Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to talk and its role in creating workplace practice and relationships. Analytic tools drawn from ethnography, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis illuminate a range of workplace discourses from medical, mediation and management settings (e.g., hospital rounds, divorce mediation, enterprise bargaining).
The book consists of fourteen specially commissioned contributions to address the thematic focus of how professional knowledge and identities are constituted in discourse vis-à-vis a given institutional order. These discourse practices shed light on what it is to be a member of a profession and how the lives of both clients and professions are affected by institutional processes. Additionally to both, clients and professions are affected by institutional processes.
In addition to the theoretical insights into workplace discourse and an extended editorial introduction, the final section of the book debates methodological issues and the need to combine disciplinary rigour with diversity.
This book will be a key text for graduate students as well as for lecturers and researchers across a range of disciplines: sociolinguistics, sociology, culture and communication studies, applied linguistics.