Bøker av Per Linell

Decision-making in institutional/professional settings has remained an established theme for social science and communication researchers. In contemporary western societies, the conditions of decision making are rapidly changing with the foregrounding of division of professional labour and distributed expertise against the backdrop of a client-centred ideology that legitimises shared decision-making. Increasingly, in health and social care settings, key decisions concerning clients are arrived at in team meetings, which have consequences both for the decisional processes and outcomes. This edited volume for the first time brings together a number of empirically grounded studies focusing on how team talk is functional to decision-making (in terms of problem formulation, generation of options, assessment of solutions etc.), with tensions, at the interactional level, between institutional and professional ways of categorising people, events and evidence.

There is an extensive 'written language bias' in traditional and present day linguists and other language sciences. In this book, this point is argued with rich and convincing evidence from virtual all fields of linguistics.

Dr Linell attacks the claim that the transformational models of language have some psychological validity and represent our mental organisation of linguistic knowledge.

An introduction to understanding focus groups as analytical means exploring socially shared knowledge. This book examines how to analyse interaction and ideas expressed in focus groups. It considers different kinds of interdependencies among participants who hold diverse positions. It explores circulations of ideas and contents in focus groups.

Per Linell took his degree in linguistics and is currently professor of language and culture, with a specialisation on communication and spoken interaction, at the University of Linkoeping, Sweden. He has been instrumental in building up an internationally renowned interdisciplinary graduate school in communication studies in Linkoeping. He has worked for many years on developing a dialogical alternative to mainstream theories in linguistics, psychology and social sciences. His production comprises more than 100 articles on dialogue, talkininteraction and institutional discourse. His more recent books include Approaching Dialogue (1998), The Written Language Bias in Linguistics (2005) and Dialogue in Focus Groups (2007, with I. Markova, M. Grossen and A. Salazar Orvig).