I am very much interested in the interdisciplinary exchange about methods how to study the social processes within the meeting itself.
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.
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
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).
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.
How do you develop methods for mapping meeting structures/chains of meetings? Outlook calendars? Are there other ways?
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
What is missed in the efforts to quantify everything that happens in meetings?
How can we design studies, perhaps experimental studies, giving us more insight into how to facilitate meetings?
Love the question! Let’s do it!
How can we map processes in meetings ?
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.
how to quantify the potential of better meetings in organisations
How can quantitative and qualitative methodologies complement each other in meetings research
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?
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.