This article analyzes how meeting participants account for their right to assign a work-related task to a colleague in meeting interaction. It focuses on accounts which appeal to benefactive effect, that is, the benefits of the proposed action to the operation of the organization. Such accounts are often formulated as general strategies or policies for action. They are shown to be related to the deontic rights of the participants in that subordinates engage in more extensive accounting practices than do managers. Accounts that evoke other interests than benefits to the organization are shown to be vulnerable to being questioned or rejected. The study thus contributes to understanding how benefactive stance is used for legitimizing requests for institutionally relevant actions.
This article addresses the issue of how team identity is constructed between two people during a series of regular meetings of a work group in Serbia. Using conversation analysis to investigate (multimodal) social actions, this study looks at the recurrent construction of an implicit team identity by focusing on management of speaking rights and co-construction of units, and displays of knowledge and accountability. With its longitudinal perspective, the article contributes to the existing body of research on teams in interaction in general, as it builds upon previous research on interactional parties and conjoined participation. The results are especially relevant for the investigations of teams in meetings, as they provide evidence of how formal features of interaction are recurrently employed to display institutionally relevant epistemics and accountability.
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