Meeting and community in the post-digital era: Understanding the texture of organizing and how it is changing
Some phenomena are so common that we don’t notice them. We take them for granted – until they change. The meeting is such a phenomenon. In this project we study how meetings change in a world that increasingly is influenced by digital technology. Changed meeting-practices have consequences, for the workplace as well as for society as a whole, since meetings are central for the performing of democracy. In meetings, people with different backgrounds gather to engage in dialogue, negotiate, agree and set courses of action. Meetings are thus a fundamental feature of organizing.
Social sciences need to contribute to explaining how meeting-practices change. Otherwise there is a risk that the development is driven by technological-optimism, and that important dimensions of established meeting-practices get lost, something that in the long-run even could pose threat to democracy.
In this project we adopt an ethnographical approach by following individuals participating in various meetings in various capacities. In our analysis we focus on three central functions of meetings in the building of community: co-orientation, coordination, and collaboration.
The project fills a knowledge-gap regarding the meeting as a process; enabling a cross-disciplinary discussion about the consequences of changing meeting-practices. This contributes to a more general discussion about which dimensions of meeting-practices are central to community-building – and ultimately to the development of democracy.
Social sciences need to contribute to explaining how meeting-practices change. Otherwise there is a risk that the development is driven by technological-optimism, and that important dimensions of established meeting-practices get lost, something that in the long-run even could pose threat to democracy.
In this project we adopt an ethnographical approach by following individuals participating in various meetings in various capacities. In our analysis we focus on three central functions of meetings in the building of community: co-orientation, coordination, and collaboration.
The project fills a knowledge-gap regarding the meeting as a process; enabling a cross-disciplinary discussion about the consequences of changing meeting-practices. This contributes to a more general discussion about which dimensions of meeting-practices are central to community-building – and ultimately to the development of democracy.
Final report
Project purpose and development
Three main considerations motivated this project. First, meetings are still a phenomenon mostly taken for granted and considered a container for other phenomena rather than something to be understood in depth. Second, meetings are a central practice in the building of community and the question of how to build community at work has been actualised by the Covid-19 pandemic and the increased use of flexible and hybrid forms of work. Third, we are now living in what has been called a post-digital era, that is an era in which digital technologies are part of everything we do. We also know that digital technologies profoundly change work practices. It was therefore urgent to understand how the increased use of digital technologies affects the practice of meeting at work, and particularly the possibility for community building through such a practice.
The purpose of the project was therefore to develop a deeper understanding of how meetings are performed in a post-digital era, and the consequences for the role of meetings in community-building.
As our work proceeded, we saw how the debate about how to organize work intensified and partly became polarized around two contrary positions: those promoting new forms of flexible and hybrid work for a more sustainable working life and those arguing for the need of making employees go back to the office for securing community building, creativity and innovativeness. This debate accentuates the need to better understand community building at work. Since virtual meetings constitute one of the main ways of interacting at work when colleagues are not co-located, we have chosen this as the context in which we have studied community building.
Our analyses, we propose, is highly relevant for understanding what is at stake in the ongoing debate. This also means that, we have contextualised our emerging analyses in relation to the more general ongoing changes in the organization of work and workplaces. This is reflected in the publications resulting from our work as well as in the disseminations activities that we have performed during the project.
Project implementation
We adopted an ethnographic approach that enabled us to come close to the practices of virtual meetings at work and to study how both humans and technologies affect the performance of this practice. This was done by means of observations of meeting-series in different kinds of organizations. We systematically chose meeting series that differed in terms of purpose and frequency, and that in various ways were central to community building for those involved and their organisations.
Most significant results and discussion of the conclusions
The project has developed three particularly significant contributions.
First, the project has resulted in the re-conceptualizing of the idea of community-building at work. The issue of ‘community’ in relation to work has previously been explored in academic research through different strands of theory, for instance through the idea of ‘communities of practice’ or the concept of 'sense of community'. The idea of ‘community’ seems, however, to be often taken for granted and definitions are not necessarily given when the concept is used. ‘Community’ is also most often treated as an entity, there is ‘a community’ to be built.
We propose, instead, to understand community building as ‘communing’, that is about being in and becoming common. There is an important difference between building a community versus enabling communing. A community is, per definition, based on boundaries, sameness, and cohesion. Communing is not. It is a process; it is how we act towards and with one another. Communing does neither erase differences in interests, goals, perspectives et cetera, nor does it prevent meeting participants from ‘becoming in common’, emerging as ‘we-together’, also with other different constellations of people at work. Instead, it offers a way of capturing how relating and working with others may be envisaged. Paying attention to ‘communing’ means paying attention to how the ‘in common’ amongst colleagues who interact with each other can be created and supported. We suggest that communing is what contemporary organizations need; not more community.
Second, we have shown how the virtual meeting is a different kind of meeting that needs to be understood in its own terms, in particular when it comes to how it can enable or constrain communing. This is an important contribution in light of the tendency in both scholarly and public debate to compare the virtual meeting to the co-located meeting in a way where the co-located meeting is made the point of departure and the virtual meeting is constructed as deficient compared to the co-located one. Applying the three concepts of coordination, collaboration and coorientation to denote ways in which work is done in meetings we have been able to describe and analyse a number of practices in which communing was achieved by creating common ground.
Communing, performed through the practices of familiarizing oneself with others, making work visible, chairing and chatting, silences, distributing trajectories, playful talk, care and gift giving, made individual participants to the virtual meeting into a ‘we-together’ with something in common by creating common matters of concern, common memories, and common experiences. By focusing on these practices and achievements we have also been able to better understand the role played by technology and how a different kind of work is needed when performing a virtual meeting compared to a co-located meeting. In particular, digital technologies make participants both visible and invisible in a virtual meeting; they simultaneously bring them closer and create a distance, and what we feel in a virtual meeting is both the same and different than a co-located meeting. In a virtual meeting we are both in different places and in a common digital space, which are both connected and disconnected. Finally, the virtual meeting is both material and immaterial at the same time. This means that in a post-digital era, when we meet virtually at work, we need to do a different kind of effort for communing to emerge. Following this, we need to develop a new set of sensibilities and competencies compared to when we meet in the same room. Communing is still possible and may still be achieved by the creating of common matters of concern, common memories, and common experiences, but it requires a different kind of effort compared to the co-located meetings; an effort that depends on how the humans and technologies perform the meeting. This is what makes the virtual meeting different.
Third, we have shown that work meetings are embedded in a texture of work practices, which are performed by humans and technologies, technologies that are connected through different kinds of infrastructures. These work practices, together with the joint meeting practice enacted in recurrent meetings by the participants, contribute to enabling and constraining communing. This means that we can deeply understand the changes in the work of both managers and employees that we are witnessing in organizations only if we stop limiting our analysis to what humans do and pay more attention to technologies, physical locations, objects, and how they contribute to the performance of work. For instance, we can understand how the work of managers intensifies when work arrangements are hybrid or flexible by paying attention to the work that the traditional office, as a place, had previously done that now the manager needs to do. It also means that we should not limit our focus to the practices of individuals, or even to those of a particular group. Micro-level practices of individuals and collaborating groups are situated and affective, and a deeper understanding of the relational aspects of the texture of work practices in which they are embedded offers a way to understand both how communing emerges, as well as a potential for explaining why it doesn’t.
New research questions
During the project we realized the need for better understanding loneliness at work (statistics show that more than 20% of employees feel lonely). We have therefore developed research applications (Handelsbanken and AFA) where we aim at understanding the affective relations between bodies, technologies and spaces that contribute to loneliness at work and to identify how they can be mitigated. In addition, we have applied for new funding from RJ for a project on engagement in meetings. The M&C-project has triggered questions related to how engagement in meetings is enabled, and the consequences thereof for organizing practices , which would be valuable to examine with a relational practice perspective to bring forward also the role of technologies.
Dissemination and collaboration
Fieldwork in the project has been made possible by collaborating with the organisations studied. The organisations were interested in better understanding how virtual meetings could help in building community and which the limitations were, and they have been offered the opportunity to discuss our analysis with us.
The results have been presented to and discussed with academics (conferences and publications) and with audiences outside academia. Examples of the latter are a webinar by the Swedish Agency for Work Environment, a webinar for ABB employees, interviews in the magazine Chef and Ingenjören, participation in the podcast Digitalt Samarbete (digital cooperation), posts on the platform arbetsplatsenifokus.se, a seminar in a program for SMEs, posts on digma@mdu. The results of the project have also been discussed in the international PhD course ”Responsible organising and managing hybrid work”.
Three main considerations motivated this project. First, meetings are still a phenomenon mostly taken for granted and considered a container for other phenomena rather than something to be understood in depth. Second, meetings are a central practice in the building of community and the question of how to build community at work has been actualised by the Covid-19 pandemic and the increased use of flexible and hybrid forms of work. Third, we are now living in what has been called a post-digital era, that is an era in which digital technologies are part of everything we do. We also know that digital technologies profoundly change work practices. It was therefore urgent to understand how the increased use of digital technologies affects the practice of meeting at work, and particularly the possibility for community building through such a practice.
The purpose of the project was therefore to develop a deeper understanding of how meetings are performed in a post-digital era, and the consequences for the role of meetings in community-building.
As our work proceeded, we saw how the debate about how to organize work intensified and partly became polarized around two contrary positions: those promoting new forms of flexible and hybrid work for a more sustainable working life and those arguing for the need of making employees go back to the office for securing community building, creativity and innovativeness. This debate accentuates the need to better understand community building at work. Since virtual meetings constitute one of the main ways of interacting at work when colleagues are not co-located, we have chosen this as the context in which we have studied community building.
Our analyses, we propose, is highly relevant for understanding what is at stake in the ongoing debate. This also means that, we have contextualised our emerging analyses in relation to the more general ongoing changes in the organization of work and workplaces. This is reflected in the publications resulting from our work as well as in the disseminations activities that we have performed during the project.
Project implementation
We adopted an ethnographic approach that enabled us to come close to the practices of virtual meetings at work and to study how both humans and technologies affect the performance of this practice. This was done by means of observations of meeting-series in different kinds of organizations. We systematically chose meeting series that differed in terms of purpose and frequency, and that in various ways were central to community building for those involved and their organisations.
Most significant results and discussion of the conclusions
The project has developed three particularly significant contributions.
First, the project has resulted in the re-conceptualizing of the idea of community-building at work. The issue of ‘community’ in relation to work has previously been explored in academic research through different strands of theory, for instance through the idea of ‘communities of practice’ or the concept of 'sense of community'. The idea of ‘community’ seems, however, to be often taken for granted and definitions are not necessarily given when the concept is used. ‘Community’ is also most often treated as an entity, there is ‘a community’ to be built.
We propose, instead, to understand community building as ‘communing’, that is about being in and becoming common. There is an important difference between building a community versus enabling communing. A community is, per definition, based on boundaries, sameness, and cohesion. Communing is not. It is a process; it is how we act towards and with one another. Communing does neither erase differences in interests, goals, perspectives et cetera, nor does it prevent meeting participants from ‘becoming in common’, emerging as ‘we-together’, also with other different constellations of people at work. Instead, it offers a way of capturing how relating and working with others may be envisaged. Paying attention to ‘communing’ means paying attention to how the ‘in common’ amongst colleagues who interact with each other can be created and supported. We suggest that communing is what contemporary organizations need; not more community.
Second, we have shown how the virtual meeting is a different kind of meeting that needs to be understood in its own terms, in particular when it comes to how it can enable or constrain communing. This is an important contribution in light of the tendency in both scholarly and public debate to compare the virtual meeting to the co-located meeting in a way where the co-located meeting is made the point of departure and the virtual meeting is constructed as deficient compared to the co-located one. Applying the three concepts of coordination, collaboration and coorientation to denote ways in which work is done in meetings we have been able to describe and analyse a number of practices in which communing was achieved by creating common ground.
Communing, performed through the practices of familiarizing oneself with others, making work visible, chairing and chatting, silences, distributing trajectories, playful talk, care and gift giving, made individual participants to the virtual meeting into a ‘we-together’ with something in common by creating common matters of concern, common memories, and common experiences. By focusing on these practices and achievements we have also been able to better understand the role played by technology and how a different kind of work is needed when performing a virtual meeting compared to a co-located meeting. In particular, digital technologies make participants both visible and invisible in a virtual meeting; they simultaneously bring them closer and create a distance, and what we feel in a virtual meeting is both the same and different than a co-located meeting. In a virtual meeting we are both in different places and in a common digital space, which are both connected and disconnected. Finally, the virtual meeting is both material and immaterial at the same time. This means that in a post-digital era, when we meet virtually at work, we need to do a different kind of effort for communing to emerge. Following this, we need to develop a new set of sensibilities and competencies compared to when we meet in the same room. Communing is still possible and may still be achieved by the creating of common matters of concern, common memories, and common experiences, but it requires a different kind of effort compared to the co-located meetings; an effort that depends on how the humans and technologies perform the meeting. This is what makes the virtual meeting different.
Third, we have shown that work meetings are embedded in a texture of work practices, which are performed by humans and technologies, technologies that are connected through different kinds of infrastructures. These work practices, together with the joint meeting practice enacted in recurrent meetings by the participants, contribute to enabling and constraining communing. This means that we can deeply understand the changes in the work of both managers and employees that we are witnessing in organizations only if we stop limiting our analysis to what humans do and pay more attention to technologies, physical locations, objects, and how they contribute to the performance of work. For instance, we can understand how the work of managers intensifies when work arrangements are hybrid or flexible by paying attention to the work that the traditional office, as a place, had previously done that now the manager needs to do. It also means that we should not limit our focus to the practices of individuals, or even to those of a particular group. Micro-level practices of individuals and collaborating groups are situated and affective, and a deeper understanding of the relational aspects of the texture of work practices in which they are embedded offers a way to understand both how communing emerges, as well as a potential for explaining why it doesn’t.
New research questions
During the project we realized the need for better understanding loneliness at work (statistics show that more than 20% of employees feel lonely). We have therefore developed research applications (Handelsbanken and AFA) where we aim at understanding the affective relations between bodies, technologies and spaces that contribute to loneliness at work and to identify how they can be mitigated. In addition, we have applied for new funding from RJ for a project on engagement in meetings. The M&C-project has triggered questions related to how engagement in meetings is enabled, and the consequences thereof for organizing practices , which would be valuable to examine with a relational practice perspective to bring forward also the role of technologies.
Dissemination and collaboration
Fieldwork in the project has been made possible by collaborating with the organisations studied. The organisations were interested in better understanding how virtual meetings could help in building community and which the limitations were, and they have been offered the opportunity to discuss our analysis with us.
The results have been presented to and discussed with academics (conferences and publications) and with audiences outside academia. Examples of the latter are a webinar by the Swedish Agency for Work Environment, a webinar for ABB employees, interviews in the magazine Chef and Ingenjören, participation in the podcast Digitalt Samarbete (digital cooperation), posts on the platform arbetsplatsenifokus.se, a seminar in a program for SMEs, posts on digma@mdu. The results of the project have also been discussed in the international PhD course ”Responsible organising and managing hybrid work”.