Teaching communication to business and management students: a view from the United Kingdom

Our academic backgrounds in the fields of communication studies, literary studies, and linguistics equipped us with concepts and theories not normally found in management education. When we came to business and management teaching, we all found that although our insights from these fields were highly relevant (even necessary) and certainly applicable, they were mostly absent from existing teaching programs. Notably though, we found this not to be the case in organizational research. Like many other fields of study, from literature to geography, organization studies have undergone what has been called a “linguistic turn.” In this article, we argue that it is time for management teaching to embrace this approach. In our view, through adopting a semiotic framework, we can facilitate that access in an educational context