The term ‘business meetings’ can provoke many reactions, some of them not very positive. This seems especially true for those who spend a considerable amount of their working lives talking, listening and not listening in meetings; and yet Boden's (1994: 8) assertion that talk, and especially talk in meetings, is ‘the lifeblood of organizations’ still seems valid, despite recent advances in electronic communication. Managers regularly have meetings with subordinates to review, check, delegate and plan tasks and duties. Colleagues regularly meet to solve or defer problems, and sometimes to create them. Representatives from different companies meet at all stages of the inter-organizational relationship, and face-to-face introductions and discussions are still widely seen as a requisite step in developing such a relationship. This book is an exploration of the language people use in business meetings, and how this language may relate to and constitute the immediate and wider contexts in which the meeting unfolds. In other words, it examines how people in commercial organizations communicate ‘in order to get their work done’, that is, ‘business discourse as social action in business contexts’ (Bargiela-Chiappini et al., 2007: 3).

As Bargiela-Chiappini et al.'s (ibid.) comprehensive survey of the field of business discourse shows, this is a growing, important and exciting area of interdisciplinary analysis. The contribution this book hopes to make is to show how a fully transcribed, ethnographically informed corpus of real business meetings can be described and interpreted using insights and methods from discourse analysis, not least in the inferential extraction of recurrent meeting practices and their realization through language.