Introduction
Good to Talk?
Codifying `Communication¿
Knowledge, Authority and Standards
Talk as Enterprise
Communication and Culture Change at Work
Communication Factories
Inside the Call Centre
Schooling Spoken Discourse
Communication and the Pursuit of Happiness

`Good to Talk demonstrates powerfully why it is increasingly not so good to talk. Deborah Cameron details how talk is increasingly "stylized", codified, standardized, and the subject of surveillance. Just as Michel Foucault demonstrated in the case of sex in the Victorian era, Cameron shows that there is entirely too much talk about talk' - George Ritzer, University of Maryland

`This is what an academic book should be: cool, well informed, and entertaining; a thought-provoking and dismaying study of how our everyday sense of talk as a social pleasure is now under threat from the ideology of talk as therapeutic and occupational duty' - Simon Frith, University of Stirling

Deborah Cameron teaches at Oxford University, where she is Professor of Language and Communication. Her main research interests are in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and the study of gender and sexuality; her previous publications include Working with Spoken Discourse (2001) and Working with Written Discourse (with Ivan Panovic, 2014), Good to Talk? (2000),The Myth of Mars and Venus (2007), and Verbal Hygiene (1995/2012).