Why Meetings Matter : Everyday Arenas for Making, Performing and Maintaining Organisations

Hall, Patrik/ Åkerström, Malin/ Cederholm, Erika A.

Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd（2024/01発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 228 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781803924632
• DDC分類 658.456

Full Description

This innovative book argues that meetings are a crucial feature of modern organisations, demonstrating that, contrary to popular belief, meetings are what define, represent and maintain organisations.

Through an in-depth analysis of ethnographic case studies, Patrik Hall, Malin Åkerström and Erika Andersson Cederholm illustrate the inner workings of meetings, exploring phenomena such as meeting chains, meeting escapes, the digitalisation of meetings, subtle meeting diplomacy, and seductive business events. This book emphasises how negotiations, collaborations and power dynamics are performed during meetings, making meetings the most fundamental working map of organisational hierarchies. Ultimately, Why Meetings Matter highlights the crucial importance of meetings in an increasingly collaborative professional working landscape.

Offering a cutting-edge approach to a longstanding social phenomenon, this book will be of great interest to academics, students and researchers in the fields of sociology, political science and organisation studies. Including ethnographic studies with practical case-based applications, it will appeal in particular to office-based professionals as it provides new insights into a taken-for-granted workplace activity.

Contents

Contents: 1 Introduction: the meeting society 2 What is a meeting? 3 The meeting landscape, its emergence
and expansion 4 Meetings as 'doing the organisation' (in collaboration with Vesa Leppänen) 5 Meetings and their documents 6 Escaping while attending meetings 7 Digital meetings 8 Collaborative meetings: diplomatic relations 9 Collaborative meetings: soft political power 10 The seductive meeting: network sociality and the promotion of a new meeting persona 11 Conclusion: the doings, the 'hows' and the 'whos' of meetings Index