The battle of the hard and the soft? : a discourse analysis of the influence of professional language

Abstract

With increased globalisation and modernisation there is a shift towards increased importance of human competencies to meet the demands of modern society. The importance of the concepts hard skills and soft skills within the language of professional progress has been an ever-growing and controversial topic. The question is whether these concepts are in fact contributing to the development of individual and social professional progress? Are the terms hard skills and soft skills limiting or of any real value and should they be reconstructed?The study's purpose was to utilize discourse analysis methodology borrowed from social science to explore the influence of these concepts from a postmodern perspective and critically examines how the discourse of hard skills and soft skills impact social life, social interaction and people’s meaning-making in project management. A published text containing PM competence baselines and personal interviews with participants with vast experience from the world of project management were the study’s base of research.The core findings are all linked to the lack of clear common language. As the definition of the concept soft skills is unclear and the complexity of the term soft skills is high, it influences different understandings and, therefore, meaning is created differently by each individual.The real impact of language is not the terminology itself but rather the individual meaning of the construction they represent. The findings imply that to gain shared meaning it is crucial to examine meaning within each social context in order to better understand what the meaning of language is and how language can influence people’s behaviour and thus, construct the society we live in.