Doing Business in the 'New Normal': COVID-19 School Leaders' Language Manners

Marjana Vaneva and Marjan Bojadjiev

A chapter in Proceedings of the ENTRENOVA - ENTerprise REsearch InNOVAtion Conference, Hybrid Conference, Zagreb, Croatia, 9-10 September 2021, 2021, pp 401-409 from IRENET - Society for Advancing Innovation and Research in Economy, Zagreb

Abstract: As the not-so-new-now coronavirus pandemic has affected all walks of life, education has not been an exemption; what is more, it is one of the most severely hit sectors. The unknown crisis created unprecedented circumstances for all participants in the education process, and school leaders have had a double job: to navigate their institutions and to look after their employees. The latter is a pretty delicate task - they have had to keep doing business and running their companies while minding the language since physical distancing necessitated the use of electronic communication, thus making room for vagueness and even misinterpretations. Ten education leaders of primary and secondary schools in North Macedonia have been video-interviewed on everyday COVID-19-related situations from their workplace context. Discourse completion tasks (DCTs) have been employed as a data elicitation method. Being given the open-ended, only topically specified scenarios, the respondents are asked to recreate their language reaction to situations that have happened in their newest pandemic work life. The interviews have been transcribed, and the leaders' language choices have been analyzed. The findings show that, luckily, the leaders have been mindful about their words and have mostly chosen to use positive, calm, and encouraging language.

Keywords: COVID-19; business; education; leaders; language (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 J29 Y90 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/262266/1/38-ENT-2021.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:entr21:262266

DOI: 10.54820/BUEG5422

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Proceedings of the ENTRENOVA - ENTerprise REsearch InNOVAtion Conference (2021), Hybrid Conference, Zagreb, Croatia from IRENET - Society for Advancing Innovation and Research in Economy, Zagreb
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().