In this work, Deirdre Boden contributes to the study of business firms and to the analysis of organizations in general. Like all other organizations, business firms are run primarily through talk - who talks to whom, at what point, how, and in what way determines how the organization works, on a day-to-day level as well as over time. Boden develops a critique of existing organizational theory and is able to point a way towards future research and thinking in the area. The book includes numerous illustrations of the significance of conversation analysis as a means of studying organizational structures. It provides a contribution to social theory, as well as to the more specific field of organizational study. Talk, Boden shows, links the microsettings of interaction with large-scale properties of organizational settings. This book should be of interest to students and professionals in sociology, organizational behaviour, discourse studies, ethnomethodology and anthropology.