Considers the ways in which work is changing in two very different sites; a gaming machine factory and a metropolitan teaching hospital. Explores the implications of these changes for research and discourse analysis. (Author/VWL)

Introduces this special issue of the journal and highlights the contents, which focus mainly on text and talk in the context of healthcare and medicine. (Author/VWL)

Comments on the methodological questions associated with applied linguistic field research, such as gaining access, data preparation, type of intervention, methods of data collection and analysis, and how to deal with requests for help and with the practitioners' expectation that discourse consultants will make recommendations for change. Focuses…

Comments on the changing dynamics in work practices. Argues that such changes are not new but have become more visible due to the increased access by outsiders, such as researchers and the media to the increase in litigation claims that exert additional pressure on practitioners. (Author/VWL)

Comments on the changed expectations of what it means to be a professional given the discursive and self-reflective turn in professional practice and the mistrust between the hard medical sciences and the soft social sciences. Discusses the necessary but difficult collaboration between observer and observed, researcher and researched, and the…

A study of collaboration and the ongoing negotiation of authority in police helicopter work focused on inflight communication in one helicopter during two weeks of operation. Data were drawn from audio and video recordings of internal and external communications obtained inflight and from observation and physiological indicators of stress and…

Presents issues regarding the practical relevance of applied linguistics and the relationship between researchers and the institutions and practitioners with whom they work. Suggests that applied linguistics needs to constitute its intellectual base within practical work outside the academy rather than applying theory to practice. (54 references)…

Working on the assumption that members of organizations create their own organizational reality by interpreting the behaviors and activities they see, the stories and myths about the organization that they hear, and pressures to conform to the norms and practices of the organization that they feel, a study examined a total of 58 stories collected…

Recent literature addressing workplace learning emphasizes the production in late modernity of worker subjectivity as "enterprising self" amid the discourses of flexible specialization in post-Fordist work environments. Extensive critique of these environments has lamented the management of workers' learning and its subversion to…

The human resource development (HRD) profession needs to continue to develop its core theories and to integrate new theories into the body of knowledge. Creating new knowledge is of essential importance to both HRD practitioners and researchers. As an emerging field, HRD is in the process of defining itself as a discipline. Currently, there are…