Overview

This book presents a comprehensive examination of how leadership and collaboration are discursively performed in professional communication, using real-world data from a UK public sector IT team. Taking an auto-ethnographic approach to workplace talk, the author examines the language involved in the performance of different team-based professional roles, examining how professional identity and relationships are indexed through casual face-to-face talk in an office environment. This investigation of how a group of people come together in an effort to achieve shared workplace goals relates to key debates in the area of professional communication, putting forward new theoretical and methodological frameworks for understanding and analysing how person-orientated aspects of professional communication shape discourses of work. This book appeals to a wide and interdisciplinary audience, including advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, academics and researchers specialising in applied linguistics broadly, and professional communication in particular, as well as consultants and practitioners working across a wide range of professional sectors.