The Business of Talk

In this book Deirdre Boden makes a bold and original contribution 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 radical 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 is a major 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 will surely be regarded as one of the most innovative studies in its area to have appeared over the past decade.