Quite often communication is not just a transfer of a message between a sender and a receiver who seek to construct meaning between them depending on their social environment or domain. In many cases, communication between people — in the non-work domain as much as in the work domain — is constructed with a specific intent in mind and is more open to the construction of these specific and often instrumental intentions at work than it is in everyday messages. At work, power inside and over communication plays a significant role. This power is somewhat asymmetrically distributed which opens up possibilities for the distortion of messages. To distort a message means toput it out of shape. A distortion is a sort of linguistic abnormality or anomaly that departs or deviates from the proper meaning of a sign. Intentional distortion alters theperception of a message, thus allowing pre-designed and purposive misrepresentations of a communicated sign.¹¹⁴ Distortions impact on the language we use. They are a linguistic tool that is unequally distributed at work.

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© 2008 Thomas Klikauer

Policies and ethics