Much like in everyday life, politeness is key to the smooth running of relationships and interactions. Professional contexts, however, tend to be characterised by a plethora of behaviours that may be specific to that context. They include ‘polite’ behaviours, ‘impolite’ behaviours and behaviours that arguably fall somewhere between – or outside – such concepts. The twelve chapters making up this edited collection explore these behaviours in a range of communication contexts representative of business, medical, legal and security settings. Between them, the contributions will help readers to theorize about – and in some cases operationalize (im)politeness and related behaviours for – these real-world settings. The authors take a broad, yet theoretically underpinned, definition of politeness and use it to help explain, analyse and inform professional interactions. They demonstrate the importance of understanding how interactions are negotiated and managed in professional settings. The edited collection has something to offer, therefore, to academics, professionals and practitioners alike.

Nicolas Ruytenbeek, Ghent University, on Linguist List 32.2056 (15 June 2021).:
Politeness in Professional Contexts stands out as a sample of pioneering research at the interface of politeness research and business communication. It contains corpus-based research, ethnographic studies, and a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses also taking into account participant’s impressions. As a result, it achieves a rich picture of facework and rapport management in different professional contexts. This is a completely coherent volume that provides new insights into face work strategies and (im)politeness-related issues in a variety of professional
settings. There is also a clear continuity between this volume and recent publications in the Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, such as Freytag (2019) devoted to business communication, and Ogiermann & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich’s (2019) edited volume that gives a central place to participants’ conceptions and co-construction of (im)politeness. Finally, this volume invites follow-up research on the role played by interpersonal variables in facework strategies, and on the intercultural dimension of professional interactions. I have no doubt that it will appeal to politeness scholars, of course, but also to researchers in business communication and (intercultural) pragmatics.