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Training in business communication is often conceived as something that takes place in classrooms, corporate training rooms, or formal workplace settings. But what about communication that is rooted in everyday encounters—in neighbourhood cafés, on social media, at professional events, or during art festivals—where people engage across languages, cultures, and shared purposes through dialogue, negotiation, and promotion? This book emerges from a growing concern that, "Business communication training remains centred on abstract professionalism, yet it could be enriched through the textures of social practice". Contemporary training often instructs formal knowledge and skills, including how to communicate, through elite and globally homogenised models of professionalism. The term “communication through social practice” refers to a routinised type of communication behaviour that consists of several interconnected elements: bodily activities, mental activities, “things” and their use, background knowledge, know-how, states of emotion, and motivational knowledge. Business communication through social practice is a meaning-making process, where trainees are not only expected to be individually competent in a formal role by formal rules after the training, but also to be able to shape their own contexts, power, and participation, thereby communicating with situated, cultural, and collective human activities. This book invites chapter proposals that explore how business communication training can be redefined through real-world social practices, such as community events, media production, hospitality training, music and arts-based projects, business negotiations, and lessons learned from international project communication.
The book responds to the following questions by presenting case studies and pedagogical innovations from diverse geographies (e.g., at present, India, China, the UK, and beyond)—that challenge the traditional boundaries of training business communication; that treats business communication training as processes embedded in relationships, local cultures, and real-life exchanges. For example, consider: • What if business communication were taught not as a static skill, but as a lived social practice? • What if the classroom extended into the community, and the community itself became the curriculum? • How to blend the contemporary advanced training pedagogies in business communication training? • The contemporary training is rarely centred at lived experience of diverse learners, supporting, e.g., - Small business owners in rural areas, - Hospitality workers engaging guests across cultures, or - Community media practitioners co-designing with local event entrepreneurs.
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