What do you mean by "effective meetings" or "meeting effectiveness"

[christoph (Christoph Haug)]

@t.g.yarrow

In my work with heritage professionals who are also civil servants, there’s an interesting tension: here ‘effectiveness’ is itself often conflated with new managerialist approaches which see that as a matter of getting rid of unnecessary ‘bureaucracy’, and from this perspective meetings can themselves be taken as evidence of that bureaucratic excess

I think you are on to something interesting here! But is this view of meetings as bureaucratic inefficiency your interpretation or do the civil servants articulate it like that? Because one could also argue the opposite: the perfect bureaucracy does not need any meetings so that if meetings occur, they would be a sign of insufficient bureaucracy (I think @hsjsls mentions this view somewhere in her book. In other words, ineffectiveness would be the result of too little bureaucracy rather than too much.

Also: I would distinguish different types of meetings, depending on how they’re organized. Some of them might then be called bureaucratic (e.g. because they use a lot of formal procedures) while others that are more informal could hardly be called bureaucratic.

Paul Du Gay at Copenhagen Business School made the observation that J. F. Kennedy, Tony Blair and D. Trump share a rather informal style of running their administration (for example in that no minutes are kept) and he makes the point that this is a problem for democratic accountability.