Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-cphqk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-14T03:50:14.869Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

31 - There's Something about Meetings

Order and Disorder in the Study of Meetings

from Part V - Synthesis and Conclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2015

By
Helen B. Schwartzman
Edited by
Joseph A. Allen ,
Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock  and
Steven G. Rogelberg
Joseph A. Allen
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska, Omaha
Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock
Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
Steven G. Rogelberg
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Get access

Summary

Abstract

There's something about meetings that makes researchers and participants want to change them, control them, order them, and make them predictable. But there is also something about meetings that makes them resist these efforts at change, improvement, order, and predictability. In this chapter I explore the impact of this order-disorder dynamic on the study of meetings and suggest some reasons why investigators have been concerned with ordering meetings and continually troubled by the disorder that meetings may produce. This volume illustrates how our understanding of meetings in the workplace is both broadened and complicated when meetings are conceptualized as communicative events and when the focus is on examining “what happens before, during, and after meetings in the workplace” (see Chapter 1). This approach requires researchers to challenge the dominant urge to order meetings while at the same time emphasizing the importance of understanding the production and value of meeting disorder. I suggest that the order-disorder dynamic may be related to a series of “folk theories” about meetings, as well as the role of individuals in organizations, and I discuss the ways that individual chapters in this volume contest the folk theories that have been so prominent in guiding our research theories.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Meeting Science , pp. 735 - 746
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Atkinson, M. A., Cuff, E. C., & Lee, J. E. (1978). The recommencement of a meeting as a member's accomplishment. In Schenkein, J. (Ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction (pp. 133–153). New York, NY: Academic.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ballard, D. I., & Gomez, F. (2006). Time to meet: Meetings as sites of organizational memory. In Parker, J., Crawford, M., & Harris, P. (Eds.), Study of time XII: Time and memory (pp. 301–312). Boston, MA: Brill.Google Scholar
Bauman, R., & Sherzer, J. (1974). Explorations in the ethnography of speaking. London, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Boden, D. (1994). The business of talk: Organizations in action. Cambridge, UK: Polity.Google Scholar
Burrell, G., & Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological paradigms and organisational analysis: Elements of the sociology of corporate life. London, UK: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Carr, E. S. (2010). Scripting addiction: The politics of therapeutic talk and American sobriety. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dalton, M. (1959). Men who manage. New York, NY: Wiley.Google Scholar
Duranti, A. (2009). Linguistic anthropology: A reader (2nd ed.). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Garsten, C. (2014). Small places, big stakes: “Meetings” as moments of ethnographic momentum. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Hull, M. S. (2012). Documents and bureaucracy. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41, 251–267. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104953CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Kauffeld, S., & Lehmann-Willenbrock, N. (2012). Meetings matter: Effects of team meetings on team and organizational success. Small Group Research, 43, 130–158. doi:10.1177/1046496411429599CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luong, A., & Rogelberg, S. G. (2005). Meetings and more meetings: The relationship between meeting load and the daily well-being of employees. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 9, 58–67. doi:10.1037/1089–2699.9.1.58CrossRefGoogle Scholar
March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1976). Ambiguity and choice in organizations. Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget.Google Scholar
Robert, H. M. (1981). Robert's rules of order (Rev. ed.). Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman & Co.Google Scholar
Sandler, J. (2014). Policy activist coalition meetings: Rituals of alternative subject production. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Schwartzman, H. B. (1978). Organizational dancing: How play works in a community mental health center. In Salter, M. A. (Ed.), Play: Anthropological perspectives. West Point, NY: Leisure Press.Google Scholar
Schwartzman, H. B. (1981). Hidden agendas and formal organizations or how to dance at a meeting. Social Analysis, 9, 77–88.Google Scholar
Schwartzman, H. B. (1987). The significance of meetings in an American mental health center. American Ethnologist, 14, 271–294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartzman, H. B. (1989). The meeting: Gatherings in organizations and communities. New York, NY: PlenumCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartzman, H. B. (1993). Ethnography in organizations. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Thedvall, R. (2006). Eurocrats at work. Negotiating transparency in postnational employment policy (Doctoral dissertation). Stockholm University, Sweden. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology, 58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thedvall, R. (2013). Punctuated entries: Doing fieldwork in policy meetings in the EU. In Garsten, C. & Nyqvist, A. (Eds.), Organisational anthropology: Doing ethnography in and among complex organizations (pp. 106–119). London, UK: Pluto.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×