Lecture 1
Strategic communication – communicating purposefully to advance the mission of an
organization
6 core tasks:
1. Training – all efforts that communication professionals take in order to make
individuals more communicative. Give people skills to make them effective at
communication and do their job better. Deal with conflicts in the workplace
2. Organising – bringing people together, creating all kinds of meetings in groups.
Make people meet and bring them together. Should you adapt your communication
style to fit that of other groups. When should you come together and when not
3. Integrating – Bring together all aspects of communication strategies. Bring together
all kinds of elements.
4. Analysing – Think about an issue that is important to an organisation and think how
to deal with it. Explanations for why communication doesn’t work and how to fix it.
Dis-functional group communication
5. Creating – creativity
6. Advising – Advising makes the organisation as a whole more communicative
(training deals with individuals)
The communications professional
Roles
1. Integrated thinker
2. C-suite advisor
3. Master of data
Skillset
1. Analytical (critical mindset, focus on research)
2. Curious (being creative)
3. Innovative (no boundaries)
4. Collaborative (focus on other people and functions)
5. Emphatic (human being and behaviour is key)
6. Reflective (Self-critical, feedback as second nature)
7. Ethical (understand all stakeholders)
8. Agile (fast changing world requires fast changing communications professionals
Nowadays, artificial intelligence, computer knowledge, data etc., are taking over human effort
and knowledge
,Lecture 2 – Training
Training – making individuals within an organisation more communicative
Conversational implicatures; Gricean pragmatics (Grice, 1975)
Pragmatics – how context contributes to meaning: words can have different meanings in
different contexts (e.g. orange can be a colour or a fruit)
Speech acts: (John Searle)
1. Locution
What was said
2. Illocution
Communicative goal
3. Perlocution
Communicative effect
e.g. if a window is open and you say ‘do you feel cold’, the locution would be ‘do you feel
cold’, the illocution would be that the other person closes the window, and the perlocution
would be what the other person decides to do as a result of you saying you are cold
Types of illocutionary acts
1. Assertives (committing a speaker to the truth of a proposition)
2. Directives (requests, commands, recommendations)
3. Commissives (promises, oaths)
4. Expressives (congratulations, apologies)
5. Declarations (declaring two people married, signing your Bachelor diploma)
Propositional content and implicature
Even when a statement seems straightforward and seems to have only one particular
meaning, it is argued that even these sentences rely on a certain level of implicature
E.g. the cat is on the mat – the cat can be in the middle of the mat, but it could also
be on the edge of the mat; are these two cases identical? Searle argues that
depending on how you think, if the cat is on the edge you could say that it is not on
the mat
Organisational implicatures
Company logos (nike, adidas) imply the companies (when you see a logo you think of
the company it represents)
However, if you don’t know the company (and their logo) the logo that you see will
not remind you of the company it represents
So, you need to have a certain background knowledge to understand this implicature
Grice: Cooperation Principle
Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it
occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are
engaged (Grice, 1975)
, So, according to the cooperation principle, your contribution to a conversation should
follow the goal of the communication moving forward
The cooperation principle doesn’t imply that two people that are in communication
should cooperate or collaborate. Two participants can still follow the collaboration
principle if they disagree (e.g. a negotiation between two parties that doesn’t result in
agreement between them can still follow the cooperation principle)
4 maxims – Grice (if you follow all 4 maxims, you adhere to the cooperation principle)
1. Quality – Speaking the truth (try to make your contribution true – do not say things
that are false, and do not say something for which you lack adequate evidence)
2. Quantity – your contribution should be as informative as is required for the good
purposes of the exchange but not more informative than is required (on the one hand,
you should not withhold information and give your communication partner all the
information he/she needs, on the other hand you should make sure to prevent
information overload)
3. Relation – when you say something it should contribute to the conversation and not
be something completely irrelevant for the conversation at hand
4. Manner – be perspicuous (clear, easy to understand) – conveys 4 sub-maxims:
1) avoid obscurity of expression – e.g. business jargon that may not be understood
by people outside the given field
2) avoid ambiguity
3) be brief
4) be orderly
You can opt out of some maxims (e.g. you can opt out of the maxim of quantity and not share
certain information if it is confidential or private)
Violating a maxim vs. flouting a maxim
Violating – you don’t follow one of the maxims and you try to hide this from the
other person (e.g. quality – when someone lies and says that they don’t lie)
Flouting – you don’t follow one of the maxims, but you make it clear that you aren’t
following it (e.g. when someone uses metaphor)
In Gricean pragmatics
The Cooperative Principle is seen as a core aspect of successful communication
Communication is seen as information exchange (it is important to get the message
across, be direct)
Maxims are seen as rules for successful communicative collaboration
BUT: If you’re direct, there could be a threat to face (especially in face-to-face conversations)
Politeness theory.
Politeness theory (Miller-Ott & Kelley, 2017)
Politeness theory – communication is not only about exchanging information (as in
cooperation principle) but also about relationships between individuals
Strategic communication – communicating purposefully to advance the mission of an
organization
6 core tasks:
1. Training – all efforts that communication professionals take in order to make
individuals more communicative. Give people skills to make them effective at
communication and do their job better. Deal with conflicts in the workplace
2. Organising – bringing people together, creating all kinds of meetings in groups.
Make people meet and bring them together. Should you adapt your communication
style to fit that of other groups. When should you come together and when not
3. Integrating – Bring together all aspects of communication strategies. Bring together
all kinds of elements.
4. Analysing – Think about an issue that is important to an organisation and think how
to deal with it. Explanations for why communication doesn’t work and how to fix it.
Dis-functional group communication
5. Creating – creativity
6. Advising – Advising makes the organisation as a whole more communicative
(training deals with individuals)
The communications professional
Roles
1. Integrated thinker
2. C-suite advisor
3. Master of data
Skillset
1. Analytical (critical mindset, focus on research)
2. Curious (being creative)
3. Innovative (no boundaries)
4. Collaborative (focus on other people and functions)
5. Emphatic (human being and behaviour is key)
6. Reflective (Self-critical, feedback as second nature)
7. Ethical (understand all stakeholders)
8. Agile (fast changing world requires fast changing communications professionals
Nowadays, artificial intelligence, computer knowledge, data etc., are taking over human effort
and knowledge
,Lecture 2 – Training
Training – making individuals within an organisation more communicative
Conversational implicatures; Gricean pragmatics (Grice, 1975)
Pragmatics – how context contributes to meaning: words can have different meanings in
different contexts (e.g. orange can be a colour or a fruit)
Speech acts: (John Searle)
1. Locution
What was said
2. Illocution
Communicative goal
3. Perlocution
Communicative effect
e.g. if a window is open and you say ‘do you feel cold’, the locution would be ‘do you feel
cold’, the illocution would be that the other person closes the window, and the perlocution
would be what the other person decides to do as a result of you saying you are cold
Types of illocutionary acts
1. Assertives (committing a speaker to the truth of a proposition)
2. Directives (requests, commands, recommendations)
3. Commissives (promises, oaths)
4. Expressives (congratulations, apologies)
5. Declarations (declaring two people married, signing your Bachelor diploma)
Propositional content and implicature
Even when a statement seems straightforward and seems to have only one particular
meaning, it is argued that even these sentences rely on a certain level of implicature
E.g. the cat is on the mat – the cat can be in the middle of the mat, but it could also
be on the edge of the mat; are these two cases identical? Searle argues that
depending on how you think, if the cat is on the edge you could say that it is not on
the mat
Organisational implicatures
Company logos (nike, adidas) imply the companies (when you see a logo you think of
the company it represents)
However, if you don’t know the company (and their logo) the logo that you see will
not remind you of the company it represents
So, you need to have a certain background knowledge to understand this implicature
Grice: Cooperation Principle
Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it
occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are
engaged (Grice, 1975)
, So, according to the cooperation principle, your contribution to a conversation should
follow the goal of the communication moving forward
The cooperation principle doesn’t imply that two people that are in communication
should cooperate or collaborate. Two participants can still follow the collaboration
principle if they disagree (e.g. a negotiation between two parties that doesn’t result in
agreement between them can still follow the cooperation principle)
4 maxims – Grice (if you follow all 4 maxims, you adhere to the cooperation principle)
1. Quality – Speaking the truth (try to make your contribution true – do not say things
that are false, and do not say something for which you lack adequate evidence)
2. Quantity – your contribution should be as informative as is required for the good
purposes of the exchange but not more informative than is required (on the one hand,
you should not withhold information and give your communication partner all the
information he/she needs, on the other hand you should make sure to prevent
information overload)
3. Relation – when you say something it should contribute to the conversation and not
be something completely irrelevant for the conversation at hand
4. Manner – be perspicuous (clear, easy to understand) – conveys 4 sub-maxims:
1) avoid obscurity of expression – e.g. business jargon that may not be understood
by people outside the given field
2) avoid ambiguity
3) be brief
4) be orderly
You can opt out of some maxims (e.g. you can opt out of the maxim of quantity and not share
certain information if it is confidential or private)
Violating a maxim vs. flouting a maxim
Violating – you don’t follow one of the maxims and you try to hide this from the
other person (e.g. quality – when someone lies and says that they don’t lie)
Flouting – you don’t follow one of the maxims, but you make it clear that you aren’t
following it (e.g. when someone uses metaphor)
In Gricean pragmatics
The Cooperative Principle is seen as a core aspect of successful communication
Communication is seen as information exchange (it is important to get the message
across, be direct)
Maxims are seen as rules for successful communicative collaboration
BUT: If you’re direct, there could be a threat to face (especially in face-to-face conversations)
Politeness theory.
Politeness theory (Miller-Ott & Kelley, 2017)
Politeness theory – communication is not only about exchanging information (as in
cooperation principle) but also about relationships between individuals
