RICK IEDEMA is Associate Professor, teaching in the Graduate Management Program at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is also Deputy Director at the Centre for Clinical Governance Research, where he works with a team of researchers on discourse-analytical and visual-ethnographic investigations into emerging kinds of hospital organization and clinicians' enactments of clinical practices. His books include Discourses of Post-Bureaucratic Organization (2003) and Identity Trouble (co-edited with Carmen Caldas Coultha

'This thought-provoking book is a sophisticated compilation of research and provides excellent examples of ethnographic designs. It would be ideal as a text in academic programmes for professionals to develop the awareness of health care as a profoundly interdisciplinary activity.' - Lela M. Holden, Journal of Advanced Nursing

• Foreword Notes on Contributors Tables and Figures Communicating Hospital Work; R.Iedema Institutional and Professional Orders of Ethics in the Discourse Practices of Research Recruitment in Oncology; E.Barton The Communicative Functions of the Hospital Medical Chart; P.Hobbs Governing the Operating Room List; R.Riley & E.Manias Dialogues for Negotiating Priorities in Unplanned Emergency Surgery Queues; M.Lum & A.Fitzgerald Personality Disorder in UK Mental Health Care: Language, Legitimation and the Psychodynamics of Organised Surveillance; B.J.Brown & P.Crawford Re-negotiating Disjunctions in Inter-organisationally Provided Care; H.Kerosuo Anaesthetic Talk in Surgical Encounters; C.Pope, M.Mort, D.Goodwin & A.Smith Corridor Conversations: Clinical Communication in Casual Spaces; D.Long, R.Iedema & B.B.Lee The Role of Signs and Representations in the Organisation of Medical Work: X-rays in Medical Problem Solving; P.Maseide Why Don't Doctors Engage with the System?; C.Jorm, J.Travaglia& R.Iedema Nursing Through Time and Space: Some Challenges to the Construct of Community of Practice; S.Candlin & C.N.Candlin