The role of the councillor and the work of meeting

ABSTRACT

This paper picks up a theme from the recent literature on the councillor, that of time spent in meeting, and suggests that if we are to understand the role of the councillor we must understand the work the meeting does. The discussion is based in a series of empirical studies and uses interactionist precepts to identify and explore the dynamics of the informal encounter, the more formal meeting and its associated paperwork, and the special if ambiguous function of meetings about meetings. It draws on recent institutionalist theorising to describe how the routines and processes of meeting must be inhabited and enacted in practice, positioning them in Arendt’s sense of politics as action and interaction. In concluding, it considers how future research might explore the ways that meetings are separated from the world to which they refer, and how different meetings and kinds of meeting are articulated one with another.

KEYWORDS:

• Councillor
• role
• institution
• encounter
• meeting
• document

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to participants in the research reported in this paper: for their interest and commitment, and for the time spent in meetings they did not need to attend. The project was partly organised and funded by APSE Scotland, and I would like to thank Paul O’Brien and Louise Melville for their commitment and support. The research was done in collaboration with David Anderson, Neil Barnett, Steven Griggs, Darcy Leigh and Melvin Wingfield. I have long been indebted to Steve for his understanding of the nature and function of local government and his sense of what writing about it might entail. The editors and reviewers of this special issue, meanwhile, have offered significant corrections to my initial submission. I remain responsible for faults the paper contains.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, for example, Jones (1973), Corina (1974), Gyford (1976), Newton (1976), Rao (1998) and, for a useful summary, Copus (2010).

2. See APSE (2014), Stocker and Thompson-Fawcett (2014).

3. Wiseman’s slightly earlier (1967) Local Government at Work begins with the council meeting and then looks at (meetings of) committees and party groups, though without problematizing the phenomenon or process of meeting as such.

4. That said, a feature of our discussions with councillors was their noting the eclipse of the conventional advice session or surgery by what we might describe as the ‘electronic encounter’: contacts made, referred and resolved by email, and events planned, announced and reported on social media.

5. In this way, the council in action (Richards and Kuper 1971) is perhaps something like science in action (Latour 1987).

6. I am indebted to Nicolas Lamp’s (2017) study of the WTO for insights in this paragraph and the next.

7. Page references are from the paperback edition (New York: Doubleday, 1959).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Association for Public Service Excellence.

Notes on contributors

Richard Freeman

Richard Freeman is Professor of Social Science and Public Policy at the University of Edinburgh. His most recent books are, with Steve Sturdy, Knowledge in Policy: embodied, inscribed, enacted (Policy Press 2014), with Jan-Peter Voß, Knowing Governance: the epistemic construction of political order (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) and, with Fiona McHardy and Danny Murphy, Working for Equality: policies, politics, people (Argyll Publishing/CCWB 2017).