VERBAL COMMUNICATING DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY (Governance Communication Linguistic Research)

 

 

Yulia V. Danyushina  (PhD, Doctor in Linguistics, Professor,

State University of Management, Moscow, Russia)

 

VERBAL COMMUNICATING DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL

SUSTAINABILITY (Governance Communication Linguistic Research)

 

The tasks of economic modernization and further development of democratic institutions and processes in Russia make researchers further investigate the communication practices in society and political sphere in order to find the new methods of improving what we call Governance Communication, that is, communication in socio-political governance and business management [1; 2].

Our cross-disciplinary research project aims at exploring Communication in/for Governance and determining the ways of its improving. Better communication provides transparency and closer links between establishment (the government and big business) and civil society, citizens and NCOs,– for making framework for more efficient public diplomacy and national dialogue, further developing participatory democracy, citizenry, and social sustainability. Better communication will also help in the war on terror and extremism. Efficient communication lessens social tense and fosters social consensus, helping anti-corruption fight and the global crisis overcoming. Learning the international experience in Governance Communication and applying its cutting edge technologies will benefit the democratic development of Russia. The inter-disciplinary research approach employed combines investigating (a) Socio-Political and Media Discourses, Mass Communication and Propaganda, Political Studies and Social Psychology, (b) Business (Corporate, Strategic) Communication and PR, (c) Sociolinguistic Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics.

The objective of the research is to investigate the specific linguistic means employed in these interrelated sub-spheres of communication.  The discursive approach is supposed to provide the basis for investigating, and the multi-level critical discourse analysis can be used as its key research method, e.g. based on the integrating the concepts by van Dijk et al., with a linguistic emphasis [3].

The spectrum of research questions encompasses the following wider spheres:

- what are the ways of improving communication in/for governance;

- how democracy is realized through information and communication;

- in what ways and by what means democracy can be communicated externally;

- how to facilitate  - by communicative means - closer links between the elite (the government and big business) and civil society, citizens and NCOs,

- how to make their interrelations more transparent and increase accountability;

- how efficient communication can create new framework for more efficient public diplomacy and national dialogue, mutual understanding and consensus;

- what is the role and the opportunities given by better communication for further developing participatory democracy, citizenry, and social sustainability;

- how efficient communication can lessen social tense (of all kinds – between social strata, ethnic, national and racial groups, religions, professional classes etc) and foster national development;  the specifics of (anti-)crisis communication;

- what elements constitute ‘the communicative mechanism’ of good governance;

- what are the peculiarities of the leadership discourse overseas and which of its properties could be extrapolated and transmitted to that in Russia;

- what the language/discursive/rhetoric opportunities for influencing are;

- what (media)communication’s social impacts and implicatures are;

- how business can express its corporate social responsibility;

- how better communication can help in the war on terror and extremism, increase social transparency and help in the war on corruption;

- what are the new opportunities given for improving communication efficiency by modern IT, the Internet, new, telecommunications, social networks, multimedia.

This research will help future leaders to provide more efficient communication via better use of the linguistic means. The tasks of further development of democracy and social sustainability in Russia make the local and federal officials acquire specific lingua-communicative competencies, the minimal list of which includes the following skills and abilities:

  • possessing the system of the lingual knowledge – the basic theory (phonetics, morphology, lexis/vocabulary, grammar/syntax, wordbuilding etc) and practical use of the Russian and English languages, in official and informal styles,
  • knowing the rules of communicative etiquette, methods of conveying the meaning, gettting and analysing the verbal feedback, avaoding misunderstanding,
  • ability to efficiently express and understand one’s intentions, thoughts and implications verbally – in written, oral and technically meditated forms,
  • skills in right choosing the proper lingual means regarding the situation,
  • readiness the perform vebal and para-verbal cross-cultural dialogue,
  • ability to find, process, refer to and use verbal information, in all kinds of resources (search systems, computer nets, reference literature, dictionaries etc),
  • ability to correctly transform, compress and transmit the verbal/textual data,
  • lingual skills in planning and performing presentations, meetings, negotiations, conferences, reporting, appraising and criticising, in problem/conflict solving,   
  • knowledge in the basics of argumentation, rhetoric and verbal influence,
  • skills in public speech, documentation, GR, PR and media relations.

The whole complex of the communicative competencies of the officials along with the system of info-communication security constitute the Concept/Doctrine of the Communicative Provision of Democratic Sustainable Development of Russia, which we are currently working at.

References:

1. Danyushina, Y.V. 2010. Business Linguistics and Internet Communication. Moscow, GUU.

2. Danyushina, Y. 2011. The Multi-level analysis of business web discourse. Doctoral dissertation. Institute of Linguistisc, Russian Academy of Science. Moscow.

3. van Dijk, T. A. (Ed.) 2007. Discourse Studies. 5 vols. Sage Benchmarks in Discourse Studies. (pp. xix-xiii). London: Sage.