Interruptive strategies in British and Italian management meetings

This paper reports the findings of research which examines the contrasting roles played by interruptive strategies in British and Italian management meetings. Much of the work on interruptions originates within conversation analysis (Bennett, 1981; Kennedy and Camden, 1983; Jefferson, 1973, 1984, 1986, 1993; Schegloff 1987; Roger et al., 1988, etc.) and has focussed on either gender or power or both (Zimmerman and West, 1975; West, 1979; West and Zimmerman, 1983; Dindia, 1987). Most of these studies involve dyadic conversation. Little research has been done on business discourse (Drummond, 1989), and relatively few studies have attempted cross-cultural and/or cross-linguistic comparisons (Murata, 1994; Makri-Tsilipakou, 1994). Defining what is to count as an interruption in sequences of natural language data involving speech overlap is a complex matter, especially if interruptions are seen as indicators of power. Our research attempts to define what we call interruptive strategies and their pragmatic significance in British and Italian management meetings, which are task-oriented and multiparty speech events. Power relationships are an important variable, and this paper examines the cultural and linguistic differences which the respective use of interruptive strategies by British and Italian managers reveals