Deputy Head of Senate

Deputy Head of the Institute for Communication Management and Media

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Go to eVVZ for PD. Dr. Lutzky's current lectures.

About

Ursula Lutzky is an Associate Professor at the Department of Business Communication at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, where she teaches on the BA specialization in international business communication and the MSc in business communication. She is a member of the Institute for Language and Discourse in Business, Deputy Head of the Institute for Strategic Organizational Communication, as well as Deputy Head of the WU Senate. Before joining the Vienna University of Economics and Business, she worked as a Senior Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor) and BA Co-Course Director at Birmingham City University in the United Kingdom (School of English, 2010-2016) and as a Lecturer at the University of Vienna in Austria (Department of English and American Studies, 2005-2010). She is a Senior Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy and an active member of the Association for Business Communication (ABC), serving the role of ABC’s Regional Vice President for Europe, Africa and the Middle East (2021-2025).

Research Interests

Ursula Lutzky is a linguist specializing in the study of language in business contexts. Her research interests include digital business communication, pragmatics, and applied corpus linguistics. She is thus interested in studying language use in business practice and explores the discursive effects that are created by the linguistic choices made in online communication.

Her research focuses on external business communication, that is communication between businesses and the outside world. She mainly studies how businesses communicate through digital outlets by investigating large samples of digital data, such as blogs, microblogs, e-commerce platforms and forums. Her monograph The Discourse of Customer Service Tweets (2021, Bloomsbury) explores the linguistic and communicative features of customer service interactions on social media. Her studies mainly use a corpus linguistic methodology, which means that she searches big data collections for linguistic patterns and trends, and she has extensive experience in compiling, preparing and annotating (XML) corpora. 

Curious about Ursula’s work? Check out…

• her monograph The Discourse of Customer Service Tweets.

• her article on humour and polarization in business communication.

• her study on discussions of debt in online fora.

• her research on the impact of word choice in e-commerce.

A full list of publications and research activities can be found in PURE.