PHILOLOGICA WRATISLAVIENSIA: ACTA ET STUDIA 7 LESZEK CICHOBŁAZIŃSKI CZĘSTOCHOWA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Negotiating values in organizational communication as a speech act ABSTRACT. The following article is devoted to the pragmatic aspects of organizational communication in which management-related values are negotiated by means of collective disputes in a dialogue between employers and labor unions. The report consists of both a theoretical and an empirical part. The theoretical part presents selected issues pertaining to the relevance of values for the management of organizations with regard to the human activity realized in direct and indirect speech acts. In the empirical part, the collected records of collective disputes concerning the interpretation and negotiations of meaning in interpersonal communication are analyzed on the basis of a typology of illocutionary acts elaborated by John Langshaw Austin and John Rogers Searle. 1. Introduction Values recently became one of the key issues in the management of organizations. They constitute the topic of numerous publications from the domain of marketing (Dobiegała-Korona, Herman 2006 and Dobie- gała-Korona, Doligalski 2011) where both the customer-related prob- lems, and the problems of managing by values in organizations are pre- sented. This topic is discussed by Ken Blanchard and Michael O'Connor (1998) who pay attention to inner sources of company values, amongst which people and knowledge are the most important ones. Values in economic sense refer mainly to the matter of a price that goods may ob- tain on a market (a company is the good presented in the case given) and the price is regulated by the market exchange. However economic values, to some extent, are derived from values understood in a social sense as they define what worth-having and what negligible is. Different sorts of trends and fashions are the best way to illustrate how social regulations in the sphere of value influence eco- nomic values. A given good may be of a standard value (it meets certain needs) however its market value may be insignificant as it is no longer fashionable. It might be similar in the case of a company's value. The best example is an increasing importance of social responsibility in business relationships considering the values of companies, as speci-