Research at the Institute for Slavic Languages focuses on the interplay of language, communication and culture in discourse domains relevant for business and economics. These discourses cover, inter alia, media and political discourses, organizational communication and face-to-face interactions in the workplace and beyond. Our research projects focus on the CEE region but also on intercultural communication in a broader perspective. Our aim is to make a valuable contribution to the benefit of students, practitioners and organizations that are facing the challenges of cultural and linguistic diversity.

Current research projects at the institute deal with the impact of linguistic and cultural diversity on different work-related settings, ranging from highly skilled to lower skilled jobs. On the one hand, our research focuses on migrant entrepreneurs from the Balkans, who commodify their linguistic and cultural heritage in Vienna, or on migrant workers from Ukraine employed in institutional or home-based care settings in the EU. On the other hand, we also investigate business negotiations in the context of a Russian-Austrian joint venture in the private sector or examine Austrian-Ukrainian project meetings in the higher education sector.

Another strand of research focuses on the imprint of culture on communication across diverse discourse domains and analyses how country- and culture-specific or organizational framework conditions shape various discursive practices and discourse-specific concepts.  For example, current research projects deal with crisis communication of low-cost vs. high-cost airlines or investigate CSR communication in the oil and gas industry and compare Western and Eastern European companies’ strategies. The role of social media in negotiating and discussing economic and political issues also features prominently in our research, since social media platforms oscillate between being liberation technology and being a form of networked authoritarianism in CEE.