Premeeting Talk: An Organizationally Crucial Form of Talk

Abstract

In this article, we analyze the premeeting talk that occurred in 6 meetings of a nutrition company's weekly staff meetings. We begin by describing the business organization, the specific meeting, and the study's discourse and ethnographic materials. Then we introduce small talk, the theoretical frame that initially shaped our interest in premeeting talk, showing that premeeting talk is not merely a site for small talk. Premeeting talk includes work talk, meeting preparatory talk, and shop talk. For each, we illustrate what the talk type looks like and highlight the organizational function it served. In the article's next section, we examine premeeting talk through a second lens-talk as institutional identity work, focusing on the group-level identity of Nutrition Corporation as a mainstream American business committed to health and fitness. We show how the company's premeeting talk reflected and constructed this partially contradictory identity. In the conclusion of the article, we consider implications of the case study for organizational scholars' studies of culture, for distinguishing institutional and ordinary kinds of talk, and for language and social interaction research that attends to the visible behaviors and material surround.