In this study I describe the results of an analysis of cohesive relations in a bilingual (English and Spanish) corpus of task-oriented dialogues. The two research questions I address relate, first, to the relationship between the generic stages of the conversations and the boundaries of cohesive chains. The dialogues, as instances of a scheduling genre, proceed in clearly defined stages. I show how cohesive chains are related to stages in the dialogue. The second research question concerns measures of cohesive harmony in speech. The dialogues, although perfectly functional, seem to contain very low cohesive harmony. I suggest that different measures of cohesive harmony are necessary for different genres.