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This study uncovers the benefits of conflict through examining the functions, intergroup relationships, and symbolic significance of negotiation. Drawing from survey and ethnographic data in two teacher‐school board negotiations, the study reveals that bargaining serves a communication function of signaling potential problems, clarifying misunderstandings, and exchanging information. These functions surface indirectly through interaction patterns and subtle cues implicit in arguments, proposal exchanges, and examples. The productive nature of conflict in negotiation also hinges on developing ties among and between teams, constituents, and publics.

This study examines procedural messages and group work habits of 20 three-person groups, 10 who preferred a tightly-structured work climate and 10 who preferred a free-associative work routine. The groups interacted for 15 minutes on a party-planning task and then prepared a written report. Group talk was coded into nine categories and analyzed with a lag-sequential procedure. Results of the study reveal that tightly structured groups followed procedural messages with abstract headings that organized group talk, while free-associative groups followed procedural statements with specific details on a content-related issue. Moreover, group members elaborated upon procedural issues, particularly at lag 1 occurrences, and embellished digressions for the entire 25 lags. These findings suggest that practitioners who aim to help groups improve their work habits should focus upon the sequences of talk in addition to the inputs or outcomes of a group.

Navigating organizational workspace is often plagued with tensions that emerge from the interplay of intended designs with organizational activities and lived experiences. These tensions are evident in research findings, such as inconsistencies in the ways that employees react to new workplace designs. They call on scholars to rethink organizational space, not as a concrete, static, or ready-made 'thing', but as a set of ongoing performances that enact particular practices, clashes among opposites, and organizational tensions. Based on research in a Nordic company, this study reveals how tensions and responses to them in an activity-based office generate creative alternatives that enhance participation and navigate passages between order and disorder. Contrary to the presumption that tensions need to be resolved, this study suggests that embracing them through managing the fluidity and flux of space gives rise to adaptability. Thus, in orchestrating workspace changes, it calls on organizational members to attend to mobility, constellations of objects and materiality, and temporal boundaries in navigating space rather than focusing on fixtures and designs.

Organizational discourse analysis, as an area of research, has grown in the past decade. Most scholars posit that language, regardless of the discursive form, is critical to the very nature of an organization. This article contends that discourse is more than an artifact or a reflection of an organization; rather it forms the foundation for organizing and for developing the notion oforganization as an entity. The articles in this volume present different perspectives on the role of text and agency in contributing to the constitution of organizations. Although the concept of text has different meanings in these articles, it refers, in general, to the medium of communication, collection of interactions, and assemblages of oral and written forms. Whether influenced by interaction analysis, structuration theory, text/conversation analysis or textual agency, these essays demonstrate how textuality in all its various forms participates in the production and reproduction of organizational life.