A post was split to a new topic: Meeting culture
I’d be curious to discuss your study design/ approach with you. Since you’re looking at meetings of a single organization, I suppose you’re not pursuing a comparative approach but looking more in depth at how, for example, certain formulations from the meeting re-appear (or not) in the minutes?
Do you also intend to look at the other way: how minutes are used/discussed in subsequent meetings?
BTW: If you prefer not to do it world-publicly, there are several ways of making the conversation less visible:
- visibile only to kunsido members, i.e. people who are logged in
- visible only to a smaller group, e.g. the symposium participants
- private conversation by sending a PM, visible to only you and me (and whoever else we invite)
These meetings were fairly unstructured and often chaotic so my question is how the minute-taker transformed that into an orderly exchange. It’s hard to find meetings that left behind both sorts of data because normally a meeting that’s being audio recorded doesn’t also need a minute-taker in the room. How minutes are subsequently used is a separate question and I’m mostly interested in that inasmuch as it’s easier to motivate the research if minutes are actually put to some use.
I’d say it’s more than that, at least potentially, because if you want to understand how unstructured conversation is turned into neat minutes, part of the explanation obviously has to do with features of the conversation but probably at least as much with the intended/expected use of these minutes. Admittedly, there may be other ways of bringing in that teleological aspect, other than looking at how they are actually used in the next meeting (especially since that may not even be their main intended use) but since you’re looking at a series of meeting with (presumably) the same note taker, chances are that reactions to previous minutes will condition the writing of future ones for the same group.
I suppose you’ve thought of all this already, just thinking aloud to see if I understand your plans correctly.
Anyway, so do you have an idea of how/where to start? Read minutes, then listen to the meeting and see if you notice something? Or a more structured approach?
Yes I’ve been getting this idea from Elise Keith and others: minutes are produced in anticipation of how they’ll be used. I’ve been thinking of Garfinkel’s “Good Organizational Reasons for ‘Bad’ Clinical Records” so like to think this idea was lurking vaguely in the back of my mind.
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As for my method, I have some hunches/hypotheses but haven’t decided whether I want to invest a lot of resources into quantitative coding.
By the way, I take a first stab at some of these issues, related to the fidelity of minutes and ex post accounts, in a forthcoming book chapter:
Gibson, David R. 2018 (expected). “The Microfoundations of Macroviolence.” In Ritual, Emotion, Violence: Studies in the Micro-Sociology of Randall Collins, edited by Elliot Weininger, Annette Lareau, and Omar Lizardo. Routledge.
This is the paper I presented at the symposium last summer though I don’t think I said much about the data quality issue then.
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I think I wouldn’t. This is a really interesting topic to explore and I wouldn’t want to limit my heuristics to a strictly deductive approach.
I think some inspiration for this can be found in the literature on organizational communication. In particular the Montreal School of org com with its text - conversation dialectic. In a nutshell, the argument is that organization is constituted in and through communication and this happens through the continuous process of translating text into conversation and conversation into text. So (although “text” has a broader meaning here), this maps nicely onto the translation of meeting talk into minutes and vice versa.
A reference to look at would be:
Taylor, J R; Cooren, F; Giroux, N & Robichaud, D (1996): The Communicational Basis of Organization: Between the Conversation and the Text. Communication Theory 6(1). pp. 1–39. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2885.1996.tb00118.x
A final thought: one of the first questions I would pose in your study would probably be to what extent the minutes are collaboratively produced by the members and to what extent they are the notes of a passive observer, as it were. The difference between the two extremes is obviously immense and constitutes in itself a dimension of meeting culture (or minuting culture). But also researchwise the difference is one between studying interaction and someone’s (assumed) cognitive processes. Real world practice will probably be “somewhere in the middle” (though in the meetings I’m currently examining minuting never becomes a collective issue - unless you count voting as part of minuting[1]). So my hunch is that a particularly interesting aspect of studying minuting from on interactionist perspective would be to look at how the minuting responsibility is negotiated throughout the meeting.
The fact that it is always the secretary who counts the votes makes that seem plausible ↩︎
Thanks for that citation! I’ll read that immediately.
In my book I did a quick comparison between maybe 30 seconds of audio transcribed using CA with a transcript produced by scholars. Here is a link.
The role of group members in editing minutes before they’re made official is something I discuss in the book chapter I referred to earlier. It was done in the Soviet politburo, and it’s done in my department — so I suppose it’s a wide-spread phenomenon as my department and the Politburo don’t have much else in common. I’m cultivating some connections to some experts on bureaucratic processes in the U.S. government and this is one thing I want to explore with them.
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I have nothing new to add to your study. I emphasize that each group needs to guide the secretary on what works for them. Our community beautification group doesn’t record the meetings. Nobody has the time to listen or even read that much, even if it was text translated. I as secretary of course ask for corrections after I email out my notes, which have expected actions and homework in bold after brief summaries of the discussion, motions, decisions. So far nobody has had to argue with me, but if it was a political group, I would want recordings to back up my notes, and of course to help keep the minutes accurate.
One thing I got from a very helpful conversation with Elise Keith is that minutes as I know them–which aim to reflect most substantive statements and often attribute them to particular individuals–are the exception, especially in the corporate world where minutes can be subpoenaed.
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So that means they can be ordered to be shown shown in court as evidence, which means they would then be public, right?
Now, what exactly is the problem if the minutes contain substantive arguments? Is it that those arguments will be used against the company in court? Or that the information will be public and competitors can use it? Or perhaps that those arguments will be attributed to individuals?
Reminds me of that decisive NASA management meeting that decided to launch the Challenger space shuttle despite strong opposition from several engineers. There’s at least one documentary about that meeting and I when I saw snippets from it the other day, I was wondering how exactly they reconstructed the arguments for the film. I’m not sure how much information was in the minutes (or if they were even written before the launch), but since they reported a unanimous decision via phone to the launch centre, I’d assume that’s what the minutes said.
If I had been one of those engineers who was against the launch, I would probably remember quite well how vehemently I argued against management and much less how I eventually gave in for no good reason…
Anyway, here is one version of how they reconstructed the meeting:
Elise can speak more authoritatively but I imagine that if a corporation is accused of price fixing, for instance, its records could be subpoenaed and those could include meeting minutes where that was discussed. Diane Vaughan’s account of the Challenger decision drew, I believe, on ex post accounts and perhaps some meeting records/minutes. But I should re-read that section of her book and will update this post if I have that wrong.
Couple of notes for clarification. First, ANY record can be requested as evidence in court, regardless of whether it’s an “official” sanctioned record or not. This is one of the reasons we don’t support a way to add private personal notes in Lucid Meetings; there is no such thing as a truly private online record when the courts come calling. I firmly believe that if you don’t want other people to see your note, you shouldn’t type it up. Pencils rock! And yes, we have had customers who have been required to produce all their meeting records for court cases.
Before starting Lucid, I worked at an eDiscovery company where we built software used by the legal community to scan and analyze electronic records for evidence. (Tip for the CA folks out there; there’s some really cool scary artificial intelligence available in the forensic community.) Legally, you can use Tweets and Evernote snippets and email and anything in court.
FWIW: this is also why I think it’s a terrible idea to keep audio recordings and transcriptions for every meeting, even though these are features we support in our platform. Super handy in some cases, but also quite risky.
About the risk here: it’s not just about getting caught doing or saying something uncool. Cost is a HUGE factor. Larger companies regularly purge their electronic records to manage this risk. If the courts demand a company turn over electronic records, they have to “produce” all of them in a format the lawyers can use. This can cost the company millions of dollars, all before the case even gets a hearing date. It’s too great a financial risk. (Another fun side note: you can get all the Enron records before the scandal broke, because they were required to produce those for court. Ediscovery professionals train using those records. Mostly we looked for evidence of cheating on the company’s fantasy football league.)
The bigger deal for formal minutes in publicly traded corporate boards and government groups is that they are required to post them publicly. So the risk here is not just from the legal courts, but also the court of public opinion. When you have to share what was decided, by whom, and how, then the pressure goes up both to follow due process and to make sure your documented minutes show that you followed the process. All the extra conversation leading up to that decision usually gets omitted - why risk that it will be taken out of context when you got to a defensible result in the end?
Here’s a simple example of one way the public meeting laws get invoked from a town just south of Lucid headquarters.
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All of the above, actually. Also, that the general public itself will take offense at something in the minutes and work to take the organization or individual down.
Another example: in the standards-setting communities, meetings often begin with an IP policy declaration to prevent exactly these kinds of problems.
In a standards group, you have people representing different companies and interests all meeting together to decide what the new global standard ought to be. If someone representing a company offers an idea to the group that the company claims to own, this causes huge problems for everyone both legally and financially. So, there are super strict rules about what you can and cannot share in these meetings. It makes for quite the dance, as every company tries to secure a competitive advantage for their IP without tipping off the other competitors in the room, and the competitors reading the minutes, while also working to abide by all the rules.
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@chantal.benoit-barne and @robichad have some fascinating study on such a multi-stakeholder group trying to come up not with global standards but with policy recommendations regarding road safety. At EGOS 2017, Chantal presented a paper about how this committee managed to build consensus. Has it been published yet?
A participant in a meeting that I once observed told me about a similar challenge in the research-heavy industry in which he works: people or organizations may have an innovative idea that might be worth millions, but they may need to collaborate with a competing company in order to make it real. So how do you communicate with them without them stealing your idea?
The problem starts already before you start negotiating intellectual property agreements. To put it pointedly: the very fact that you are approaching your competitor for a conversation might give away the fact that you have some brilliant discovery. (As Watzlawick put it: “One cannot not communicate.”) Depending on how well they monitor you, they may even suspect what you are working on and have informal ways of finding out more before you even meet.
But that’s not all. The other story that this informant told me was about the risks involved in handling such a request for a meeting when you know the company contacting you is basically working on the same problem as you are. You can’t just sign off an IP agreement that you won’t steal any of their ideas because some of the ideas that they reveal to you may not be new to you at all because you (independently) found things out and if you signed that you wont use their findings it suddenly means that you can’t use your own findings anymore. Add to that the fact that “ideas” and “findings” are rarely clearly circumscribed and you understand why publicly funded research is so important. Research is a collaborative process and works best if none of the collaborators has to try and own as much of the knowledge as possible in order maximize profit.
But back to your point about regulating the sharing of information in meetings: do you have an example of how this is done, given that you can’t say what information you wont share (because then you’re already sharing it) and saying what you can share may also be difficult if there are obvious gaps, hinting at what you are hiding. I’d imagine that the only way out is abstraction, i.e. talking about categories of information, which, by definition, opens up room for interpretation, which is another can of worms when it comes to litigation…
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This note in the other topic reminded me that we had this interesting discussion of minutes here. I’ll jump on opportunity to revive it. So how does the minute-taker determine whether a decision has been made? Or, if you don’t have an answer yet, how are you tackling the question?
I’m assuming you have recordings of the meeting and minutes? But are the recordings videorecordings where you can see when the minute taker starts writing?
And what kind of coordinates do you have in mind for pin-pointing the “when”? Time is obviously meaningless here, so maybe turn-type, or sequences of turn-types that predict minuting?
If you ever had a chance to look at this, I’d be curious to hear your opinion, given that it’s quite different from your own work.
And here is another reference that could be interesting for you (if you don’t already know it). It’s a reconstruction of a decision-making process more than 200 years ago, based on meeting records:
Graber, F. (2007). Obvious Decisions: Decision-making among French Ponts-et-Chaussées Engineers around 1800. Social Studies of Science, 37(6), 935–960. doi:10.1177/0306312707078013
This isn’t the main focus on the paper, partly because often no decisions are made. But when I can I’ve been asking, what sort of talk gets characterized by the minute-taker as a decision? It seems to be proposals put forth by those in control of a particular domain, like the Secretary of State, when no one raised any objections.
I have audio, minutes, and in one case the hand-written notes taken during the meeting–which were subsequently the basis for the minutes. Until now it hadn’t occurred me to that it would be nice to have video of the minute-taker! Except for that one meeting where I have the original notes, there definitely may have been some retrospective labeling, where the minute-taker tagged talk as a “decision” because he (always men) knew what came later, either in the meeting or post-meeting.
The Taylor article I’ve tried to read a few times, without success. Might be a disciplinary thing. Graber is great, another example of a study that uses records taken by hand. I’ve already added a reference.
And thanks for those citations you provided Melisa. I’ve already downloaded several.
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That’s fantastic. Can’t wait to read it!
Here is the abstract (with my emphasis added):
Meeting minutes (and similar records) provide a cherished window into the internal workings of important bodies, but scholars usually have little option but to trust their veridicality. However, the production of a record of talk as it happens is a difficult task, especially when talk is animated and turn-taking unregimented. I compare recordings of four National Security Council meetings secretly made by Presidents Kennedy and Nixon with minutes and notes taken by NSC principals and staff members. While minute-taking practices differed in level of detail, all minute-takers engaged in processes of preservation, deletion, and transformation as they sought to distill and disambiguate. Moreover, the need to omit some talk made it possible to suppress certain kinds of content, such as evidence of internal disagreement. The loose relationship between talk and its written incarnation is consequential for lay actors, such as subordinates who rely on minutes for insight into their superiors’ wishes and mindsets; for scholars tempted to read minutes as an accurate account of what transpired; and, potentially, for other sorts of investigators looking to apportion responsibility for misbehavior and bad outcomes.
Given that you mention “scholars tempted to read minutes as an accurate account of what transpired”, I’m wondering what kind of feedback you received from colleagues.
The irony is, that those scholars may in many cases not be so far off, simply because in practice, the minutes are (seen as) “what transpired”, even by the participants themselves. I have more than once been baffled by how meeting participants don’t (want to?) see the discrepancy between what was said and what is written. It seems that the disambiguation work that the minutes perform is too precious to question it. The temptation, in other words, is perhaps even stronger for the participants than it is for the researcher.
But I realize I should really read the paper before reflecting on it 
so I’ll shut up now.
When I started this research I volunteered to take minutes during department meetings, for purposes of methodological empathy. It really was eye-opening. I often found myself shortchanging remarks that followed those that seemed, at the time, important to take down in detail, and I immediately took to imagining who would care about the minutes when determining what to record, though it’s hardly clear who cares or under what circumstances they might do so.
The article just came out so I haven’t received any responses yet from historical sociologists, and maybe never will! I hope that anyone in this group who uses minutes as data will at least address these concerns, and bring them to the attention of authors whose work you’re reviewing.
As for my job as minute-taker, once I volunteered I was stuck with it for five years, and just shed it this semester when a minor leadership role required me to take an active role in meetings. Only once I was free of the chore did I realize how much it made me feel like an observer looking through a window for all those years.