Teamwork and Team Talk: Decision-Making Across the Boundaries in Health and Social Care

Decision-making in institutional and professional settings has remained an area of curiosity for social science and communication researchers. This first-of-its-kind edited volume demonstrates how team talk and teamwork are paramount to decision-making in workplaces. 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 legitimizes 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 book argues that team-based decision-making can be studied optimally at the interactional level within an institutional backdrop. The contributors of Teamwork and Team Talk select particular sites of teamwork and team talk and adopt different analytical frameworks within the qualitative research paradigm to explore specific talk–work configurations. Like an orchestra, the division of interactional labour seems distributed and coordinated along the lines of role-responsibilities. Bringing together empirically grounded studies focusing on how team talk and teamwork are paramount for problem formulation, generation of options, assessment of solutions and more, the team of global contributors brings to light the tensions, benefits, and complexities inherent to these processes.