This book consists of nine chapters analyzing various genres of business discourse, and an introduction written by the editors. All of the chapters in the book would be strengthened by more rigorous data analysis procedures, whether quantitative or qualitative. Nevertheless, there is much of value in the book, parts of which will be of use to a wide range of potential audiences. Okamura interviewed office workers in international businesses about the use of address terms in the workplace, both in English and in their mother tongue, comparing Japanese with Swedish, British, Canadian, American, and Dutch speakers. Interviewees' accommodation to the cultural norms of the group differed according to the power of the speaker: Higher-status employees were less likely to adopt local norms over their own country's addressing conventions. While Okamura acknowledges that his sample size is small, and that transcriptions of actual interactions would be a stronger data source than the interviews he relied on, his findings are interesting and potentially useful for courses on intercultural communication, business communication, or the sociology of language.

Frade's chapter deals with pedagogical issues around international business contracts. While in today's global economy English is the language of international business contracts, people from non-English-speaking countries have to understand contracts that are not only written in English but are also based on the legal systems of English-speaking countries. This leaves those from non-English-speaking countries at a disadvantage because they are not familiar with the common law approach to contracts. Frade proposes creating “globalized model forms of contracts” to facilitate the creation of contracts comprehensible to all parties, and teaching courses in how to understand the “genre” of English-language contracts based on common law.

Sode uses a brief excerpt from an actual meeting to illustrate how people respond to proposals. Sode's central observation is useful and important. She discovers that in business meetings supposedly convened for the purpose of making decisions, participants rarely respond directly to suggestions or proposals for solutions made in the meeting. Instead, participants tend to produce a “string of suggestions.” The participants are apparently orienting not just to the sequential turn-by-turn production of the talk but to the overall context of the interaction (the goals of the meeting and organizational goals).

Bhatia discusses the apparent overlap in genres of texts studied in the related disciplines of business and law. In business, cases are created to give students practice in applying knowledge and skills to “real-life” problems, while law cases are legal documents describing the reasoning used to reach a given legal decision. Students may provide inadequate analyses for their class assignments if they confuse the expectations of the business genre with the law genre. For researchers in applied genre analysis, Bhatia is showing us that a case is not always a case; genre researchers must be alert when comparing, for example, cases, business reports, or letters of complaint across disciplines, industries, or departments within organizations. Bhatia proposes an interdisciplinary perspective on business genres to facilitate research by taking account of differences between genres in different fields and subfields. He recommends going beyond textual approaches to the study of genres to include ethnographic, socio-cognitive, and socio-critical perspectives.

In the spirit of Bhatia's recommendations, I would recommend that the researchers in this volume would in many cases benefit from the approaches to theorizing, data collection, and data analysis provided by a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, in particular sociology (including sophisticated statistical techniques), psychology, ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, workplace studies, and Critical Discourse Analysis. While the studies in this volume are admirable for their refusal to stay narrow – they consistently try to draw connections and explore relationships between things not always studied together (e.g., different levels of context, different cultures or nationality, native vs. non-native speakers of a language, different types or genres of texts, the relationship between spoken and written discourse, and the documents that are produced and the people who produce and use those documents) – this breadth is achieved at the cost of theoretical consistency, data adequacy, and methodological rigor.