Good to Talk?

Deborah Cameron teaches at Oxford University, where she is Professor of Language and Communication. Her main research interests are in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and the study of gender and sexuality; her previous publications include Working with Spoken Discourse (2001) and Working with Written Discourse (with Ivan Panovic, 2014), Good to Talk? (2000),The Myth of Mars and Venus (2007), and Verbal Hygiene (1995/2012).

`This is one of those books - in my view the best kind of academic work - which takes a very specific phenomenon, and shows it to be the key issues of much larger significance.... I found this book entertaining, moving, inspiring, infomative, and intellectually stimulating. It jas altered my ideas about applied linguistics, and about what happens in my daily life′ - Applied Linguistics `Good to Talk demonstrates powerfully why it is increasingly not so good to talk. Deborah Cameron details how talk is increasingly "stylized", codified, standardized, and the subject of surveillance. Just as Michel Foucault demonstrated in the case of sex in the Victorian era, Cameron shows that there is entirely too much talk about talk′ - George Ritzer, University of Maryland`This is what an academic book should be: cool, well informed, and entertaining; a thought-provoking and dismaying study of how our everyday sense of talk as a social pleasure is now under threat from the ideology of talk as therapeutic and occupational duty′ - Simon Frith, University of Stirling′This wonderful work asks why so much contemporary energy is devoted to teaching people how to communicate properly - as if talking to one another were a technical accomplishment rather than an essential feature of human sociality. Cameron is an astute communication theorist (deceptively so, for she commits the sin of being readable) and when she writes about all-centre training it is hard not to weep′ Stephen ColemanUniversity of Leeds

• IntroductionGood to Talk?Codifying `Communication′Knowledge, Authority and StandardsTalk as EnterpriseCommunication and Culture Change at WorkCommunication FactoriesInside the Call CentreSchooling Spoken DiscourseCommunication and the Pursuit of Happiness