Ebook: Managing Language: The Discourse of Corporate Meetings

The aim of this text is to answer the question: what do managers in multinational companies really do during meetings? Following fieldwork in three corporations in Britain and Italy, the picture that emerges is one that challenges the widespread understanding of meetings as boring, routine events in the life of an organization. As the recordings analyzed in the book show, organizational meanings and relations come into existence through verbal interaction; these are challenged and manipulated in a constant process of sense-making in search of coherence which engages managers in their daily life. The pragmatics of pronominalization, metaphors and discourse markers, as well as thematic development, reveal the dynamics of sense-making in both English and Italian.