Abstracts - Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

EIJA VENTOLA, AALTO UNIVERSITY, SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS, HELSINKI, FINLANDCEOS OF NOKIA - NEGOTIATING DIFFERENCES? ISSUES OF LANGUAGE,METALANGUAGE, MODALITIES, CULTURE?Nokia, the telecommunications company, has recently within the past decade hadthree CEOs, two of which have been Finns. During Mr. Ollila’s time Nokia wasadvancing from success to success. The next CEO, Mr. Kallasvuo, had to explain whythe sales had been going down and finally had to step aside last September 2010.The current CEO is an ex-Microsoft man, Mr. Elop, a Canadian, and he has justrecently announced closer co-operation of Nokia and Microsoft. The externalcommunication practices of the three CEOs are the focus of this paper. The paperexplores the issue of how well the principal methodological tools of systemicfunctionallinguistics can display the communicative practices of the CEOs – howthey employ the ideational, interpersonal and textual functions of language, howthey use metalanguage and how they construe multimodally their presentations.Further, the results will further be contrasted to audience reactions to the CEOs’use of language, metalanguage and modalities, and the implications to therealizations of cultures in global business will be discussed.PAPER SESSION 4B - ROOM 2 - TUESDAY, 26 JULYISFC38 Book of Abstracts Page 59 Lisbon, July 2011