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.

This study compares emoticon usage in English with thetext-based Japanese version, kaomoji ("face-marks"). We analyze a corpus of CMD drawn from English andJapanese sources at the micro-level using an approach modeled on Conversation Analysis. Japanese kaomoji were chosen because they are an understudied phenomenon in the CMD research and because they vary quite dramatically from English emoticons, in both their construction and in their variety (Katsuno & Yano, 2002; Nishimura, 2003). Overall, we found that emoticons and kaomoji serve primarily as punctuating devices within text-based conversations. As such, they clarify the structure of messages, generally by appearing at the close of phrases, sentences, or messages.

We do so by investigating one significant activity within an organizational strategy making process, namely strategy meetings. Here, members of the upper management group create concrete drafts for the actual strategy document, and we focus on a specific action sequence where strategy actors propose changes to the strategy document. Specifically, we investigate how the participants subsequently deal with the proposal, how such interaction work facilitates the accomplishment of strategy roles, and how the interaction impacts the decision making process. Our study shows that strategy actors, when making these decisions, not only orient to an acceptance or rejection of the proposal but also to questions of entitlement (Asmuß & Oshima, 2012). This orientation involves multimodal resources, ranging from talk (Samra-Fredericks, 2003) to embodied and material resources. The study thus provides an empirical demonstration of the processual aspects of strategy work and their impact on strategic outcomes; further, it highlights the importance for practice studies to acknowledge communicative (verbal, embodied and material) aspects in capturing the complexity of strategy work.

Coordinating talk and practical action: The case of hair salon service assessmentsPost-print version of: Oshima, S. and Streeck, J. (2015). Coordinating talk and practical action: The case of hair salon service assessments. Pragmatics and Society 6(4): 538-564.Abstract: This paper investigates how talk and practical action are coordinated during one type of activity involving professional communication: the service-assessment sequence in hair salons. During this activity, a practical inspection of the haircut must be coupled with sequentially produced verbal acts. Our analysis of four examples reveals that there is no fixed relationship between the organization of talk and practical action. Instead, people manipulate this relationship on a moment-by-moment basis, often coordinating the two into a single, integral package, or relying on one stream of action to achieve progress in the other. These findings imply that some multimodal activities that are brought into alignment may have their own, separate and independent procedural logic and sequencing patterns and that these can be brought into play to create or deal with constraints in each other.