Managing Language

Book excerpt: The book attempts to answer the question: what do managers in multinational companies really do during meetings? Following fieldwork in three corporations in Britain and Italy, the picture that emerges is one that challenges the widespread understanding of meetings as boring, routine events in the life of an organisation. As the recordings analysed in the book show, organisational meanings and relations come into existence through verbal interaction; these are challenged and manipulated in a constant process of sense-making in search of coherence which engages managers in their daily work life. The pragmatics of pronominalisation, metaphors and discourse markers, as well as thematic development, reveal the dynamics of sense-making in both English and Italian. The 'native' perspective adopted in Part One of the book is complemented , in Part Two, by a contrastive study of the structural and pragmatic properties of meetings in the corporate and cultural contexts of the British and Italian multinationals, respectively. Finally, the intercultural dimension of corporate communication is vividly portrayed in the experience of managers of an Anglo-Italian joint venture examined in the concluding chapter.