Thanks for these further insightful reflections. Yes, I’m absolutely interested in the formalism of meetings and the multiple ways people think about, talk about and also practice this. (In this thread I have been mostly talking about what they talk about but in most of my work I follow what this practically involves). So meetings as formal instruments can be positive: seen as a means to the ends of open, democratic decision making (after Du Gay); but also negative, as in derision of ‘meetings about meetings’ and empty form that takes people away from the ‘real’ work they do; or for that matter distances them from the monuments they want to conserve. These orientations are partly structural; partly generational (older people more wedded to the kinds of deliberations and ‘care’ the discourse of ‘effectiveness’ as in ‘efficiency’ sweeps away), but also the source of considerable ambivalence – the same person may say both these kinds of things at different times.
On formal/informal, there’s a good paper by Nicolas Lamp in the JRAI collection I edited on informality as a recursively ‘receding horizon’ of formality. He makes the point that the distinction is relative and shifts; and that each or constituted in relation to the other. He is describing the WTO, but the point translates to other contexts, I think.