Business Discourse and Organizational Business Meetings Across Disciplines

Abstract

This chapter explains in detail the rich literature on business discourse and organizational business meetings in four disciplines: business discourse, organization studies, business and management, and linguistics. The chapter first maps out a broad review of the nature of meetings and discusses the various business discourse definitions. It then describes the global scholarly work on business meetings that have established a concrete framework for analyzing meetings in the business discourse field across many social humanities disciplines. Next the chapter addresses the focus of this book, namely, organizational business meetings, arguing that little has been written about the communicative event of meeting as a social organizational performance. In doing this, the chapter draws on the work of Schwartzman (The meeting as a neglected social form in organizational studies. In: Cummings L, Frost P (eds) Publishing in the organizational sciences. Sage, Thousand Oaks, p 233–258, 1986, The meeting: gatherings in organizations and communities. Plenum Press, New York, 1989) and Boden (The business of talk: organizations in action. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994) on the social organizational structural of meetings, followed by several accounts from the business literature of what a business meeting is. This chapter ends with an overview of the key linguistic research on organizational meetings, starting with the foundational study of Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris (Managing language: the discourse of corporate meetings. John Benjamins, Philadelphia, 1997) on Italian and British business meetings and continuing with the work of Poncini (Discursive strategies in multicultural business meetings. Peter Lang, Bern, 2004), Holmes and Stubbe (Power and politeness in the workplace: A sociolinguistic analysis of talk at work. Pearson, London, 2003), and Mullany (Gendered discourse in the professional workplace. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007).