Conference calls, the business meetings of the 21st century: a multi-layered approach to an emerging genre

Abstract

This paper focuses on conference calls (CCs) - the new and most prevalent meeting format in corporate America. Its goal is to provide a highlevel, descriptive account of CCs and to contrast them with traditional business meetings. It argues that CCs constitute a sub-genre in their own right. A blended  genre in which different modes of communication - telephone and computer mediated - are involved, none of them face to face. For its multi-layered approach, the analysis of CCs that make up the corpus draws on tenets from (inter) cultural studies, genre and English for Specific Purposes studies, pragmatics, and conversational analysis and relies on Flowerdew’s (2005) suggestion to use complementary linguistic and ethnographic approaches to the study of genre.