Decision-making in institutional and professional settings has remained an area of curiosity for social science and communication researchers. This first-of-its-kind edited volume demonstrates how team talk and teamwork are paramount to decision-making in workplaces. In contemporary Western societies, the conditions of decision-making are rapidly changing with the foregrounding of division of professional labour and distributed expertise against the backdrop of a client-centred ideology that legitimizes shared decision-making. Increasingly, in health and social care settings, key decisions concerning clients are arrived at in team meetings, which have consequences both for the decisional processes and outcomes. This book argues that team-based decision-making can be studied optimally at the interactional level within an institutional backdrop. The contributors of Teamwork and Team Talk select particular sites of teamwork and team talk and adopt different analytical frameworks within the qualitative research paradigm to explore specific talk–work configurations. Like an orchestra, the division of interactional labour seems distributed and coordinated along the lines of role-responsibilities. Bringing together empirically grounded studies focusing on how team talk and teamwork are paramount for problem formulation, generation of options, assessment of solutions and more, the team of global contributors brings to light the tensions, benefits, and complexities inherent to these processes.

Shortlisted for the 2022 BAAL Book Prize Shortlisted for the American Association of Applied Linguistics 2024 Book Prize Linguistic Penalties and the Job Interview looks at a relatively untapped area of language and social life: the role of language and interaction in constructing the job interview and how this role produces disadvantage in the linguistically diverse communities of the western world. It relates the specific activity of the job interview to the wider field of institutional discourse and discusses relevant social theories in the light of the data. The volume considers job interviews as key ‘gatekeeping’ encounters within the workplace from two main perspectives: interviews as extreme examples of social evaluation, showing how inferential processes of moment to moment talk in interaction can lead to the ‘small tragedies’ of everyday life; and interviews as a window into social inequality more generally. It illustrates interactional sociolinguistic and linguistic ethnography methodology through the job interview and workplace data and argues for the importance of practical relevance – applying sociolinguistic analysis to educational interventions.

Interpreter-Mediated Healthcare Communication engages conceptually and empirically with the ongoing debate concerning the ‘influence’ occasioned by the participation of an interpreter – whether professionally trained or as a lay family member – in healthcare delivery. Healthcare delivery, especially in the primary care sector, is increasingly becoming multicultural and multilingual in character. This global reality manifests itself as a communicative challenge in interpreter-mediated healthcare consultations, involving professional as well as family members in the role of interpreters. In the context of this book (previously published as a special issue of the journal Communication & Medicine), interpreter-mediated healthcare consultations are seen simultaneously as multilingual and multiparty interactions, as well as being dyadic and triadic communication. The introductory editorial sets the scene by foregrounding the core notion of ‘communicative vulnerability’ of all participants – the care recipient, the healthcare provider and the interpreter – in relation to the emergent interactional subtleties at the spheres of participation and interaction. In addition to the ‘brought along’ communicative vulnerability of the participants, the interactional trajectory itself, iteratively, contributes to such vulnerability at the contingent level. Especially, the interpreter routinely shifts between ‘just being a linguistic/literal medium/conduit’ to ‘strategically being a communicative mediator/broker’, potentially influencing the processes and outcomes of a given healthcare encounter. The contributors to the volume, representing different parts of the world (Australia, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, UK and USA), address, in different ways, the complexities surrounding the concepts of ‘participation’, ‘mediation’ and ‘shifts in roles/frames/footings’ and their interactional manifestation/consequence. As the empirical studies illustrate, the interpreters – professional or otherwise – position themselves actively in the interaction as their roles and participation formats become situationally and culturally embedded, albeit in varying degrees in different phases of the consultation. The contributions engage along a variety of axes as far as the data settings are concerned – professional vs lay interpreters, primary vs. tertiary healthcare setting and low-stake vs. high-stake encounters. The issues raised in the book – albeit dealing mainly within the confines of the western healthcare landscape – point in the direction of how ‘communicative vulnerability’ may be heightened in relation to the currently dominant paradigms of patient-centredness, patient autonomy and shared decision making.

Decision-making in institutional and professional settings has remained an area of curiosity for social science and communication researchers. This first-of-its-kind edited volume demonstrates how team talk and teamwork are paramount to decision-making in workplaces. In contemporary Western societies, the conditions of decision-making are rapidly changing with the foregrounding of division of professional labour and distributed expertise against the backdrop of a client-centred ideology that legitimizes shared decision-making. Increasingly, in health and social care settings, key decisions concerning clients are arrived at in team meetings, which have consequences both for the decisional processes and outcomes. This book argues that team-based decision-making can be studied optimally at the interactional level within an institutional backdrop. The contributors of Teamwork and Team Talk select particular sites of teamwork and team talk and adopt different analytical frameworks within the qualitative research paradigm to explore specific talk–work configurations. Like an orchestra, the division of interactional labour seems distributed and coordinated along the lines of role-responsibilities. Bringing together empirically grounded studies focusing on how team talk and teamwork are paramount for problem formulation, generation of options, assessment of solutions and more, the team of global contributors brings to light the tensions, benefits, and complexities inherent to these processes.

Shortlisted for the 2022 BAAL Book Prize Shortlisted for the American Association of Applied Linguistics 2024 Book Prize Linguistic Penalties and the Job Interview looks at a relatively untapped area of language and social life: the role of language and interaction in constructing the job interview and how this role produces disadvantage in the linguistically diverse communities of the western world. It relates the specific activity of the job interview to the wider field of institutional discourse and discusses relevant social theories in the light of the data. The volume considers job interviews as key ‘gatekeeping’ encounters within the workplace from two main perspectives: interviews as extreme examples of social evaluation, showing how inferential processes of moment to moment talk in interaction can lead to the ‘small tragedies’ of everyday life; and interviews as a window into social inequality more generally. It illustrates interactional sociolinguistic and linguistic ethnography methodology through the job interview and workplace data and argues for the importance of practical relevance – applying sociolinguistic analysis to educational interventions.

Interpreter-Mediated Healthcare Communication engages conceptually and empirically with the ongoing debate concerning the ‘influence’ occasioned by the participation of an interpreter – whether professionally trained or as a lay family member – in healthcare delivery. Healthcare delivery, especially in the primary care sector, is increasingly becoming multicultural and multilingual in character. This global reality manifests itself as a communicative challenge in interpreter-mediated healthcare consultations, involving professional as well as family members in the role of interpreters. In the context of this book (previously published as a special issue of the journal Communication & Medicine), interpreter-mediated healthcare consultations are seen simultaneously as multilingual and multiparty interactions, as well as being dyadic and triadic communication. The introductory editorial sets the scene by foregrounding the core notion of ‘communicative vulnerability’ of all participants – the care recipient, the healthcare provider and the interpreter – in relation to the emergent interactional subtleties at the spheres of participation and interaction. In addition to the ‘brought along’ communicative vulnerability of the participants, the interactional trajectory itself, iteratively, contributes to such vulnerability at the contingent level. Especially, the interpreter routinely shifts between ‘just being a linguistic/literal medium/conduit’ to ‘strategically being a communicative mediator/broker’, potentially influencing the processes and outcomes of a given healthcare encounter. The contributors to the volume, representing different parts of the world (Australia, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, UK and USA), address, in different ways, the complexities surrounding the concepts of ‘participation’, ‘mediation’ and ‘shifts in roles/frames/footings’ and their interactional manifestation/consequence. As the empirical studies illustrate, the interpreters – professional or otherwise – position themselves actively in the interaction as their roles and participation formats become situationally and culturally embedded, albeit in varying degrees in different phases of the consultation. The contributions engage along a variety of axes as far as the data settings are concerned – professional vs lay interpreters, primary vs. tertiary healthcare setting and low-stake vs. high-stake encounters. The issues raised in the book – albeit dealing mainly within the confines of the western healthcare landscape – point in the direction of how ‘communicative vulnerability’ may be heightened in relation to the currently dominant paradigms of patient-centredness, patient autonomy and shared decision making.