The Discourse of Business Meetings

This book examines the social organizational discourse of task-oriented business meetings in a Kuwaiti financial organization and an American non-profit trade organisation. Focusing primarily on the linguistic behaviours demonstrating agency and power of managers and staff members displayed during these meetings, the project is based on ethnographic data collected during eight months of fieldwork. The author examines the similarities and differences between the linguistic behaviours of both organizations, particularly relating to the production of collective we, us, and our utterances and directive speech acts issued to explore how managers and co-workers perform agency and power in meetings. This distinctive book will shed light into the influence of language on the actions and relationships of managers and co-workers in business meetings, and will be of interest to applied linguists and discourse analysts in the field of business discourse in addition to business professionalsin management and finance.

Develops a sociolinguistic theoretical perspective on the business event of meeting Advising how companies would benefit from hiring language and communication professionals to evaluate the way staff members communicate together in meetings Identifies the importance of examining agency and power in facilitating the flow of communication in business meetings

Autorentext
Fatma M. AlHaidari is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Public Authority for Applied Education and Training, Kuwait. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, language and gender, and the discourse of business meetings.

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Business Discourse and Organizational Business Meetings across Disciplines.- Chapter 3. Fieldwork in Organizations.- Chapter 4. An integrated analytical framework for interpreting the meeting data.- Chapter 5. Analyzing Innovative Kuwait Co. meeting data.- Chapter 6. Analyzing Global Phoenix meeting data.- Chapter 7. Compare and Contrast.- Chapter 8. Conclusion and Future Directions in Business Discourse.