Abstract
This book contains the most comprehensive collection of research about digital business discourse. It is an essential resource for all communication scholars interested in this area of study. With its easily readable and engaging content and style, it can also serve as an appropriate text for many communication courses with a focus on digital communication. Perhaps most noteworthy about this book is its focus on language and discourse in digital business communication. So often, research about emerging communication technologies dwells on the features of these technologies. This book, by contrast, provides a sorely needed emphasis on the way meaning is constructed in digital business discourse.
Darics (2015b) opens the book by establishing the need for a work on digital business discourse given the growing popularity of and variation in digital communication situations. She recognizes the challenging nature of defining digital business discourse with the competing views of what constitute the terms business and discourse. She provides an excellent overview of each article contained in the book and how these are well positioned in the area of digital business discourse.
Throughout the book, the various researchers provide compelling research and theory about the role of rhetoric, discourse, and language in digital business communication. These researchers come from diverse disciplines and geographic regions. They focus on many genres of digital business communication, including consumer reviews (Vásquez, 2015), leadership communication (Girginova, 2015), team communication (Skovholt, 2015), internal crisis communication (Fägersten, 2015), and external crisis communication (Creelman, 2015). They investigate discourse in many channels, including microblogs (Girginova, 2015), instant messaging (Darics, 2015a; Mak & Lee, 2015; Markman, 2015), email (Lenassi, 2015; Skovholt, 2015), a social intranet (Fägersten, 2015), and corporate blogs (Creelman, 2015). Furthermore, many of these articles contain intriguing and memorable topics, such as blurring public and private boundaries in CEO tweets (Girginova, 2015) and swearing in digital professional conversations (Mak & Lee, 2015). The research occurs in professional environments across the world, ranging from Italy (Lenassi, 2015) to Norway (Skovholt, 2015) to Sweden (Fägersten, 2015) to Hong Kong (Mak & Lee, 2015) to India (Carrió-Pastor, 2015). The concluding chapters focus on theoretical perspectives on improving research and practice in digital business discourse (Darics, 2015a; Edelson, Kim, Scott, & Szendrey, 2015; Maier & Deluliis, 2015).
Darics (2015b) claims the aim of the volume is to offer “an overview of the most recent research that addresses emerging communication practices in digitally mediated professional genres” (p. 3). She has succeeded in this aim. All serious scholars of digital business discourse should find valuable material in this book to guide and position their research.