Mittuniversitetet

The aims of this thesis were to describe the verbal interaction in workplace meetings and to relate them to the order of gender. The material consists of five workplace meetings with both female and male participants and was transcribed using a system developed for the purposes of the study. Both the videotapes and transcripts were used in the analyses. Three main studies were carried out. The first study aimed at describing the structuring of the verbal interaction during the meetings, especially in comparison with ordinary conversation. The second study tested the hypothesis that the men in the meetings would dominate the verbal interaction. The third study aimed at describing narratives in the material, especially two narratives told by a male participant in one of the meetings. The methods used in the studies combined qualitative analysis of small sections of talk with quantitative analysis of variables, coded in the material as a whole. The first study showed many similarities between the five meetings in the way interaction was structured, which indicated the possibility that the workplace meeting represents an activity type of its own. One main result was that although the meetings were managed with almost no formal procedures, the verbal interaction was still very structured, and handled with practices belonging to ordinary conversation used in an activity-specific way. The quantitative analysis showed no great differences between the men and the women and the hypothesis was not clearly verified. Two variables indicated that the men dominated the interaction and one variable indicated that the women dominated the interaction, but on the whole the similarities between the men and the women were greater than the differences. The qualitative analysis of the narratives showed how the narratives in the meetings were an interactional achievement and how their meaning was negotiated in the interaction. The analyses also showed how the meaning of the narratives was influenced by normative conceptions about masculinity and thus could be a means of doing gender.