Article
Power Dynamics in Professional Communication: An English Studies Perspective on Corporate and Legal Discourse
Professional communication in corporate and legal settings is not a neutral exchange of information but a site in which institutional power is continuously enacted, negotiated, and contested through language choice. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), politeness theory, and genre analysis, this paper examines how power asymmetries between organizational actors, managers and subordinates, lawyers and clients, institutions and lay participants, are constructed and sustained through specific linguistic resources including modality, directive speech acts, hedging, turn-taking control, and lexical formality. The study synthesizes findings from corpus-based workplace discourse research, courtroom interaction analysis, and organizational communication studies to compare how power is linguistically indexed across corporate meeting talk, corporate email correspondence, and legal-institutional discourse (courtroom examination and legal documentation). A comparative methodology is described using discourse-analytic coding of directive strength, politeness strategy selection following Brown and Levinson's face-management framework, and genre-based structural analysis following Bhatia's move-structure approach, applied to workplace discourse corpora and courtroom transcript studies. Reported findings indicate that corporate power is more frequently encoded through indirectness, mitigated directives, and collaborative pronoun use that preserves an appearance of consensus, whereas legal-institutional power is more frequently encoded through direct control of turn allocation, restrictive questioning formats, and specialized register that limits lay participants' interpretive agency. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for professional communication training, plain-language legal reform, and the broader theoretical understanding of how institutional power operates through, rather than merely alongside, language.