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The Director of the MSc program in Corporate Communication, Leena Louhiala-Salminen, has been awarded the 2014 Association for Business Communication (ABC) Outstanding Researcher award.

The award criteria include overall contribution of the researcher's cumulative publications in refereed journals and scholarly books, significance of the work to the field, overall quality of the research, and the heuristic value of the research.

The selection team of business-communication scholars, all of whom are previous winners of the Award, had great praise for Leena Louhiala-Salminen’s work. 

The quality and breadth of her research and its impact on the field of business communication has been immense, as the excerpts from the selection team member’s letters in the following show.

 Breadth and depth of the record

Leena Louhiala-Salminen’s sustained record of valuable research and publication extends over more than 20 years. Her theoretical contribution of BELF (English as a Business Lingua Franca) is seminal and her studies analysing business, managerial, and organisational communication in international environments are significant.

Louhiala-Salminen’s involvement with ABC and ABC publications covers a long span. Leena Louhiala-Salminen has steadily built a research history in business communication research that focuses primarily on how people in international and intercultural workplaces communicate using English – while using contextual research parameters such as new technology, specific industries, culture, and pedagogical and training concerns. 

Communication drives organisational processes 

Leena Louhiala-Salminen has managed to bridge the disciplinary divide between communication studies, (applied) linguistics and international management studies. She has been making a case for investigating actual language use and involving linguistic data when considering the issues of corporate language and language policy in multinational organizations.

Although the need to consider language may be obvious to a linguist, it has been less so to business and management scholars, and to organizations.

'It is communication that drives organisational processes and phenomena, and communication creates and consolidates organisations', Leena Louhiala-Salminen says. 'With my research I have tried to raise awareness of this in the wider research community and among business practitioners', she continues.

Further information:

Professor Leena-Louhiala Salminen
Leena.louhiala-salminen@aalto.fi
Tel. +358 40 3538 201