Using conversation analysis for organisational research: a case study of leadership-in-action

Abstract

ABSTRACTThere is a growing interest in Conversation Analysis (CA) and what it has to offer to the field of business communication and organisational studies. However, CA’s fine-grained analyses of transcripts of naturally-occurring talk and its basic assumptions that eschew traditional research methods such as surveys, interviews, and quantitative analyses of large amounts of data often mean that it is misunderstood and the potential benefits of CA to organisational scholars are often overlooked. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate both CA’s ontological and epistemological assumptions and to provide a case study that showcases CA in action. More specifically, this paper illustrates how CA can make visible, and thus analysable, the doing of leadership as in situ social practice. The paper closes by indicating what CA can add to both scholarly knowledge of leadership and to leadership training.