[PLing] Sylvia Jaworska lectures - 12.6 and 13.6

[Gillings, Mathew]

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the Department of Business Communication at the WU, we would like to invite you to two upcoming events in our series Lectures in Language, Communication & Culture. We are happy to welcome Prof. Sylvia Jaworska from University of Reading, who will be giving two talks next week - one lecture on Monday, and one workshop on Tuesday. Details can be found below; please register for each event by emailing bizcomm.lectures at wu.ac.at<mailto:bizcomm.lectures at wu.ac.at>.


Lecture: "Who shakes the trees and dives deep? Detecting bias in professional communication"

Date: 12.06.2023
Time: 18:00
Location: D2.2.228

Abstract:
Despite the advances of equal opportunities in education and legislation, organisations across sectors are still far away from treating their employees fairly. For example, reporting on the Gender Pay Gap in 2021 revealed that 8 out of 10 British companies paid men on average 16% more than women for the same work. While there are many barriers to equality, research has revealed the existence of biases that overwhelmingly disadvantage women and members of minority and ethnic groups. And while we know about the existence of biases, how exactly they operate in organisational practices producing and reproducing inequalities remains a black box of organisational life.

This talk attempts to open some parts of this black box by exploring a large corpus of performance reviews collected from a multinational company headquartered in London. Using a corpus-based approach, it systematically identifies differences (and similarities) in the ways in which female and male employees, and their work are described and evaluated. The results offer unique insights into the ways in which stereotypical and gendered expectations are routinely perpetuated in high-stake evaluations with direct consequences for people's careers and professional development. Specifically, it shows how both different and similar lexical choices (hyper)masculinize - sometimes in 'creative' ways - the notion of white-collar work in the neoliberal economy, systematically penalising those who do not conform to it.
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Workshop: "What does 'value' really mean and to whom? Using tools of (corpus) linguistics to read and interpret meaning trajectories in business discourse"

Date: 13.06.2023
Time: 10:00 - 12:00
Location: D2.2.228

Abstract:
This workshop will showcase how the tools and insights from (corpus) linguistics can be effectively used to help us 'read' and 'understand' the specialised discourse of business communication; we know that meanings are never set in stone and change as words move from context to context. The workshop will explore in particular how business communication employs and exploits multiple meanings to get particular messages across. Examples will be drawn from the discourse of performance reviews and integrated business reporting.

CV
Professor Sylvia Jaworska - Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics (reading.ac.uk)<https://www.reading.ac.uk/elal/staff/dr-sylvia-jaworska>

Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien: Department für Fremdsprachliche Wirtschaftskommunikation - WU (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien)<https://www.wu.ac.at/bizcomm/>

We look forward to seeing you there!

Best,
Mathew
____________________

Dr. Mathew Gillings
Institute for English Business Communication, D2/C
WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business)
Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020, Vienna

Email: mathew.gillings at wu.ac.at<mailto:mathew.gillings at wu.ac.at>
Tel: +43 1 31336 6088

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