This special issue of Journal of Business Communication focuses on an area of major interest at the workplace, namely meetings. In specific, the special issue investigates how meetings as complex social events can be understood as an interactional joint achievement of all involved participants. Hence, the special issue focuses on researching social relations, emotions, identity construction, decision making, and the social organization of meeting talk. It does so by both investigating meetings in public and private organizations and studying traditional face-to-face meetings and virtual team meetings. The special issue explores these topics by approaching them from empirical studies of meetings based on transcripts of authentic interaction. This microanalytical approach contributes to understanding the interactive and dynamic nature of workplace interaction. Thereby, the different articles in this special issue shed light on questions of efficiency, leadership, and group dynamics in meetings.The current introduction presents some of the main characteristics of meetings as described in previous research and the main approaches to meeting interaction used in this issue. After a short overview of traditions that have dealt with meetings (first section), the qualitative, microanalytical approach adopted in the special issue is presented in more detail (second section). In the third section, the main characteristics of meeting talk as described in previous studies within this tradition are presented in detail. The introduction ends by shortly presenting the six contributions to this special issue on "meeting talk." PREVIOUS RESEARCH ON MEETINGSThe management literature on meetings focuses mainly on ways to make them more efficient (

Meetings are complex institutional events at which participants recurrently negotiate institutional roles, which are oriented to, renegotiated, and sometimes challenged. With a view to gaining further understanding of the ongoing negotiation of roles at meetings, this paper examines one specific recurring feature of meetings: the act of proposing future action. Based on microanalysis of video recordings of two-party strategy meetings, the study shows that participants orient to at least two aspects when making proposals: 1) the acceptance or rejection of the proposal; and 2) questions of entitlement: who is entitled to launch a proposal, and who is entitled to accept or reject it? The study argues that there is a close interrelation between questions of entitlement, aligning and affiliating moves, and the negotiation of institutional roles. The multimodal analysis also reveals the use of various embodied practices by participants for the local negotiation of entitlement and institutional roles.

Performance appraisal interviews play a crucial role in internal communication. Most of the research on performance appraisal interviews has focused on strategic aims and interview design, but less attention has been given to the way in which performance appraisal interviews actually take place. In this study, the focus will, therefore, be to investigate how one of the crucial and most delicate activities in performance appraisal interviews, namely, giving critical feedback, is conducted. The way critical feedback is given is predominantly through negative assessments. The results indicate that there is an orientation to critical feedback as a socially problematic action despite the institutional character of the talk. Moreover, it can be seen that the more the supervisor shows an orientation to negative assessments as being socially problematic, the more difficult it becomes for the employee to deal with negative assessments. The study ends by outlining various implications for the workplace.

The paper investigates the interactional work required in order to launch a complaint about non-present third parties in discussions between employees and their manager. The study shows how the complaint recipient (the manager) creates opportunities for the complainer (the employee) to complain and how the recipient and complainer collaboratively facilitate entry into complaining by means of building joint epistemic access and affective stance towards the complainable. Focusing on the institutional context of performance appraisal interviews, the study further indicates that the legitimation of complaining is collaboratively treated as a managerial task. We utilize English translations of Finnish and Danish data.

This paper shows how ambiguity arises across multiple strategizing activities through the presence of multiple strategic actors within and across different strategizing phases. During the authoring phase, the intentionality of the different management actor voices becomes detached from the meaning expressed in the strategy text, resulting in a decontextualized, monovocal strategy paper. In the translation phase, the study shows how the text still possesses an inherent multivocality making it impossible to talk about strategy text as an atemporal, neutral object. In the phase of interpreting the strategy, three main rhetorical positions are identified among the employees:acceptance, ambiguity and rejection, representing the multivocal interpretations of the employees interviewed. The study contributes to the ongoing discussion about the challenges and potentials of the multivocal, multicontextual nature of strategizing in organizations.