Language Analysis: The Challenge of Change for Multinational Organization

The language analysis paper aims to thoroughly examine language functions or patterns used within an academic article, in order to determine the formality level. Analyzing business articles can help me become more insightful about my MBA program. This academic article, “The Challenge of Change for Multinational Organization” written by Victoria M. Grady, et al., was published on “The International Journal of Management and Business” in November 2014. The authors focused on the difficulties of transformation for the global organization and how to overcome those challenges. Most of the context in this article was expressed in formal tone, except in some parts, which were described by using informal techniques and other special language devices. As mentioned above, I considered this academic article is business article with high-formality.

The tone of this article is formal because the authors avoided using contraction and they mostly placed adverbs within the verb in the sentences. A sentence from Grady’s article, which is “… employees do not actively resist a change as much as they want to avoid the feelings of loss associated with transition (Harvey, 1999)” (P. 100), is the good example in this case. The authors used “do not” instead of “don’t” in this sentence because using contractions is not appropriate for the academic writing. Moreover, the adverb was placed near the verb in the middle of the sentences, which is “actively resist”. The formal academic writing prefers placing adverb in the middle of the sentences to placing it at the beginning or the end of the sentences (Swales and Feak, 2012). It can be interpreted that the informal article places the adverb at the opening or the ending position in the sentences. Nevertheless, I rarely found some sentences in this article positioned the adverb at the beginning of the sentences, such as “Currently, GO is composed of three primary divisions that direct the internal and external business processes of the organization” (P. 99). Anyway, the academic articles should use various sentence structure to narrate the story, so it is impossible for the authors to avoid placing the adverbs at the beginning or the end of some sentences.

The other formal grammar styles in Grady’s article are that the authors frequently used indirect questions and they also wrote the sentences in passive form in order to avoid addressing the readers with the word “you”. For example, “… to make recommendations regarding how GO should continue to reform to better meet its strategic objectives.” (P. 98). However, some informal techniques were used in this article. There was some usage of direct questions in the interview question part. The direct questions contained the word “you”, such as “What would help you better manage the day-to-day activities of GO?” (P. 100). Additionally, the authors sometimes used the word “we” to address themselves. The sentence, “Although many change theorists celebrate their method as the most efficient mechanism for successfully managing change, we suggest that there is no one right change theory or model.” (P. 98), is the example in this case. Even if some direct questions, the words “you” and the words “we” were existed in the article, I still considered that this article is formal because it is just the situational usage of direct questions in the particular part. The authors can make the articles more formal by change these sentences into passive voice form.

Furthermore, the authors regularly used the formal negative form in this article, such as “…there is no one right change theory or model” (P. 98). The low-formality sentences tend to use more words than the high-formality sentences. Nonetheless, the authors used some informal language feature, which is the informal negative form, in this article. For instance, the sentence, “This fear of change is not unfounded” (P. 97), sounds more interesting with double negative words. If the authors used “is founded” or “has been founded”, it will be just a common sentence. Even though the informal negative form were used, this article was judged to be the formal article.

In addition, this article does not have much specific vocabulary, so it is less formal than the other business article. However, this article contains the special language feature, which is the 7-languages abstract. The abstract includes English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, and Chinese languages. I found this language feature is unique because not much academic articles have this special feature. This language device demonstrates the authors’ professional. It can be assumed that it is necessary for all business administrators and also people in my discipline to learn additional languages, because it can benefit our future careers. In another aspect, the authors also wanted to attract the readers from various countries.

In conclusion, the tone of this article is mostly formal, even if both formal and informal language features were used. There were some situational usages of the informal language features in the article. However, I recognized more formal techniques than the informal ones because the authors avoided using contractions, direct questions, and the word “you”. They mostly placed adverbs in the mid-position of the sentences. As a result, I learned how to write the papers in my discipline by using the right tone, which has been used by most authors, through the language analysis paper.

References:

Grady, V. M., (2014). The Challenge of Change for Multinational Organizations: The International Journal of Management and Business, 5 (2), P. 97-120.

Swales, J. M. and Feak, C. B. (2012). Academic Writing for Graduate Students: Essential Tasks and Skills”, 3rd Edition, Michigan Series in English for Academic & Professional Purposes.