A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Company Meetings

The present study analyzes the company meeting from the perspective of power within the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), trying to find out how the Chair exerts power and how power is shifted between the Chair and the meeting participants.Many a study on institutional discourses views power as an attribute associated with institutional status. This paper shows, however, that power is determined not only by the institutional status, but also by the involvement of the participants who will contest power and compete for the speakers' role in the verbal interaction at a meeting. To understand how institutional conventions and power relationships orient participants in their verbal exchanges in effective meetings, the present paper first analyzes the interactional structure of the company meeting and other linguistic features such as turn-taking and topic management, and then provides attempted explanations by taking account of context.Our research yields the following findings: first, the discourse structure of the meeting is largely decided by the Chair; second, topic control and turn taking are the major machinery manipulated by the Chair to exert institutional control; third, the hierarchical relationship between the participants are shaped by the meeting talk; and finally, power is not possessed by any person or group permanently, but shifted around and struggled during the course of a meeting. Implications are discussed with regard to business practice and Business English teaching and learning.