Paper short abstract:

How do meetings acquire force in social life? Meeting ethnographers concerned with this question should consider: What produces meetings in a setting? How is a specific meeting accomplished? What does the meeting itself produce in terms of social and material artifacts?

Paper long abstract:

In order to understand the role that meetings play in social life it is necessary to first look at them not through them or behind them. When we do this we discover that meetings do not simply "reflect" the social order that is assumed to exist outside the meeting but in many important ways constitute this social order and create the possibility for challenging and even subverting it. The question that I will consider here is: how do meetings do this? Once we move from viewing meetings as passive forms in social life we need to account for how meetings have/gain agency or force. I believe that this is one of the most important questions that meeting ethnographers need to consider and it relates directly to other assertions about the "agency" of meetings, specifically the idea that meetings produce and reproduce the social order as well as how meetings interconnect or provide the "infrastructure" for the local and the global. In this paper I suggest three questions for meeting ethnographers to ask in their fieldwork: What produces meetings in a setting? How is a specific meeting accomplished? What does the meeting itself produce in terms of social and material artifacts? I am particularly interested in looking at the role of play, mediation and misdirection in the production and performance of meetings. My argument will be illustrated using ethnographic material from a series of studies of American mental health organizations and institutions.