Meetings, meaning-making and consensus: From shared understandings to shared moments in time

Abstract

Top management meetings, board meetings, budget meetings, strategy retreats and weekly updates - the organizational world is certainly a world of formal meetings where various kinds of meeting practices are often focal points for people related to the organization. While the classical studies on meetings were instrumental in nature, recent studies have drawn more attention to meetings as a social practice. Formal meetings have also been acknowledged by researchers as strategically important arenas in need of further research to better understand the mundane, micro-processes of meeting activities (Jarzabkowski & Seidl, 2008). Among practitioners and researchers as well, there is a tendency to bring forward that one of the central contributions of having formal meetings is that they can lead to a shared understanding among meeting participants in relation to, for instance, the organizations' vision, goal, strategy etcetera (Huttunen, 2010). This belief also holds that shared understanding is fundamental for organizational members to 'move on' together in a 'successful' way. In this paper, we argue that the emphasis on a shared understanding builds on a transmission view on conversations and a substantive view on meaning-making where it is the out-put - the shared understanding - that is in focus. We also bring forward that such a one-sided emphasis on continuity, sameness and sharedness has certain backdrops in that it offers people a limited repertoire to act from and thereby restricts unrealized potentiality (Durand & Calori, 2006). Other than that, the focus on shared understandings upholds the myth of static meaning-making, but how would that be possible considering that from a process perspective, meaning-making is unfinalizable, always on the way and never fully completed?