Svennevig2012b

Svennevig2012b
BibType	ARTICLE
Key	Svennevig2012b
Author(s)	Jan Svennevig
Title	The agenda as resource for topic introduction in workplace meetings
Editor(s)
Tag(s)	EMCA, Workplace studies, Meeting talk, agenda, chair, Conversation Analysis, document, gesture, meetings, multimodality, topic introduction
Publisher
Year	2012
Language
City
Month
Journal	Discourse Studies
Volume	14
Number	1
Pages	53–66
URL	Link
DOI	10.1177/1461445611427204
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

Meetings differ from ordinary conversation in that they have an agenda that specifies in advance the topics to be addressed during the meeting. However, the introduction of these topics needs to be locally accomplished and recognized by the participants as agenda items. This article presents some characteristic practices used for introducing agenda-based topics. It shows that they rely on the known-in-advance status of the items, and are presented by the chair as unilateral announcements. They exploit and invoke the written agenda in several ways. The announcements are often short phrasal constructions, just citing the written title of the agenda point. Furthermore, a gaze down at the written document is used as a public display that the introduction is related to the agenda. In contrast to this practice of introducing agenda items, topics not specified by the agenda are introduced by suggestions and questions that present the introduction as contingent on acceptance by the co-participants. The analysis sheds light on the ways in which institutional talk-in-interaction is permeated by the formulations and logic of written documents.

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