Doing meetings online: understanding variation in virtual workplace meetings

Abstract

This paper contributes to previous work on workplace registers by presenting an analysis of a corpus of virtual meetings. The Interactional Variation Online corpus is comprised of recordings of virtual meetings from four different organisations. This study describes how each organisation shares similar practices when engaging in virtual meetings and how variation emerges when each organisation is compared to the other three. Corpus results show how, to establish conclusions related to this register, it is necessary to consider the influence of variation across organisations, the chairing style of each meeting, the formality of each organisational culture and the level of participant engagement in each meeting.