The FWF-RFBR Joint Project conducted by the Institute of Slavic Languages WU (project head Prof. R. Rathmayr) and the Department of Russian Language and Oral Communication (project headProf. T. Milekhina) is an interdisciplinary empirical study on “Russian Corporate Communication” exploring the subject matter in a discourse-analytical perspective. In close cooperation between Russian and Austrian applied linguists, cultural analysts and an organizational researcher and based on empirical data from real-life business situations (recordings of verbal interaction, corporate documents, media texts and interviews) Russian corporate communication is being analysed in its socio-cultural and organisational context.

For the Austrian team, data generation involved extended travelling to Russia, time-consuming communication in advance in order to achieve access to corporations and win the trust and assistance of local management. For a number of tasks, however, researchers resorted to the web (online media, web-sites, new social media).

The focus of the joint research is on new developments in verbal and non-verbal business communication (e.g. business-customer interaction, new forms of meetings, corporate web-sites, branding, dress codes etc.) framed by inquiries into the economic and sociocultural background (history of Russian business, relations of state and business, socio-cultural context, business etiquette, language management, terminological development etc.).    

A book manuscript is being prepared in Russian to be published by “Yazyki slavyanskoi kul’tury” in 2015. A translation into German will follow. Addressees: linguists, scholars in Slavic studies, social, economic and organizational scientists, and business people.

Joint Project (I771) funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)

Duration: October 1, 2011 - March 31, 2015

Head of the project: Renate Rathmayr

Cooperation with Russian team headed by Tatjana Alekseevna Milekhina

(Saratov State University) funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research.