This paper belongs to of the Gothenburg Meeting Science Symposium
David Gibson, University of Notre Dame (Sociology)
Abstract
A meeting is a pre-planned face-to-face encounter involving two or more people, usually with a specific purpose that gears into organizational processes. An important challenge faced by both meeting researchers and is making sense of what does not happen–arguments not made, objections not raised, stories not told. Insofar as such talk might have been consequential, its nonoccurrence is equally so, but even with excellent recordings of the meeting itself, it is generally difficult to say whether a particular person’s failure to make a thematically relevant (and even urgent) point was due to (a) ignorance of that point, (b) the lack of desire to make it, (c) the lack of capacity to seize and hold the floor long enough to give voice to it, or (d) the sense that the terms of discussion were such as to disallow it (for example, if the point is evidentiary but the discussion took an ideological or ethical turn). (…) Read more