Corporate meetings as genre: a study of the role of the chair in corporate meeting talk

Meetings are the backbone of organizational life and as such constitute an important component of workplace discourse. We expand here upon earlier work which suggests that a meeting constitutes a distinct genre, taking informal rather than formal meeting talk as our focus. To further explore the genre theory perspective, the analysis draws on theoretical and analytical tools deriving from work on "activity types" (Levinson 1992 [1979]) by concentrating on the role of the meeting chair which is characterized as a structural device for managing these interactions. Acts that index "chairing" are analyzed as discourse types (Sarangi 2000) enacted in the context of the corporate (informal) meeting activity type. We analyze data from two comparable data sets, one recorded in Europe and one in New Zealand. Despite the effect of local context on the instantiation of the meeting event, there seem to be generalizable features (e.g., the chair's function in openings and closings and the agenda) which make meetings recognizable to participants. The findings indicate striking similarities across the organizations, lending support to the existence of a meeting genre, and emphasizing the significance of the chair role which shapes and is shaped within the context of the genre. We close the paper by discussing how the activity- and discourse-type approach can contribute to the study of spoken business genres.