Power in meetings may be enacted in many ways, ranging from democratic and collaborative through to authoritative and didactic,
with the exact positioning on this continuum typically under the control of the chair. By contrast with the focus of most previous
research on the behaviour of institutionally ratified chairs of intact teams, this paper examines how volunteer chairs of small
focus groups in public meetings use the power associated with that role to manage the discussion and to encourage or discourage
explicit expression of disagreement. Our analysis identifies ways in which these arbitrarily assigned chairs influence and
facilitate the small group discussions through a range of discourse practices. By separating the chair role from its typical
co-occurrence with institutional hierarchy we are able to demonstrate the inherent influence and power of the position in the
decision making process.
1998 “Look Who’s Talking: An Analysis of “Chair-talk” in Business Meetings.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication121: 157–197.
Blackledge, Adrian
2012 “Discourse and Power.” InThe Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. byJames Gee and Michael Handford, 616–627. London: Routledge.
Buur, Jacob, and Henry Larsen
2010 “The Quality of Conversation in Participatory Innovation.” CoDesign6 (3): 121–138.
Buur, Jacob, and Ben Matthews
2008 “Participatory Innovation.” International Journal of Innovation Management12 (03): 255–273.
Coupland, Justine
2003 “Small Talk: Social Functions.” Research on Language and Social Interaction36 (1): 1–6.
Dannerer, Monika
2001 “Negotiation in Business Meetings.” InNegotiation and Power in Dialogic Interaction, ed. byEdda Weigand and Marcelo Dascal, 91–106. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Davis, Kathy
1988Power under the Microscope: Toward a Grounded Theory of Gender Relations in Medical Encounters. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Deppermann, Arnulf, Reinhold Schmitt, and Lorenza Mondada
2010 “Agenda and Emergence: Contingent and Planned Activities in a Meeting.” Journal of Pragmatics421: 1700–1712.
Drew, Paul, and John Heritage
(eds)1992Talk at Work. Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Drew, Paul, and Marja-Leena Sorjonen
1997 “Institutional Dialogue.” InDiscourse as Social Interaction: Discourse Studies 2 – A Multidisciplinary Introduction, ed. byTeun van Dijk, 92–118. London: Sage.
Eckert, Penelope
2011 “Adolescent Language.” InLanguage, Society and Power: An Introduction, ed. byAnnabelle Mooney, Linda Thomas, Shân Wareing, Jean Stilwell Peccei, Suzanne LaBelle, Engøy Henriksen, and Eva Eppler. New York: Routledge.
Fairclough, Norman
1989Language and Power. London: Longman.
Fairclough, Norman
1992 “Discourse and Text: Linguistic and Intertextual Analysis within Discourse Analysis.” Discourse & Society3 (2): 193–217.
Firth, Alan
1995 “Talking for a Change: Commodity Negotiating by Telephone.” InThe Discourse of Negotiation: Studies of Language in the Workplace, ed. byAlan Firth, 183–222. Oxford: Pergamon.
Fleck, Rowanne, Yvonne Rogers, Nicola Yuill, Paul Marshall, Amanda Carr, Jochen Rick, and Victoria Bonnett
2009 “Actions Speak Loudly with Words: Unpacking Collaboration around the Table.” In
The ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces
. Conference proceedings, November 2009. New York: The Association for Computing Machinery.
Fletcher, Joyce
1999Disappearing Acts. Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Handford, Michael
2010The Language of Business. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heinemann, Trine, Jeanette Landgrebe, and Ben Matthews
2012 “Collaborating to Restrict: A Conversation Analytic Perspective on Collaboration in Design.” CoDesign8 (4): 200–214.
Holmes, Janet
2005 “Power and Discourse at Work: Is Gender Relevant?” InFeminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Gender, Power and Ideology in Discourse, ed. byMichelle Lazar, 31–60. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Holmes, Janet, and Stephanie Schnurr
2003Power and Politeness in the Workplace: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Talk at Work. London: Pearson.
2010 “Is that Right? Questions and Questioning as Control Devices in the Workplace.” InWhy Do You Ask?: The Function of Questions in Institutional Discourse, ed. byAlice Freed and Susan Ehrlich, 187–210. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Holmes, Janet, Meredith Marra, and Bernadette Vine
2011Leadership, Discourse, and Ethnicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Holtgraves, Thomas
2000“Preference Organization and Reply Comprehension”. Discourse Processes 30 (2): 87–166.
Jacobs, Scott
2002 “Maintaining Neutrality in Dispute Mediation: Managing Disagreement While Managing not to Disagree.” Journal of Pragmatics26 (3): 291–319.
Kangasharju, Helena
1996 “Aligning as a Team in Multiparty Conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics341: 1447–1471.
Kangasharju, Helena
2002 “Alignment in Disagreement: Forming Oppositional Alliances in Committee Meetings.” Journal of Pragmatics341: 1447–1471.
Koshik, Irene
2002 “A conversation analytic study of yes/no questions which convey reversed polarity assertions.” Journal of Pragmatics34 (12): 1851–1877.
Lee, Merlyn
2011 “Decision Making in a Collaborative Writing Task.” InProceedings of the 3rd CELC Symposium, National University of Singapore, 2011, ed. byRadhika Jaidev, Maria Sadorra, Jock Wong Onn, Lee Cherk, and Beatriz Paredes Lorente. Singapore: Centre for English Language Communication.
Măda, Stanca
2012Moderation Techniques in Meeting Management. InProfessional Communication across Languages and Cultures (Vol. 171), ed. byStanca Măda and Răzvan Săftoiu, 193–212. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Melzi, Gigliana
2000 “Cultural Variations in the Construction of Personal Narratives: Central American and European American Mothers’ Elicitation Styles.” Discourse Processes30 (2): 153–177.
Mondada, Lorenza
2013 “Embodied and Spatial Resources for Turn-taking in Institutional Multi-party Interactions: Participatory Democracy Debates.” Journal of Pragmatics46 (1): 39–68.
Mortensen, Kristian
2013 “Writing Aloud: Some Interactional Functions of the Public Display of Emergent Writing.” InProceedings of PIN-C 18-20 June 2013, Lahti, Finland, ed. byHelinä Melkas and Jacob Buur. Lappeenranta: LUT Scientific and Expertise Publications.
Myers, Greg
1998 “Displaying Opinions: Topics and Disagreement in Focus Groups.” Language in Society271: 85–111.
Nielsen, Mie
2013 ““Stepping Stones” in Opening and Closing Department Meetings.” Journal of Business Communication50 (1): 34–67.
Pälli, Pekka, and Esa Lehtinen
2009“Reconstructing Strategy: Constructing and Employing Written and Spoken Genres in Meeting Talk.”Paper presented at the
6th International Critical Management Studies Conference
, Warwick Business School, England. July 13–15, 2009.
Paramasivan, Shamala
2007 “A Discourse-oriented Model for Analysing Power and Politeness in Negotiation Interaction: A Cross-linguistic Perspective.” Journal of Universal Language81: 92–127.
Priem, Richard, David Harrison, and Nan Muir
1995 “Structured Conflict and Consensus Outcomes in Group Decision Making.” Journal of Management211: 691–710.
Rahim, Afzalur, David Antonioni, Krum Krumov, and Snejana Ilieva
2000 “Power, Conflict, and Effectiveness.” European Psychologist5 (1): 28–33.
Ravichandran, Deepak, and Eduard Hovy
2002 “Learning Surface Text Patterns for a Question Answering System.” Paper presented at the
40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
, Philadelphia, July, 2002.
Rees-Miller, Janie
2000 “Power, Severity, and Context in Disagreement.” Journal of Pragmatics321: 1087–1111.
Rogerson-Revell, Pamela
2011 “Chairing International Business Meetings: Investigating Humour and Leadership Style in the Workplace.” InConstructing Identities at Work, ed. byJo Angouri and Meredith Marra, 61–84. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Salas, Eduardo, Diana Nichols, and James Driskell
2007 “Testing Three Team Training Strategies in Intact Teams: A Meta-Analysis.” Small Group Research38 (4): 471–488.
Schmitt, Reinhold
2006 “Interaction in Work Meetings.” Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée11 (2): 69–84.
Spangle, Michael, and Myra Warren Isenhart
2003Negotiation: Communication for Diverse Settings. California: Sage Publications.
Stalpers, Judith
1995The Expression of Disagreement. InThe Discourse of Business Negotiation, ed. byKonrad Ehlich and Johannes Wagner, 275–290. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Talbot, Mary, Karen Atkinson, and David Atkinson
2003Language and Power in the Modern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Torrance, Paul
1957 “Group Decision-making and Disagreement.” Social Forces351: 314–318.
Tracy, Karen, and Aaron Dimock
2004“Meetings: Discursive Sites for Building and Fragmenting Community.”InCommunication Yearbook 28, ed. byPamela Kalbfleisch, 127–166. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.
2018. Social influence and discourse similarity networks in workgroups. Social Networks 52 ► pp. 228 ff.
Lockwood, Jane & Gail Forey
2016. Discursive control and power in virtual meetings. Discourse & Communication 10:4 ► pp. 323 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.