Language in corporate transitions: A communicative action model with implications for management education

• Main Author: Filgueiras, Rosemary Bastos
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-1998
• Subjects: Business education; Management; Occupational psychology
• ISBN: 0591913771; 9780591913774

Participatory research, grounded in a hermeneutic tradition, provided the framework for this study. This research explores how language plays a role in corporate transitions. Transitions can be related to hiring or laying off employees, changing environment (opening a branch in another country or state), changing administration, or other transition issues discussed by the research participants. Language is the medium by which innovation and involvement occurs. It is the medium in which organizational transition may take place smoothly. The four validity claims, comprehensibility, truth, rightness and legitimation used in Jurgen Habermas' communicative competence theory, serve as the framework for the research. Three themes guided the research: communication and language, rationality, and action. These themes are interdependent and interrelated. The results of data from the conversations guided by the themes with leaders of multinational corporations were used for the creation of a transcultural communicative model. Participants agreed upon the need for an expanded sense of communication and new understandings of different cultures when communicating in multinational corporations. The new understandings were related to concepts of communication which embrace employees' creativity, knowledge and understandings. The primary finding endorses the use of a communicative action model that creates the condition in which employees can feel an integral and participative part of the organization. Further, the successful use of a communicative action model can legitimize an organization and sustains it transitions.