Sofie Decock

Customer complaints and disagreements in a multilingual business environment. A discursive-pragmatic analysis

Abstract This paper probes into authentic CMC business complaints and disagreements by offering a discourse-pragmatic analysis of complaint negotiation e-mails written by French- and German-language customers. The analysis focuses on an identification and description of complaint and disagreement strategies, and on the presence of internal and external modifiers. Our data, gathered ethnographically at the sales department of a Belgian multinational, shows how the customer’s discourse evolves from more neutral, problem-oriented, routinized formulations in first complaints towards more confrontational, person-oriented, ad hoc formulations in disagreement e-mails as reactions to complaint refusals. This discursive change goes hand in hand with an increase in the use of direct speech act realizations and upgraders. As it appears, in the course of the complaint negotiation, face-threat to the speaker outweighs consideration of the addressee’s face needs. The most notable cross-cultural difference we found between German- and French-speaking customers is a more explicit style in German and a more confrontational style in French, with cross-cultural differences gaining weight at the expense of international communicative norms in less routinized messages. Finally, the results of our study urge us to reassess concepts of directness, and on a societal level, they serve to promote intercultural awareness in business contexts.

Reactions to Brexit in images: a multimodal content analysis of shared visual content on Flickr

In this article, the authors analyze citizens’ reactions to Brexit on social media after the referendum results by performing a content analysis of 5877 posts collected from the social media platfo...

Shifting multilingual strategies in a Flemish public healthcare service

Abstract This paper addresses the challenges service providers are facing amidst growing ethnolinguistic diversity in a neoliberal climate. We focus on the public service provider Kind & Gezin (K&G), the agency that monitors the wellbeing of young children on behalf of the Flemish authorities in Belgium. We demonstrate that the organisation has taken various multilingual measures that go against the government’s preference for monolingual service provision. This is particularly the case for ‘bottom-up’ bilingual practices, where bilingual family support workers and medical staff developed bilingual routines in service provision, much in line with the ‘client-centered communication’ which K&G professes. Whereas these practices were initially endorsed by K&G’s management, a further diversification of K&G’s clientele, along with budgetary restrictions, prompted management to restrict these practices and explore alternative ways of providing multilingual services that do not require the recruitment of extra staff. Drawing on ethnographic data we explore the rationale underlying the organisation’s decision to restrict its multilingual policy and the way this decision is influenced by neoliberal principles which foreground effectiveness, efficiency, flexibility and entrepreneurialism. We conclude that the policy shift leads to ideological reconceptualisations of ‘language’ and ‘language difference’ that sit uncomfortably with the reality of language-discordant service encounters, as well as to redefinitions of the professional identity of bilingual family support workers.

Professional discourse in multilingual settings: policies and practices

With the growth in mobility and linguistic diversity as some of the hallmarks of our increasingly globalized economy, research addressing multilingualism in the workplace has been on the rise. Both scholars in sociolinguistics and in international business studies have developed an interest in workplace multilingualism. The former continue a longstanding research tradition on workplace discourse in various disciplines of linguistics, ranging from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to ethnography, pragmatics, (critical) discourse analysis and interactional sociolinguistics (e.g. Drew and Heritage 1992; Gumperz 1982; Gunnarsson et al. 1997; for an overview, see Sarangi and Roberts 1999). Many of these studies have combined a focus on the fine detail of micro-level interactions with one on the institutional order and larger-scale social, economic and ideological processes, and have laid bare the generic features of workplace talk, how institutional knowledge and professional identity are constructed in discourse (Sarangi and Roberts 1999), and how (mis)communication can feed processes of racial discrimination in multi-ethnic workplaces or cross-cultural service encounters (Gumperz et al. 1979; Gumperz and Roberts 1991; Roberts