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.

Srikant Sarangi is Professor in Humanities and Medicine and Director of the Danish Institute of Humanities and Medicine/Health at Aalborg University, Denmark. Between 1993 and 2013, he was Professor in Language and Communication and Director of the Health Communication Research Centre at Cardiff University. Currently he is also Professor in Language and Communication at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim (Norway); Visiting Research Professor, Centre for the Humanities and Medicine, The University of Hong Kong; and Visiting Professor at University of Malay. In 2012, he was awarded the title of Academician by the Academy of Social Sciences, UK. His research interests include: institutional and professional discourse; quality of life and risk communication in genetic counselling, HIV/AIDS, telemedicine, general practice and palliative care; intercultural pragmatics; language and identity in public life; ethnicity, race and discrimination in multicultural societies. He is author and editor of twelve books, guest-editor of five journal special issues and has published nearly two hundred book chapters and journal articles in leading journals in discourse and communication. He is the editor of Text & Talk as well as the founding editor of Communication & Medicine and with (C. N. Candlin) of Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice. Per Linell is a sociolinguist and professor in the interdisciplinary graduate school of communication studies at Linkoping University, Sweden. He has published widely within the field of discourse studies, particularly on institutional discourse. His most recent books are Approaching Dialogue: Talk, interaction and contexts in dialogical perspectives (1998) and The Written Language Bias in Linguistics: Its nature, origins and transformations (2005).