Reviewed by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, University of Warwick

This volume is the third of nine handbooks intended to provide a comprehensive perspective on the field of applied linguistics. In the words of the series editors, the collection aims to ‘present the knowledge available in applied linguistics today firstly from an explicitly problem solving perspective and secondly, in a non-technical, easily comprehensible way’ (xiii). Structured in four parts and twenty-six chapters, the 626 pages of this volume contain the work not only of several distinguished contributors and some younger scholars, but they represent also the editors’ own understanding of what applied linguistics is about and what future may lie ahead for its practitioners.

In this respect, the choice of areas representing organizational and professional communication reflects the track record and the long-standing research interests of the editors, both internationally known for their work in professional communication. Three domains of practice, namely health and social care, the legal arena, and the workplace, are introduced by position papers in Part 2, authored, respectively, by Aaron Cicourel, Roger Shuy, and James Taylor. The latter is a scholar speaking from an organizational communication angle. Both Parts 3 and 4 include chapters illustrating empirical studies conducted in all three fields. Worth highlighting in Part 4 are two chapters on professional learning and two chapters on research-practitioner collaboration, which the reader with an interest in pedagogic and methodological issues will find especially interesting.

If the reader is looking for the rationale behind the ordering of chapters in this handbook, the introduction offers clarification: a substantive forty-two-page discussion of their understanding of an applied linguistic approach to professional and organizational practice. The choice of distributing chapters on all three domains of practice across both Parts 3 and 4 is intended to give the reader the opportunity to identify ‘discursive parallels’ between domains, cross-cutting ‘critical themes’ (e.g. expertise, evidence, relevant knowledge, and rationality), and the discursive devices associated with their realization. This requires a certain degree of effort on the part of the reader, in spite of the editors’ useful chapter synopses in their introduction.

It is quite clear, however, that the applied linguistics perspective that the editors envisage for professional communication, and partly realize in their handbook, can only be multidisciplinary. In their words, their perspective ‘not only builds on the cumulative insights gained from discourse based studies [  ], the sociology of professions and the sociology of work’ (45) but, also, for example, on organizational communication and organization studies. Similarly, research on the embodied nature of social interaction (hinted at as ‘multimodality’ in Ch. 14), and the contribution of materiality to professional practice, are not documented in this collection but should be included in future research on applied linguistics. Regrettably, the high cover price may put the volume beyond the means of most individuals.