This project aims to uncover some aspects of the interactional architecture of internal meetings in multinational companies. Preliminary areas of interest include the participants’ use of language resources (and code-switching) and material artifacts (e.g., handouts, presentation slides), as well as an exploration of the central practices from the perspective of the task at hand. A dataset of 10 hours of video recordings captured in one multinational company will be compiled, transcribed, and scrutinized by employing multimodal conversation analysis. The findings of the small-scale analysis will be presented in a scholarly journal article, but the project outcomes go beyond this in two ways. First, the infrastructure for doing video-based research will be prepared, including informed consent forms, data management, and transcription protocols. Second, an application for an international project under the Weave scheme will be prepared. Overall, these outcomes of this project will contribute to our understanding of interaction in meetings. Subsequently, the data and findings can be turned into training modules in the area of business communication.

project leader: František Tůma