Christoph Haug

This paper belongs to of the Gothenburg Meeting Science Symposium

Katarina Jacobsson, Lund University (Social Work)

Abstract 
During the last decade the Swedish authorities’ appeal for collaboration between and within different welfare institutions has been particularly accentuated through various efforts to standardize and formalize collaboration and co-ordination. Human service workers from various agencies (eg. psychiatry, the social services, and the employment office) are required to arrange meetings regarding individual clients or patients where they draw up a plan, stating “who do what and when”. In this paper, I examine one such meeting where ten professionals come together with Carl, a young patient at a closed psychiatric unit, in order to plan Carl’s future while they simultaneously fill out the form “Co-ordinated Treatment Plan” (CTP). (…) Read more

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David Seidl, University of Zurich (Department of Business Administration)

Abstract 
Existing research suggests that established structures and routines are suspended during strategy workshops, enabling critical reflection and facilitating the emergence of new ideas. This paper extends this line of research by examining the specific mechanisms through which suspension in strategy workshop is achieved. Drawing on an in-depth, longitudinal case study of a series of strategy workshops within a firm, we show that suspension is actively created through distinctive practices. These suspension practices operate in two ways. First, they inhibit established practices and secondly they act to disrupt secondary practices that reinforce or defend the established practices. (…) Read more

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Malin Åkerström, Lund university (Dept. of Sociology)

Abstract 
Formal meetings are evens that are a peculiar mixture of sense and nonsense, of drama and dullness. For managers meetings may be an arena “where the action is”: situations to display competence and moral character. However, people may feel less involved, and meetings may be experienced as nonsense, as meaningless and worthless. A recurring theme in various studies is complaints about meetings, particularly regarding their frequency, their emptiness, and the forced attendance, taking time from what the employees consider their core tasks. In this paper I discuss how one may capture such experiences: in interviews by retold experiences or stories, in field observations by noticing side-talk, by side-involvement such as meeting scribbles or by using of smart phones or laptops during meetings, and in post-mortem accounts. (…) Read more

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Brian Due, University of Copenhagen (Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics)

Abstract 
Good relations and effective communication patterns are crucial for high performance teams (Salas, Goodwin, & Burke, 2008). Much of this is accomplished at meetings in and through the detailed and sequential organization of actions in micro ecologies (Asmuß & Svennevig, 2009). The successful and unsuccessful interactions around meeting activity types like e.g. deciding, informing, and ideating are grounded in details in the situated multimodal encounters. In order to “fix” interactional issues, we have been working on developing a video-based interaction improvement method (Due & Lange, 2015; Due, Lange, & Trærup, forth.). (…) Read more

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Frank Nullmeier, University of Bremen (SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy)
Tanja Pritzlaff-Scheele, University of Bremen (SOCIUM)

Abstract 
In political science, collective decision-making is identified as the core objective of politics. Moreover, the face-to-face meeting is identified as the key element when it comes to processes of political decision-making. Therefore, data collection in studies on decision-making processes often focuses on data from actual political meetings, especially on audio-visual material. However, apart from the difficulties of getting access to these meetings and a permit to videotape them, there are other downsides to the use of video data from real political meetings: Often times, the quality of the data suffers from the fact that too many things are going on in a room at once. (…) Read more

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Patrik Hall, Malmö University (Dept of Global political studies)
Erika Anderson Cederholm

Abstract 
In this paper we focus on the specific meeting form of inter-organizational events as a mode of organizing and performing a policy. The organizational context of our study is the collaboration between academia, industry and the public sector which is often referred to as the triple helix model or an innovation system. More specifically, our case is the establishment of a regional innovation system in Skåne, Sweden. One of its key activities is an annual meeting on the topic of innovation – Skåne Innovation Week. (…) Read more

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Johanna Leinius, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”)

Abstract 
In this paper, I argue that when studying meetings between differently positioned political and social actors, the historically entrenched power relations that shape both the context of the meeting and the subjectivities of those that meet must be considered. I use the results of my doctoral thesis, in which I analyze two inter-movement encounters in Peru that aim to link indigenous, feminist, popular, and afro-Latin social movements, to show how the encounter of different social worlds at meetings can be studied through ethnographically based committed research. (…) Read more