Whether scheduled or unscheduled; face to face, virtual, or a hybrid of the two; formal or informal, meetings take many forms and are used for a variety of purposes and reasons (Bargiela-Chiappini, 2009; Boden, 1994; Castor, 2005; Georgakpoulou, 2005; Holmes & Marra, 2005; Koester, 2010; Mumby, 2007). In general, meetings are essential business events that happen in most workplaces and organizations; they can be analyzed at different levels across disciplines including business administration and management, finance and economics, organization studies, political science, psychology, sociology, linguistics, and anthropology. Although the majority of researchers from these disciplines acknowledge the importance of having meetings, there has been little examination of meetings as social events, built to construct the social order and disorder among actors in the social systems of such organizations.
Within the theoretical framework in which meetings are seen as social events, the 1986 account of social anthropologist Schwartzman , considered by some to be defining, that identified meetings as the homeostasis of organizations looms large among organizational scholars and in the literature. Schwartzman describes this theoretical framework by encouraging researchers to investigate the significance of understanding organizational meetings as “both the construction of order and disorder in social systems, and so they must be conceptualized as occasions with both conservative and transformative capacities” (1986, p. 36). In this sense, she argues that meetings in organizations can be fruitfully observed within such a theory of organizational context, namely a theory of ethnographic analysis. Schwartzman explains:
We need to produce field studies that examine what naturally occurring meetings do for individuals in specific organizations, how individuals use meetings in their day-to-day organizational life, and how meetings affect individuals in specific settings. […] [W]e should also begin to examine relationships between individuals and meetings, and to compare the structure and uses of meetings across organizations and cross-culturally. (1986, p. 249)
This original analysis evolved into her groundbreaking ethnographic description of organizational meetings in 1989. Schwartzman once more provides a comprehensive ethnographic investigation of meetings, this time in a mental health center, arguing that scholars need to develop two sets of questions vis-à-vis meetings as social gatherings in different organizations. The first set involves examining what a meeting means and how it is made by participants, while the second focuses on exploring why meetings exist and are maintained in an organizational and cultural setting.
A handful of ensuing studies adopt her ideas highlighting the valuable role of meeting events in different kinds of workplaces and organizations. Van Vree (1999), for instance, points out how meetings are classic Western organizational behavior, mostly shaped by politics and professional networks. In Meetings, Manners and Civilization , Van Vree discusses meeting rules in workplaces and the social histories of meeting development in Western civilization, claiming that meetings are successful negotiation occasions through which participants are confronted with violence and changes in power balances and codes of emotions. Van Vree reports on the history of European meetings from the early Middle Ages to the present time, explaining how farmers would gather to talk about war and plan military goals and actions. In those meetings, farmers settled on different war plans and voted for war decisions using their feet. Farmers who did not attend the meetings faced a specific punishment. With the emergence of civilized monarchies and nations, meetings were held by kings and governments under strict attendance, comportment, and planning rules. During the Middle Ages, meetings had developed as a joint event of participants for decision making across all of Europe, starting with the Netherlands .
Subsequent studies of meetings reflect a transitional research effort of looking at the event of meeting as a crucial multiparty interaction across disciplines. Researchers have also categorized meetings differently, so that different researchers may speak of a professional meeting, an administrative meeting, a workplace or work-related meeting, an organizational meeting, an institutional meeting, or a business meeting. In the field of sociology and organizational studies, Boden (1994) has proposed an extensive description, similar to Schwartzman’s (1986, 1989), of the language and agency of organizational meetings , highlighting the substantial role of a meeting in bringing together the organization as a whole; that role entails “[t]he interaction order of management,” “ritual affairs,” “tribal gatherings,” and “the proper arena of organizational activity” (1994, p. 81). To Boden , meetings are ritualized organizational affairs involving social ag ents in action who gather to talk in patterned discussions to achieve membership s and relationships.
From a professional/organizational workplace view of the meeting, the most recognized investigation is the longitudinal sociolinguistic study of the Wellington Language in the Workplace (LWP) group by Holmes and her colleagues. Starting with a study lasting from 1996 to 2008, the LWP group has observed 450 participants in 16 different workplaces in Wellington, New Zealand . The group explores several language behaviors of what builds an effective work communication and what leads to work miscommunication among New Zealanders and other ethnicities at work. The organizational meeting is one such language behavior. Holmes identifies meetings as the large extensive setting of workplace discourse, claiming that New Zealand workers follow different openings and closings for formal meetings than do other cultural groups in Wellington. In addition to that, the L WP group finds organizational meetings to be an important site for building solidarity relations and professional identities of workers. Other studies have found similar results to the LWP group’s project (Angouri & Marra, 2011; Holmes & Stubbe, 2003; Koester, 2006; Vine, 2004; Yamada, 1992).
Coming from the business meeting perspe ctive, Poncini (2004) looks at professional Italians communicating in multicultural business meetings and makes a number of significant accounts of staff members’ discursive strategies within meetings and with multicultural parties. In her study, Italian staff members use English as the lingua franca of meetings and also produce distinctive terms and pronouns signifying their membership in the group in the meetings. Italian staff members with more power regard business meetings as cooperative settings to control power and build a common ground with the less powered. Poncini further adds that multicultural parties in business meetings evaluate their business language and tasks so as to foster a positive ambiance among all staff members and facilitate participation.
In the context of workplace meetings , Mullany (2007) has documented the speech acts and small talk of British male and female manager s and staff members during meetings in a retail and a manufacturing company. One fundamental finding of her ethnographic investigation of the two companies is that manager s and staff members create their own meeting community of practice, constructing various verbal and nonverbal behaviors of stereotypically gendered styles. The communities of practice in both companies enable manager s to mitigate power and use humor in addition to establishing workplace social relation ships, Mullany (2007) claims.
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