Meetings: A cultural perspective

Abstract

We draw on Helen Schwartzman's seminal work on meetings to make the case for studying meetings and studying them from a cultural perspective. In a global context marked by the increasing interdependence of social groups of all sizes, scholars need ways to study and interpret local phenomena; a cultural approach to meetings provides a means for discovering local practices and theories of communication, and for enabling cross-cultural comparison to generate empirically grounded multi-cultural perspectives. After reviewing how scholars have used Schwartzman's work, we revisit her scheme for studying meetings and demonstrate how it orients researchers to local cultural practices and processes. To illustrate the kind of theoretical innovation that can follow from the application of her scheme, we reformulate her work on the relationship between meetings and social order to argue that egalitarianism and hierarchy should be theorized as strategic communicative accomplishments that serve the locally relevant social ends of some or all meeting participants.

Keywords:

• culture
• ethnography of communication
• meetings
• sense making
• hierarchy
• social interaction