Women Speaking Up: Getting and Using Turns in Workplace Meetings

by C. Ford

Overview

Countering popular myths of women's deficiencies in communicating in traditionally male professions, the author uses women's talk to illustrate the interactional skills required to contribute effectively to workplace meetings, and presents new insights on the organization of talk in meetings while celebrating women's clear competence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781403987228
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	04/01/2008
Series:	Communicating in Professions and Organizations
Edition description:	2008
Pages:	202
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

CECILIA E. FORD is Professor, College of Letters and Science, English Department and Women's Studies Program at University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. Her research focuses on language as an interactional phenomenon, drawing on conversation analysis as a framework for discovering the ways that humans construct, on a moment-by-moment basis, the social orders that make up our lives - including the provisional and emergent practices we call 'language'. Her research concentrates on turn taking and how humans collaborate and improvise in social interaction, using contingent practices including grammar, sound production, and physical orientations (gesture, gaze, body position).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Transcription Symbols Introduction: A Feminist Project Data and Analytic Practices Reflections on Participation Meeting Organization: Openings, Turn Transitions, and Participant Alliances Questions: Opening Participation, Displaying Expertise and Challenging Placing and Designing Disaffiliative Actions Speaking Up in Meetings: Summary and Conclusions References Index

Editorial Reviews

"Cecilia Ford's Women Speaking Up is a refreshing look at the linguistic competency of women in the workplace...In what could otherwise be a daunting array of research participants and transcripts, the book makes excellent use of organizational keys, typographical indicators, and line drawings to organize data and help the reader follow along. This is thoughtful, nuanced, sophisticated work that avoids prescriptive findings or reductive applications...we should applaud Ford's commitment to making the methods and theoretical contributions of conversation analysis so accessible and to thereby allow women and men from all academic disciplines to celebrate women's agency."

- Rebecca Wey, Gender and Language journal

From the Publisher