@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…
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.
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.
so I’ll shut up now.