology experiments, inflated job titles and the wording of business letters. Our interview guest for this episode is Professor Dennis Mumby from The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who will talk about the role of communication in organisations. In the analysis part, the host scrutinise the language of the recruitment pages of a company.

In the first part of the episode, Erika mentions the Loftus-Palmer experiment, which was published in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior in 1974.

Two of Dennis Mumby's recent publications that we mention in the interview are the co-authored textbook 'Organizational Communication: A critical introduction' and his 2016 article 'Organizing beyond organizations: Branding, discourse, and communicative capitalism', which was published in the journal Organization.

At the end of the interview, Dennis Mumby mentions Brooke Duffy's book (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love.

A good summary of Sullivan's and Delaney's work on female entrepreneurs can be found on the LSE blog.

And finally, in the third part of this episode, we look at a page on the website of cosmetics company Avon.

Erika and Veronika have analysed an earlier version of this campaign in a paper that can be accessed and downloaded for free.

References:

Darics, E., & Koller, V. 2019. Social actors "to go": An analytical toolkit to explore agency in business discourse and communication. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 82(2), 214-238.

Duffy, B. E. 2017. (Not) Getting paid to do what you love: Gender, social media, and aspirational work. New Haven, CT, and London, UK: Yale University Press.

Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. 1974. Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 13(5), 585-589.

Mumby, D. 2016. Organizing beyond organizations: Branding, discourse, and communicative capitalism'. Organization 23 (6), 884-907.

Mumby, D. K., & Kuhn, T. 2019. Organizational Communication: A Critical Introduction (2nd Edition). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

Sullivan, K.R & H. Delaney. 2017. A femininity that 'giveth and taketh away': The prosperity gospel and postfeminism in the neoliberal economy. Human Relations 70(7), 836-859.

In this first episode, the three hosts discuss how language matters in business and show how communication, far from just passing on information, is used for many different functions in organisations. Their guest is Michael Handford,who has taught communication skills to and developed training materials for professionals in a variety of industries. They talk about communication textbooks and the need for large collections of real texts to improve them. The episode also features a short analysis of a text in which a management company seeks residents to comply with safety regulations.

Launching 13th September - Subscribe now!