The idea to write this monograph grew out of my panel presentation at the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) conference held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in July 2017. I had been intrigued by the panel proposal titled ‘Self-Presentation and Self-Praise: The Neglected Speech Acts’ put forward by Daria Dayter and submitted my abstract, feeling that the topic was suitable to corporate communication.

After the conference, all the panellists were asked to contribute their papers to a joint volume on self-praise. It was while working on the draft paper that I realised the inability to confine my ideas to an 8,000-word format, within the boundaries of a single research discipline only (i.e. Pragmatics). By then I had already moved a long way from teaching applied linguistics and business English (communication) courses, being more and more drawn towards business as a research and educational field. Currently working in a private business school, teaching business and management courses, as well as instructing students from all over the world how to successfully complete their research projects, and supervising many in a wide range of research topics, as well as engaging in conversations with practitioners representing various industry sectors, I have finally found my interdisciplinary ‘niche’.

Most of my own recent research projects have also tended to be of interdisciplinary nature (combining methods and insights of numerous academic disciplines), with the interest lying specifically in the interconnections between business and society (including technology), and the multi-stakeholder view on business practices. Such an approach is also mostly suitable to the topic at hand for it is impossible to investigate the complexity of self-presentation and self-praise from a single perspective. In order to account to this complexity, an exploration of the interconnectivity of and interdependency between the numerous factors impacting multilayered corporate behaviour, both on the macro and micro levels, incorporating the applied, ‘hands-on’ practitioners’ vantage point, as well as that of theoreticians and academic researchers is necessary.