Starting from the premise that discourse is what brings organizations into being, this chapter presents a state-of-the-art review of research on corporate discourse. Its main goal is to evaluate the contributions that discourse analytical perspectives and methodologies have made to the understanding of organizational practices, showing how corporations use discourse strategically to create and maintain corporate identity and perform ideological work. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part reviews studies concerned with aspects of internal communications, highlighting discursive strategies for “doing” business and adopted across contexts and media including business meetings, job interviews and business emails. The second part discusses studies investigating external communications, focusing specifically on communications with investors and stakeholders as well as with the wider world. Studies exploring CEO letters, annual and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, advertising and branding are reviewed. This part also discusses research that examined corporate communications in “moments of crisis,” showing how corporations strategically employ discourse to maintain a positive public image. The final sections summarize the implications and the need for “doing” discourse analysis in corporate environments and conclude with avenues for further research.

In many parts of the world, the enduring inequalities in both educational experiences and academic outcomes across linguistically and culturally different groups complicate widespread discourses of “diversity” and “inclusion.” The study of discourse, as a means of theoretical and methodological inquiry, has advanced our collective understanding of how social power and inequality are enacted, (re)produced and resisted through texts and discourse-in-interaction in educational contexts. This chapter begins with an overview of early work that has yielded remarkable insights into how diversity and inclusion are patterned in and through everyday classroom socialization routines. It then proceeds to sketch how current trends of discourse study have enriched our discussion of the complexity of language, ideology and power inherent in the educational discourse. We present ongoing tensions concerning the theoretical, methodological and applied dimensions of this work. The chapter concludes by delineating some implications for educational practices and future directions for expanded work in the study and understanding of discourses of diversity and inclusion.

Transnationalism, globalization and superdiversity are constructs used for thinking about flows of people, information, capital, texts and ideas, how they are connected and the effects of these flows on social relations. While there are many differences in these constructs, this entry highlights commonalities of focus, intellectual roots and methods used to analyze flows and connectivity. I start by noting that much of the work carried out in this area was done by sociologists, anthropologists and those working in cultural studies, most of whom had little interest in how communicative activity figured in generating and sustaining flows, what such communicative activity looked like or how the communicative repertoires of mobile people opened or closed future life world potentials. I then go on to point out that, within sociolinguistics, the use of these concepts and the study of the phenomena they refer to have been characterized by a constant drive to understand connections between communicative events that are part of these flows, how and why different communicative events are valued, and how and why such differences can create inequality. In doing so, I point out that much of this scholarship has led to the creation of new concepts and invitations to reconceptualize how we think about language in social life.

This chapter maps the emerging conceptual terrain of posthumanism and its relevance for discourse studies, with a particular focus on sociolinguistics and applied linguistics work. Posthumanism is a label applied to a range of theoretical and methodological approaches across the humanities and social sciences that are calling into question dominant assumptions generated by Western Enlightenment thinking about the human by giving greater consideration to the role of material objects, animals and the environment in understanding the social world. Posthumanism thus considers the implications of the central role of materialism in our understandings of human agency, language, cognition and society. For discourse studies, a turn to posthumanism requires us to examine the role of discourse in how humans become entangled with the material world through their everyday embodied interactions with objects, artifacts, technologies, plants, animals, and the built and natural environment. Through embracing an activity-oriented perspective toward these human–nonhuman entanglements, the implications are that we must rethink modernist categorical boundaries between subject/object, human/nonhuman and society/nature, both within metadiscourses about these dichotomies and through a more microanalytic lens in the analysis of text and talk.

This chapter provides an overview of the concept of “mediatization” and its different applications. It distinguishes “institutional,” “social constructionist” and “linguistic-anthropological” understandings of the concept. After defining and discussing each understanding, the chapter draws attention to how the linguistic-anthropological approach may be employed in discourse-analytical research. Specifically, the approach is argued to be highly amenable with a focus on metapragmatics. Much like a focus on metapragmatics reflects language users’ awareness of language use, mediatization may reflect their understanding of the nature of the communication they are engaged in. After providing several examples, the chapter discusses how discourse-analytic methods may further complement the development of mediatization frameworks. Looking ahead, these developments will need to take into account a surge in multimodal content, the increasingly global reach of communications, and ever-shifting social media potentials.

The notion of language rights has proven to be highly controversial. It has typically been invoked in calls for the state to protect and recognize the heritage languages of minority communities. Implicit in such calls is a reliance on traditional understandings of what it means to be a member of a language community, to be a speaker of that community’s affiliated language, and to be a citizen of the state within which the community is embedded. But the conceptions of citizenship as well as those of community and language are changing – often in response to global shifts in mobility and migration. And these changes exacerbate rather than mitigate the problematic nature of language rights. In this chapter, I review various studies of citizenship, mobility, migration and language rights. Among the points that I make are the following: A fuller appreciation of implications of these changes needs to take into account the impact of neoliberalist ideologies. Recent developments such as the gig economy and virtual migration also need to be factored in. Underlying all these is the idea of personhood and how it variously informs the understanding of what it means to be a migrant, a citizen and a speaker of a language. I then flesh out the theoretical and policy implications of these studies, arguing that there is need to move beyond language rights if the migrant-citizen-language nexus is to be properly understood and fruitfully addressed.

Metaphor involves the perception of similarities or correspondences between unlike entities and processes, so that one can experience, think and communicate about one thing in terms of another – lives as journeys, minds as machines, emotions as external forces, and so on. A consistent thread in the history of the study of metaphor concerns the potential of different metaphor choices to reflect and facilitate different ways of viewing topics or phenomena – a function of metaphor that is itself metaphorically captured by the notion of “framing.” The related phenomenon of metonymy, although less well studied in these terms, also facilitates framing in discourse. In this chapter, we review research on the framing power of metaphor and metonymy, with a particular focus on studies that are relevant to or directly concerned with the use of metaphor in discourse, broadly conceived. We begin with an overview of rhetorical approaches to metaphor as a tool for persuasion and of cognitive approaches to metaphor as a tool for thinking, including both theoretical and empirical studies. We review a variety of studies that have investigated the framing function of metaphor, and, to a lesser extent, metonymy, in authentic language use from a range of sources (e.g. politics, science and education) and using different qualitative and/or quantitative methods. Focusing on metaphor, where the evidence is most robust, we critically examine the relationship between, broadly speaking, cognitive and discourse-based approaches to metaphor. We go on to provide a concrete example of the framing function of metaphor in healthcare discourse, and show how cognitive and discourse perspectives can be usefully combined into a multilevel analytical framework that can, among other things, be used to make recommendations for professional practice and training.

Although the notion of “populism” goes back to Roman/Greek antiquity, the twenty-first century has seen a surge in both the success of such movements and academic interest in them, especially their rhetorics, discourse and politics. In engaging with populism, discourse studies has interfaced with political and social sciences and struggled to find a conceptually sound and empirically grounded definition, while avoiding an overly broad use of the term. In this, the field is far from homogenous, but it offers many insightful approaches to studying contemporary populist politics. A specific point of interest (and contention) is the interrelationships among rhetorical strategies, discourse-analytical concepts relating populism to hegemony or society (such as interdiscursivity, recontextualization and normalization) and the agenda of populist politics. Behind this looms the larger question of the status of populism itself. While some scholars regard populism as an ideology, others call it a movement or syndrome. While some argue that it is both a form and a content, others maintain that it is only a style or, rather, that it combines specific forms with specific contents. In terms of evaluation, some argue that (at least contemporary) populism is a danger to democracy or, more specifically, to liberal democracy, while others see it as an integral part of any democracy or even a positive force. Central among the traits identified in populist politics is its divisiveness and appeal to “the people”: It divides society into two homogenous and antagonistic camps, the “pure people” versus the “corrupt elite.” At the same time, it is antipluralist in claiming that it alone represents the true will of the people, claiming to raise that will over all else. This often links to a larger opposition constructed by populist politics: “national” versus “international” interests. Beyond such commonalities, populist politics, their rhetorics and discourse differ strikingly across the globe and across political affiliations. Empirical discourse studies engage with the specifics of the rhetorics employed by populist politics and how they relate to discourses within the respective contexts.

This chapter discusses the idea that discourse is central to how race is culturally understood and the form it takes in different contexts. Through the notions of “racialization” and “racialized,” as the semiotic and ideological processes through which race comes to be produced and reified through language practices, it proposes to study ideological processes instead of fixed racial categories, which entails moving beyond the study of the ideology of racism towards the study of its ideological practice. This chapter also addresses the links between race and language that emerge dynamically through discursive practice. It sustains that language and race intersect in two main ways: in “racial discourse,” or discourse that takes race as its topic, and in “racialized linguistic practice,” or the use of language associated with specific racialized groups. It finally recommends integrating the different discursive approaches that address language and race under the wider perspective of language as social practice. This entails researching what race does in specific contexts through the understanding of how power relations emerge in local contexts, how people make sense of their social practices, and how wider social structures influence discursive practices.

In this chapter, I offer examples of ethnographic approaches to discourse, focusing in particular on how linguistic anthropologists have engaged with and expanded upon the concepts and theoretical tools offered by Goffman and Bakhtin. This includes attention to how Goffman unpacks interactional participant roles, how his concept of footing has been critical to recent interest in stance, and also how speakers linguistically shift in and out of registers. Drawing on Bakhtin, discourse analysts have turned to explore the productive concepts of genre, intertextuality, voicing and chronotopes. Ethnographic discourse analysis connects levels of discourse and context and relies on specific methodological strategies to capture the dynamic ethnographic and sociopolitical contexts within which language is located and to which it contributes and responds.

The concept of discourse has always been at the core of critical analysis in the field of discourse studies. To some extent this is explained by the connection between discourses, in a Foucauldian sense, and representations of, for instance, power relations, gender and social injustices – all in need of critical analysis. However, in research on organizational discourse, the object for critique can be the transformations of social actions within organizations rather than, for example, unequal representations (in texts). There is a well-established link between social actions and genres: genres are (or are at least part of) social actions. The overarching aim of this chapter is to discuss how genre-oriented analysis can complement other types of analysis in the broader field of critical discourse studies, and to offer critical understandings more directly related to social actions. The chapter gives an overview of two approaches to the critical analysis of genre: critical discourse analysis (CDA) and critical genre analysis (CGA). From the perspective of methodology, the chapter responds to calls for a social and affordance-driven multimodal critical discourse studies by offering a number of qualitative concepts for analyzing the genre aspects of multimodal texts. Analytical examples come from interrelated genres such as “vision and values,” “core values” and “platforms and values” from state agencies and universities in, above all, Sweden and the United States. In the context of public authorities, these genres are to be considered as emerging genres, which allows for a specific type of critical inquiry: Which are the changing social actions that these genres are part of? Are they related to internal control or to external communication and market-oriented “branding” of the public authority?