The Business of Talk: Organizations in Action

In this work, Deirdre Boden contributes to the study of business firms and to the analysis of organizations in general. Like all other organizations, business firms are run primarily through talk - who talks to whom, at what point, how, and in what way determines how the organization works, on a day-to-day level as well as over time. Boden develops a critique of existing organizational theory and is able to point a way towards future research and thinking in the area. The book includes numerous illustrations of the significance of conversation analysis as a means of studying organizational structures. It provides a contribution to social theory, as well as to the more specific field of organizational study. Talk, Boden shows, links the microsettings of interaction with large-scale properties of organizational settings. This book should be of interest to students and professionals in sociology, organizational behaviour, discourse studies, ethnomethodology and anthropology.