82 questions from 50 meeting researchers and practitioners

Research Symposium
9

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