82 questions from 50 meeting researchers and practitioners

Research Symposium
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In the opening session of the Gothenburg Meeting Science Symposium we used the MeethingSphere platform to collect questions that we would like to discuss during the two-day gathering. The result was a list of 82 questions (many of them with sub-questions and additional comments) which we then clustered based on similarity and we came up with 12 categories (i.e. 12 types of questions)

  1. Meeting efficiency and effectiveness
  2. Meetings and their contexts
  3. Research methods
  4. The symposium itself
  5. Journals, publication of meetings research
  6. Relationships between meetings
  7. Practitioner questions
  8. Defining meetings, taxonomies
  9. Teaching/training meetings
  10. Functions of meetings
  11. Content of meetings
  12. Artefacts in meetings

Because the list of all questions is so very long, I am splitting it up so that below I will create one reply for each of the 12 categories.

I have to say that reading through this list is extremely interesting and I somewhat regret that we didn’t manage to work more systematically with this list during the symposium. But on the positive side, I think we have an enormous treasure here that can inspire quite some online conversations.

Please feel free to respond to any of the many items in the list. I’d suggest you create a new topic for your response and then select the text that you want to respond to and click the “Quote” button that pops up. The selected text will be inserted as a quote into your new topic post. (Note: you need to be online for this, it can’t be done via email)

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1. Meeting efficiency and effectiveness

  1. Strategies and ways of increasing interactivity and involvement in meetings - what works?
  2. collective intelligence is easier to generate in some kinds of meetings
  3. how to quantify the potential of better meetings in organisations
  4. How to increase meeting efficiency while at the same time involving meeting participants and hearing everybody’s voices?
  5. Is it possible or harmful to have a structured set of “good meeting” conduct/rules?
  • Of course it’s possible, like it’s possible to have a good shovel. But don’t use a shovel to rake leaves. All tools (rules) can be misused.
  1. What are the mechanisms by which meetings are consequential?
  • Decisions made, stories that can be told after the fact, emotional residues.
  1. What are the mechanisms by which meetings are consequential?
  • Decisions made, stories that can be told after the fact, emotional residues.
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2. Meetings and their contexts

  1. To what extent do meetings reflect the wider structures of the social context in which they are embedded? What determines this extent.
  • good question
  • meetings pick up on the larger norms and expectations of the wider society
  • To explore the extent to which the wider social structures/ context inform the meetings, versus the meetings informing the creation development of those social structures/ context
  • I’m interested in this, too. – both aspects, reflecting and building/construing the wider social, economic and cultural context, especially to capture (possibly) changes underway.
  • It reflect my interest as well. I’m interested in meeting as a social human activity rather than exploring meeting efficiency
  • That is the only thing meetings do, but to discover these reflected structures is what we as meetings experts have to do (learn).
  • Meetings may reflect wider structures but it is also really important to think about how meetings constitute wider structures of the social context.
  • I was wondering, thinking from a multi-level perspective, to what extent organizational meetings reflect the organizational/business context and to what extent the wider societal (national?) context?
  1. What do meetings do to the organization/society/instition that they are conducted within?
  2. In what ways do meetings reproduce or upend the norms of the structures within which they occur?
  • How do meetings relate to the wider context and social processes of which they are a part?
  • How are cultural differences reflected in meeting dynamics?
  • How do meetings reflect broader hierarchies in society and how do they reproduce or challenge them?
  1. What are the taken-for-granted assumptions that guide our research about meetings as well as our attempts to change and/or reform meeting practices in specific contexts?
  2. What are the status of meetings’ externalities (hallways, breaks, etc.) in different approaches to meeting science?
  3. Meetings are largely made up of practices that can also be found elsewhere . How are these practices affected by the fact that they take place in meetings.
  • Practices… does this mean techniques?
  1. why is there a cultural bias against meetings, and is it recent?
  • Good question. Because meetings have been dysfunctional for so long it’s been embedded in the culture?
  • I have the impression that the impact of meetings are hard to quantify from an organizational or business perspective. What is the worth of building good relationships between team-members?
  • It is fairly easy to blame organizational dysfunctions on meetings because theyare the visible instantiations of the organization
  1. Intercultural aspects of meeting practice
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3. Research methods

  1. I am very much interested in the interdisciplinary exchange about methods how to study the social processes within the meeting itself.
  2. Can we come up with a check-list of things/aspects an observer/ethnographer of a meeting should take note of (and why)? For example: what objects are available in the room and which are used for what by whom? How many men/women participate? Who is chairing the meeting and why? etc
  • Where is the meeting happening on-/off-stage (in side meeting conversations)?
  • Depends on the specific research questions of the observer.
  1. How to see and analyze what is not said / what does not happen at meetings (processes of silencing, marginalization, the interactions that happens ’outside’ meetings and still crucially shape them)?
  • is there a way to see and analyze whether participants see these processes, and to what they attribute these?
  • This is tricky ontologically, because how to you study what does not exist? Maybe this is just a terminological matter
  1. How to analyse video recording of meetings?
  • Does anyone have any experience in live coding of meetings?
  • how to analyze body language in meetings, such as dominating or sidelining behaviors?
    • Interesting! Does anyone know or use any good coding schemes here?
      • See a recent review published in Journal of Management by Bonaccio et al. (2016) for an overview of the role of nonverbal behavior in organizations, and also an overview of measurement methods.
    • See GMMS paper by Jacco Smits and Celeste Wilderom (thematic session 1).
  • Anyone knows about (automatic) methods to best measure nonverbal mimicry during video-taped meetings?
  • Yes, important issue! Perhaps compare notes from using different approaches
  • Especially when wanting to acknowledge the multimodal nature (verbal, embodied, material) of meetings
  • The relationship between discourse analysis and interaction analysis
  • Take a look at The Observer XT annotation software by Noldus. It’s expensive but quite flexible in combining different data sources (e.g. different video-perspectives, audio, eyetracking, arousal/hearthrate measurements etc).
  1. As a management scholar with a background in social psychology, I wonder how ethnographic, sociological, and socio-linguistic approaches may help our understanding on how to improve the effectiveness/efficiency of meetings in organizations?
  • An ethnographer’s work would probably not focus on making meetings more efficient. Ethnographers or rather anthropologist would rather focus on the dynamics, politics, issues of power, ways of performing and so on in meetings and how it reflects societal issues. That said I’m sure you could if you wanted to since ethnography is often based on participant observation as a method making observations in meetings.
  • Ethnography can also be useful in identifying gaps between how different groups/cultures/organizations think about what counts as a good meeting and folk theories about meetings.
    • “Folk theories about meetings” is a particular interest of mine. Talk to me,please, I’m Ib Ravn
  • The utility of ethnographic approaches for management might be to provide a wide variety of case studies, disrupting the boundaries of what is considered “normal” meeting practice and opening up new possibilities.
  1. How do you develop methods for mapping meeting structures/chains of meetings? Outlook calendars? Are there other ways?
  2. Is behavior exhibited by employees/managers during meetings representative for their organizational day-to-day behavior in general? Methods to find this out?
  • here you can also study the link between existing values in the organisations and the meeting culture
  1. What is missed in the efforts to quantify everything that happens in meetings?
  2. How can we design studies, perhaps experimental studies, giving us more insight into how to facilitate meetings?
  • Love the question! Let’s do it!
  1. How can we map processes in meetings ?
  2. Can our approaches or some of our approaches capture any changes in the ways meetings are held and designed, e.g. by means of techmology, changes in physical context and spaces and ways to collaborate and interact.
  3. how to quantify the potential of better meetings in organisations
  4. How can quantitative and qualitative methodologies complement each other in meetings research
  5. Is there a problem to comparatively study meetings when so many disciplinary fields are represented?
  • How can we (as a group of meeting expert gathered here at GMSS) benefit from the fact that we are all physically present and able to work together?
  1. What is the role of informal meetings? What are informal meetings? You can edit your own contributions by selecting it and clicking the pencil icon on the top left. You can also comment on the contributions from others by selecting it and then typing your comment.
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4. The symposium itself

  1. I hope to learn more about different perspectives on meetings and to get an overview of this emerging field. I also hope to connect with other researchers in the field.
  2. Is there a problem to comparatively study meetings when so many disciplinary fields are represented?
    *How can we (as a group of meeting expert gathered here at GMSS) benefit from the fact that we are all physically present and able to work together?
  • If we are studying meetings, why would interdisciplinarity pose any significant problem?
  • If we develop contributions back to particular disciplines having adopted a multi-disciplinary perspective when considering meetings, then we (individually) may be challenged to reflect the full context that contributed to our insights. But multi-disciplinary inputs would hopefully significantly add to our understanding of meetings as a phenomenon in their own right.
  1. Are the muffins healthy?
  • and the coffee?
  • When was a muffin ever healthy?
  • coffee is good ,but muffins too much sugar!
  • If they make you happy.
  1. Might we have time to talk specifically with people who take similar epistemological approaches to us, as well as different time to talk “across” approaches?
  • good idea
  1. How can we define and develop the field during this time so that there are clear ways to move forward with one another?
  2. Can we ask less and comment more?
  • Can we stop at question 124?
  • I mean comment on the questions…
    • or even comment on a comment…
  • Yes, please :slight_smile:
    • like…
  • Like this?
  1. are we going to sit on the same chairs at the same table during the GMSS?
  • I think Christoph has thought of moving us around in different settings. Laptops are mobile, so we should manage.
  • You are not a tree, you can move.
  1. can we make a wordcloud at the end of this exercise?
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5. Journals, publication of meetings research

  1. Foster meaningful and important meetings research activity, promoting synergies between discipilines.
  • Facilitate synergy between researchers.
  • Facilitate synergy between reseachers and disciplines, gain sense of research agenda for meetings, consider the benefits of framing research as “meetings research”
  • I look forwards to meeting many scientific colleagues and hope to learn new ideas about meetings and like to share my knowledge of the subject. I should discuss with you my research plan concerning the various parliamentary meeting cultures of Europe.
  • The best that can happen is that the symposium triggers new synergies and joint
  • research agendas. But even if that doesn’t happen, I think there is a value in being aware of other approaches (and perhaps understanding them a bit better).
  • Some synergies, spontaneous insights, and surprising connections in our different fields of study, which have intersections but different root literatures in many cases.
    • Link empirical with normative aspects and draw onclusions for practice.
  • The unexpected discovery of a benefactor who can cover airfare for those of us coming from overseas.
  • Having conversations with interesting scholars who have partly overlapping and partly distinctive research agendas to my own.
  • see connections between different research projects/interests.
  • Yes to all of the above! Additionally, I would like to promote dialogue with other scientist-practitioners as to how to connect our meetings research more closely with the needs of organizational world which we study, and which is obviously so heavily engaged in meetings.
  • Meeting researchers studying meetings, learning about their work and, hopefully, fostering joint research agenda.
  • To avail of an opportunity to learn more about the full spectrum of meetings research taking place, share perspectives from my own work, and build possible collaboration with scholars on future research initiatives.
  • I am interested in hearing the perspectives of researchers at the summit and learning how or whether you all believe this work should inform shifts in meeting culture.
  • What is the relationship between group research and meetings research?
    • Related to that question is the one about how research on real world meetings relates to research on group communication in a laboratory setting (i.e. where certain aspects of the situation are controlled by the researcher and where the group members usually have neither a shard past nor a common future.
  1. Which journals are good outlets for research on meetings? (Operationalization: a journal in which you do not have to justify/ explain why it is interesting to look at meetings but can start with the particular aspect of meetings that you’re looking at)
  • I think it depends on your specific background and research question at hand. One rather interdisciplinary journal that (frequently) publishes meeting research is “Small Group Research”
  1. Do we need a Journal of Meeting Science?
  • Important - new meeting for this only?
  • Yes, we do, and today we may be able to outline a couple of special issues
  • Where to publish qualitative research on meetings?
  • Or, less pretentiously, just a “Journal of Meeting Research”
  • Shall we erect a regular Meeting Journal and a committee to organize the next symposium or ’event’?
    • What’s next after this symposium?
      • a special issue publication!
      • and another symposium next year
      • agree
  • yes good idea!
  • Can we make it open-access? This would benefit practitioners as well.
  1. How do we as practitioners stay current with the best meeting science?
  • a journal?
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6. Relationships between meetings

  1. What is the boundaries of a meeting? What type of gatherings are not meetings?
  • How do meetings relate to one another?
    • How do meetings relate to each other?
    • Processual aspects of meetings, also incorporating other meeting related data like meeting memos, etc.
    • And, to extend this, how can we design meeting sequences to optimize these relationships?
  1. How do meetings interact and how does the interaction of meetings accomplish/contribute to achieving organizational outcomes and tasks
  2. CCO: meetings constructing organizations
  • Meetings as sites of organizational sensemaking (Weick)
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7. Practitioner questions

  1. How to create links between applications/practioners and research
  • What difficulties do practitioners encounter when trying to find scientific evidence?
  1. Why is it so hard for meeting practitioners to spot the form and process of meetings? (They all focus on content, understandably; but the mastery of meeting process is what makes the better meeting)
  • I don’t understand this one. Can this be restated with more specific context? certainly there are many arenas where the practitioners are deeply aware of process
  1. How to take small meeting practice into big conference sessions?
  2. How do we make our meeting science/evidence based knowledge more relevant and accessible to practitioners and the organizations they serve?
  3. What empirical questions would practitioners or meeting facilitators would like to see answered most?
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8. Defining meetings, taxonomies

  1. There seem to be a number of concepts (and phenomena) that several papers relate to and which might therefore be key concepts in meetings research. It would be great to find out if we have a shared understanding of these concepts or where the differences lie. I list some concepts (and phenomena) below. Feel free to add yours as a reply.
  • Meeting culture(s)
  • Meeting effectivenes (and efficiency)
  • Meeting architecture, meeting design, meeting structure
    • meeting design
  • Meetings as actants, as doing something, as “makers”
  • Liminality, bracketing, suspension of structures
  • Representation/invocation of absent actors in meetings
  • Formality/informality: we really need to be clearer of what we mean by formal or informal meetings. Articles have been written about formal/informal interaction (e.g. Atkinson 1982) but they are rarely cited by meeting scholars
  • silence/ suppression of voices in meetings, what is not said
  • Sequential organization of social actions
  • Meeting dynamics
  • The agency of meetings collectively?
  • Process of hiearchy and power
  • Decision-making ’processes’
    • Group imagination and its loss
  • Outcomes
  1. What are the useful dimensions of a meeting taxonomy that can be used to guide research and practice, creating a common language that helps bridge these worlds?
  2. I’d like us to find the concepts and typologies about meeting dynamics that will help us overcome the extensive dysfunctions of meetings
  3. Are meetings interruptions or just normal course of events?
  • normal!
  1. At what point does talk about “meetings” as a general topic lose coherence? How far can we go before we’re actually talking about different things?
  2. Which types of meetings are the most interseting to study?
  3. What do you think of the idea that meetings are for groups what tinking is
    for individuals?
  • I like the idea
  • You along the lines of studying distributed cognition?
    • there is a very interesting connection here
  • I don’t fully grasp this comparison, can you explain a little more what you mean?
  1. Meeting science or meeting studies? What concept is most useful for this field of study?
  • What dimensions are the most informative in classifying meetings?
  • Meeting Research is the less pretentious name
    • I agree
    • Agreed!
    • agree
  • meeting science sounds like a misnomer
  • This question actually captures an important difference between different approaches to studying meetings. But I wonder if it is also driven by what might most appeal to practitioners who want “meeting science” even if they might be interested in the insights produced by meeting research.
  • “Meeting Science” sounds like we suffer from an intellectual inferiority complex, like “Nursing Science” and the Nobel Memorial Prize in “Economic Science”
    • Nah, I think that’s too harsh :wink: Meeting science sounds fine to me. I think it really depends on your research approach/ methods used/ etc.
  1. Defining meetings as a researchable analytical object
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9. Teaching/training meetings

  1. How do we teach about meetings?
  2. Is learning still important in meetings? or is Networking the Nr1? (or maybe motivation?)
  • You showed your hand, Maarten!!
    • you remembered, Ib!
  1. Anybody with experience of organizing academic courses (undergraduate or otherwise) about meetings? Would be interesting to hear some experiences
  2. Teaching students how to train practitioners
  3. Shared syllabus
  • A shared module across a number of teaching organizations?
  • what would the focus of a syllabus like this be? how to, understanding the meeting function in society/work, methodology?
  • To inform students about meetings in the broadest sense and to foster better awareness of the range of meeting types, approaches to conducting them, the ways they can operate, the difficulties participants might encounter etc etc
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10. Functions of meetings

  1. What is the point of a (group) meeting? What can be accomplished through co-presence that can’t be accomplished online or through dyadic interaction?
  • Good question! Maybe also: At which stages of team collaboration are which types of meetings important (e.g. virtual vs. face-to-face)?
    • In several papers on virtual teamwork that I have read, the consensus seems to be that face-to-face is most important at the very start, to establish a basis of trust/sense/norms etc.
  • And what shapes the dynamics that make co-presence productive and when does it result in fragmentation or separation?
  • and, if virtual is the only option, how do we change practice to make that work?
  • What’s the difference between virtual and physical meetings?
    • Good questions but what does that mean exactly? In terms of interaction? in terms of outcomes?
    • The embodied, nonverbal elements of interaction come into play when studying physical meetings.
      • What about virtual proxies of nonverbal behavior such as emoticons?
    • How to study and compare
    • the difference in terms of effectively achieving objectives interests me
    • also, a specific issue is the hybridity of meetings: using several modes at the same time
    • I guess virtual team research shows already quite clearly, that “virtuality” plays only a minor role in natural environments. There is no point in comparing…
      • Do you have a source I could read?
  1. How to understand the social, formal and political aspects of meetings
  • normal!
    • That’s not a question
  1. What is the role of informal meetings? What are informal meetings?
  2. Meetings are status symbols
  • What is this referring to specifically? Roles in meetings as symbols of social status? Or attending the meeting itself as a staus symbol?
  • meetings as signaling meaning within a shared context, the effect is magnified in technology-mediated meetings: e.g., audio-conferencing meetings are not important => multi-tasking participants
  1. What does the semantic field for meeting terms look like in English and some other selected languages? How do these terms relate to culturally conditioned “folk beliefs”?
  2. What is the relevance of fun at meetings?
  • Are there forms of play evident in meetings?
  • There is actually quite an interesting paper on this topic: Lehmann-Willenbrock, N., & Allen, J. A. (2014). How fun are your meetings? Investigating the relationship between humor patterns in team interactions and team performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99, 1278-1287.
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11. Content of meetings

  1. How are decisions produced in meetings?
  2. Which proposal prevails in the decision-making process, and why?
  3. Is politics in meetings necessarily bad?
  • No!
  • No!
  • There is always politics in social interactions, when understanding it as negotations of power - the question is what kind of politics is happening.
  • Decision-making in meetings is, ultimately, ’politics’. It’s almost always happening, the questions is what we make of it.
  • …it’s unavoidable.
  • Meetings are always political.
  1. What are the types of reasons and arguments participants employ to push their decisions proposals?
  2. How to understand the role of the chair in meetings
  3. What do different meeting technologies produce?
  4. What is the role of affects/emotions in meetings?
  • I am thinking about the concept of ’emotional intelligence’ (EI). Are managers scoring high on this trait/skill able to lead staff meetings more effectively? Is being able to recognize and regulate your own emotions but also the emotions of other members (EI dimensions) important for facilitating a productive meeting?
  • Interesting also: meetings as a place for affect to converge
  1. Problem solving, decision making, achieving results,… how does that happen?
  2. This discussion reflects our very different methods used when studying meetings
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12. Artefacts in meetings

  1. The impact of the physical caracteristics in the meeting room; furniture etc
  • and objects as actants during meetings that steer the process (flipchart, sticky notes) as well as architecture of the meeting
  • table size…
  • Affordances of objects and physical environment
  1. What is the point of a (group) meeting? What can be accomplished through co-presence that can’t be accomplished online or through dyadic interaction?
  • Good question! Maybe also: At which stages of team collaboration are which types of meetings important (e.g. virtual vs. face-to-face)?
  • And what shapes the dynamics that make co-presence productive and when does it result in fragmentation or separation?
  • and, if virtual is the only option, how do we change practice to make that work?
  • What’s the difference between virtual and physical meetings?
    • Good questions but what does that mean exactly? In terms of interaction? in terms of outcomes?
    • The embodied, nonverbal elements of interaction come into play when studying physical meetings.
      • What about virtual proxies of nonverbal behavior such as emoticons?
    • How to study and compare
    • the difference in terms of effectively achieving objectives interests me
    • also, a specific issue is the hybridity of meetings: using several modes at the same time
    • I guess virtual team research shows already quite clearly, that “virtuality” plays only a minor role in natural environments. There is no point in comparing…
      • Do you have a source I could read?
  1. Video mediated meetings
  • I would call this more broadly technology-mediated
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A post was split to a new topic: Does anyone have any experience in live coding of meetings?