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Plenary Speaker:
Professor Jan Svennevig, Oslo
University
Title: Interaction in Workplace Meetings
Abstract: The field of research on institutional
interaction has predominantly been concerned with encounters between
institutional representatives and members of the public, so-called
expert-lay interaction. In recent years, however, there has been an
increasing interest in internal communication in organizations, both
within work teams and between management and employees. A natural site
to investigate the characteristics of such interaction is workplace
meetings. The current paper will report on research into the interaction
order of meetings as a communicative activity type and leadership
practices realized in them. More specifically, it addresses some of the
characteristic procedures used by meeting chairs in moderating the
interaction by reference to the agenda. In addition, it describes a
specific meeting activity, namely reporting. Reporting sequences are
constituted by a report by an organizational member in charge of an
institutional task and a response in the form of feedback from his or
her manager. This is an environment where managers carry out central
management tasks such as evaluating work performance and giving
directions for future action. It will thus be argued that meetings
constitute a prime site for researching both communicative practices of
leadership and the internal constitution of organizations as
institutional entities.
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