AFTER DIGITALISATION
RJ 2022

THE MEETING SOCIETY

Malin Åkerström

Translated by Clare Barnes

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond
in collaboration with Makadam förlag

MAKADAM FÖRLAG

GÖTEBORG & STOCKHOLM

WWW.MAKADAMBOK.SE

After Digitalisation is the 2022 Yearbook for Riksbankens

Jubileumsfond

Editor: Jenny Björkman

Editorial board: Nicklas Berild Lundblad, Ingrid Elam, Lisa Irenius, Sven Anders Johansson

THE MEETING SOCIETY

© Malin Åkerström 2022

Graphic design: Johan Laserna

eBook: Bulls Graphics, Halmstad 2022

ISBN this volume 978-91-7655-407-4

ISBN for the box set of six essays: 978-91-7061-404-0

ISSN 2000-1029

This work is licensed under Creative Commons — Attribution 2.5 Sweden.

To view a summary of the licence, go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/se/ or contact Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

Contents

Foreword: After Digitalisation

“I can’t, I’m in a meeting”

The growth of meetings in working life

Meetings, meetings, meetings

Burgeoning meeting types

Online meetings

Changed meeting ethics

Guerrilla strategies and fleeing meetings

Mind-numbing, dull and absolutely wonderful

Notes and list of illustrations

References and suggested reading

Presentation of Riksbankens Jubileumsfond

Foreword:
After Digitalisation

“After digitalisation”? The theme could give the impression that digitalisation is complete: first we lived analogue lives, then digitalisation arrived, and now it is finished. But the “after” of the heading does not mean that digitalisation is a stage we have passed through, nor that the relationship between the digital and its analogue counterpart is as simple as we imagine. Nevertheless, perhaps we have arrived at a situation or state in which we can gain perspective on digitalisation, and examine its effects and conditions in a critical and nuanced manner.

The essays in this collection are wide ranging in their subjects, but they all relate to the question of what digitality is and how it affects our lives. Nina Wormbs’ essay, on how what is often presented as an ethereal sphere of ones and zeroes, beyond the material world, examines the extent of its hunger for resources and its impact, with the vast amounts of e-waste it produces. Hans Ruin’s piece examines the paradoxical longing for control and submission that can be discerned behind our expectations of AI, artificial intelligence. In turn, Orsi Husz reveals the continuity behind the transition from a paper-based regime of identity to digital surveillance capitalism, and Jesper Olsson describes how binary code infiltrates and reorganises not just reading, as in the case of audiobooks, but culture in general, while demonstrating how the new is always more intricately intertwined with the old than it may appear. In area after area, the consequences of digitalisation appear to be double or, rather, dialectical. The digitalisation that promised simplicity seems, in reality, to lead to the generation of increasingly complex systems, writes Nicklas Berild Lundblad. If technology reveals the world, it also appears to simultaneously hide it. In this essay, sociologist Malin Åkerström describes the increasing number of meetings in our working lives. The irony is that, on the one hand, meetings are considered important and must always be prioritised but, on the other hand, their proliferation is increasingly encroaching on the core tasks that are their subject.

One explanation for this growth in meetings is the need for coordination in an increasingly complex society, but there also appears to be an attraction in meetings as a form, in contrast to other work. Indeed, digitalisation appears to have reinforced this tendency – when meetings are held on Zoom they can expand even further. But this meeting-inflation also results in guerrilla strategies, ways of fleeing from the meetings you attend. Scrolling through Facebook, surfing the internet or simply doing other work during a meeting is obviously easier if you are sitting at your computer.

Organisation theory, notes Åkerström, talks a lot about structures, leadership and power, but less about the forms through which power is exercised, leadership practised and structures made concrete: the meeting. To some extent, her text starts to change this situation.

The Editors

“I can’t, I’m in a meeting”

A room with a large table, chairs, and a whiteboard – many of us will recognise this as a meeting room. We take along our coffee cups and sigh as we walk towards it, because many meetings are perceived as dull and somewhat meaningless, even if they may occasionally be dramatic and emotionally charged. However, over the last few years we have not always met in conference rooms, but via computer screens instead, at home at the kitchen table.

Meeting platforms such as Zoom and Teams have long existed, but the recent pandemic has made these tools an everyday aid for many people. And, with this, our meetings have changed. If we are at home, there may be new participants: pets or children want to join in too. But even before these meeting forms escalated, digitalisation had had an impact on our behaviour in meetings. Even at face-to-face meetings, participants brought laptops or smartphones and could use them to spend time doing other things than following the day’s agenda.

Meetings in a range of contexts are part of everyday life for most people, whether at associations, in education or at work. The decisions that are made (or not made) during meetings are often the subject of scholarly study, but rarely meetings as a social phenomenon in themselves. Yet meetings are a natural part of many people’s normal life. When we say “I can’t, I’m in a meeting”, no further explanation is needed; there is no need to say what the meeting is about or who the meeting is with. The form of the meeting in itself is not something we reflect on.

Nevertheless, meetings are central to a great deal of working life and, even if some occupations have fewer meetings, they take up an increasing amount of our time. We could ask why is there this abundance of meetings? And how have meetings changed over time, and how are they affected by the all-encompassing process that is digitalisation?

The growth of meetings in working life

Meetings have always existed. They are described in literary classics: The Iliad, King Lear and the Icelandic sagas. The sagas are full of rites for meetings at which negotiations occur – these are the meetings that create the nation. Dutch social historian Wilbert van Vree depicts meetings based upon stories, paintings and, in particular, historical sources. Handbooks, from Erasmus’ advice in the early sixteenth century to contemporary manuals, are given a specific place in van Vree’s description of the rules of meeting etiquette. The forms for the meetings and the participants’ behaviour must, he claims, be investigated in relation to society’s process of civilisation. Although violence had often been used to solve conflicts further back in history, the expansion of parliamentarianism in eighteenth-century England led to formal meetings with cross-party negotiations taking on the task of conflict resolution.

Van Vree’s book, Meetings, Manners and Civilization (1999), describes the development from “campfire meetings” to Mediaeval things, military councils, court assemblies, parliamentary meetings and our contemporary business and work meetings. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when European states with absolute monarchies began to have monopolies over violence and taxes, the monarchs needed advisors with competence in balancing costs and benefits, and long-term planning, who also had self-control and the ability to regulate their emotions. When various parliamentary assemblies eventually began to have greater decision-making powers, in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe, rather than the more or less autocratic monarchs, meetings became increasingly formalised. Industrialisation and urbanisation happened in parallel with this development and, in association with these upheavals, there were increased demands for society to become more democratic, giving rise to a string of popular movements. This development led to people who had no experience of meetings now learning formal meeting practices. Popular movements thus began to organise courses for members that covered rules, keeping minutes and meeting techniques.

And, as demands have grown for politics to solve more problems in education, healthcare, insurance and other areas, organisations have been established where meetings are an integral part of their work. This could involve relations between states, regions or municipalities, but also other types of organisations, such as employer and trade union organisations, healthcare providers and patient organisations. Many researchers use the need for coordination, collaboration and cooperation between and within organisations as an explanation for the growing number of meetings in contemporary society.

Meetings, meetings, meetings

Although precise measurement is difficult, estimations show that time spent in work meetings has dramatically increased. Organisation researchers Steven Rogelberg, Cliff Scott and John Kello showed that in the years 1960 to 1980, managers in the US doubled the average number of hours they spent in meetings. This increased meeting participation is particularly applicable to managers and white-collar workers, but also entire professional categories such as police officers, healthcare workers and teachers are experiencing this expanded meetings practice, as discussed by the Swedish political scientists Anders Forssell and Anders Ivarsson Westerberg in their book Administrationssamhället (2014), which was something of a bestseller.

Naturally, there are multiple reasons for this expansion. One is that the number of meetings is increasing because more people are involved; the background is an increasingly comprehensive process of democratisation. Political and ideological ideals of openness and participation have been translated into legislation and regulations about the representation of various employee categories and stakeholders on bodies such as boards. In many workplaces, meetings are held in addition to these regulated representations, to gain support for, interpret and concretise proposals for a new policy or other organisational changes. In a study that was published in Mötesboken: Tolkningar av arbetslivets sammanträden och rosévinsmingel (2019), my colleagues and I used ethnographic field observations, qualitative interviews and “calendar interviews” (the interviewees talked about meetings on the basis of their calendars) to track mid-level managers in vastly differing organisations. The head of a unit at a youth offender institution explained that there were “lots of meetings at the moment”.

…there are lots of guidelines on the way, lots of things being pushed down the list of things we have to do and to be able to do them, we should perhaps have a meeting to work how we’ll manage to do this and the resources we’ll need. And so that takes a few hours. So maybe you have to add more meetings to that and there are more things that are pushed downward. So it’s… it’s… a lot. Then there are the different groups you have to meet: management groups, and the directors, and everything…

Guidelines need to be interpreted. Therefore, employees must sit in meetings. What will be produced is (in this case, as in many others) a new document with local guidelines and policies. And one meeting is not enough; the interviewees above explain that they must “schedule more meetings” about the same issue, involving additional employee categories. Calling a range of parties to a meeting to interpret new regulations is now a natural way to make decisions. Previously there were fewer meetings but a more hierarchical structure, where the boss simply decided what would be done. In another research project, this time on the dynamics of administration, “An administrative Eigendynamik”, we wanted to investigate how administration can actually be appealing, despite the frequent complaints about the documents and meetings entailed by bureaucracy. We followed everyday life at youth offender institutions, a few healthcare wards and social services units, as well as a project involving border police in the Baltics. Here too, we used ethnographic methods and conversational interviews. Our own experiences of academia could also be inserted in the data, because meetings are also part of academic life. We presented the results in a book called Hidden Attractions of Administration (2021).

It was clear that if new categories of staff are invited to meetings, this gives rise to new meetings – regardless of whether there are formal demands behind the invitation or not. Different subcategories, such as union representatives, have meetings with their own category or organisation prior to the main meeting, pre-meetings are initiated and sometimes post-meetings need to be held with various groups to provide information about what was said or to explain decisions. Organisations with many specialised employees simply require coordination that is managed via meetings. Healthcare is a good example. The staff meet in teams to provide each other with information about a patient; there are also coordinators who ensure the chain of care works well, because patients are examined at different clinics, rehabilitation needs to be organised, relatives contacted and the municipality may need to be involved in home care or assisted living.

Digitalisation

Another explanation for the increase in meetings is the increasingly comprehensive digitalisation of offices. Digitalisation was intended to make things easier, but it also requires meetings, not least to explain the new systems. New digital systems are continually upgraded or replaced, and employees use digital systems to request annual leave, travel expenses and to perform other electronic routines themselves.

Technology has also meant that, in many organisations, administrators have access to employees’ digital calendars and can thus just book meetings without asking their colleagues in advance. For the organisation, this has the benefit that activities can be coordinated. Digital calendars allow mutual transparency and meeting discipline can be monitored, because everyone can see each other’s meeting schedule and who attends or not.

Meanwhile, employees can develop their own strategies if they feel their working hours have too many meetings or too much monitoring. At several organisations studied by my colleagues and I, our interviewees stated that they entered made up acronyms in their calendars, such as PT or MOT. PT stood for “personal time” and MOT for “my own time”. These guerrilla strategies blocked the administrators’ opportunities for booking up the employees, buying them their own space.

Collaboration

Another aspect that contributes to the expanding meeting practice is the now so beloved collaboration between public agencies, associations or businesses. Frequently, the purpose of this collaboration is to prevent important issues “slipping between the cracks”. This is necessary, but increases the density of meetings. Indeed, many collaborative initiatives consist entirely of meetings. To ensure the desired collaboration gets out of the starting blocks, temporary organisations are created, sometimes in the form of projects, in which different institutions will work together. These provisional new organisations rarely have their own buildings or staff. Instead, their identity is provided through a name and via meetings. In several of the cases we have studied, all the activities are organised and planned through meetings. Initially, a new organisation requires meetings at which positions will be established, interests observed and the representatives learn about the circumstances of the various parent organisations. In addition, the participants often also attend the parent organisation’s meetings, increasing the number of meetings for each employee.

Consider how the requirement to collaborate can contribute to accelerating administration. Just over a decade ago, new provisions were added to the Swedish Health and Medical Service Act (1992:763) and the Social services Act (2001:453), stipulating that municipalities and healthcare regions must enter cooperative agreements regarding people who receive care from both a municipality and a healthcare region. This agreement resulted in a ‘coordinated individual plan’, which was to be established for the patients or clients who were considered to need one.

The purpose of this document was to clarify which of the involved institutions would do what and when. A coordinated individual plan has no set template, so all the organisations can and did construct these documents based on their own needs.

Simple and practical – that was the idea. But not only did these coordinated individual plans generate 100-page instruction books, videos, textbooks and so on, they also required meetings. It is one thing for healthcare providers to meet patients and clients, but then meetings began to be arranged between the various care organisations. At these meetings, between the social services and school, for example, basic questions could be asked, like: What is a coordinated individual plan? What’s its purpose? There was a desire to organise how everyone involved was to “observe the coordinated individual plan”.¹

Many new professional groups among white-collar workers have been created partially due to the new imperative for collaboration, and they often organise their working hours through meetings. There are coordinators in numerous activities, but also project managers, controllers, communications officers and strategists. These are professional groups whose tasks are largely built upon meetings and get togethers. They act via meetings and via calling others to meetings, presenting plans, discussing them and perhaps creating new working groups which, in turn, call new meetings. Sometimes, these new professions create career opportunities in the same organisation. Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare now requires that municipalities and healthcare regions have a “quality management system”, which has given rise to new job titles.

In a recently published ethnographic thesis on social work, Teres Hjärpe, researcher at the School of Social Work in Lund, observes how she met social workers who had become quality developers, strategists, planning secretaries, method developers and so on. They still worked for the same employer, but were now occupied with writing reports and participating – and involving other professionals – in meetings. What they no longer did was meet clients. Something has happened; previously, social work was a profession in which you primarily met clients. Nowadays it can instead be a profession in which you sit in meetings with others in the same or similar professions, or report from meetings in front of a screen. In some cases, there are now so many meetings that municipalities are using AI systems to facilitate management and decision-making.

The attraction of meetings

There is something attractive about being occupied by documents and seeing colleagues at meetings, rather than seeing clients. Even if many new employees must attend meetings that are decided on from above, such as by the Board of Health and Welfare, or encounter a set meeting structure, as anthropologist Renita Thedvall studied in EU officials, the initiative for new meetings often comes from below.

Meetings are sometimes generated by an Eigendynamik. This concept originated with nineteenth-century sociologist Georg Simmel, who argued that many social phenomena could not be explained using a simple causal relationship. Instead, there are different self-reinforcing mechanisms within a field or phenomena. One of his examples was fashion, which is driven by innovation, but then imitated, which leads to the fashion being diluted and eventually brings about new innovation.

A similar mechanism can be discerned in the Eigendynamik of administration, which swings from perceived order and disorder, which we discussed in our book on the hidden attractions of administration. People in organisations want order, but they also want freedom, which can cause a perceived disorder and give rise to demands for meetings at which work is given tighter boundaries. Democracy is valued, people want their opinions heard – which is why there are workplace meetings, but this should not go overboard. Too many and overly long meetings can lead to disorder. Employees want decisions and formal rules, but the decisions should be open to criticism and provide some room for flexibility – generating new workplace discussions. In this way, meetings’ Eigendynamik can be driven from below.

One example of when meetings enter such a self-reinforcing administrative spiral comes from a large state-run care project for young people involved with crime or substance abuse, which I discuss in an article called “The Merry-Go-Round of Meetings” (2019). The administrative spiral could be observed at several levels, but was reinforced by conflicts between some parties. The project employed coordinators, who were to be in close contact with the young people and their families. Despite this, the project came to have an increasing focus on administration. The coordinators chose to spend more time in meetings and with other professionals, and less time with the young people.

The coordinators were also involved in something that could be called a document conflict, which often played out during meetings with collaborative partners (representatives from social services and staff from young offender institutions). The coordinators had launched their own document, The Agreement, which aimed to identify each party’s responsibility. However, the social services already had a Care Plan and the institutions each had their Treatment Plan; they felt that these documents were adequate. The introduction of The Agreement thus led to a lack of clarity about which document was applicable. In brief: the new document created disorder. The conflict over the documents thus generated meetings at which they tried to create order, but this was unsuccessful because neither the new coordinators nor the other, older professional groups backed down. In turn, this conflict generated other conflicts that also led to meetings – because who was going to write The Agreement and at what stage of the project should it be formulated?

This project is no exception. Numerous Swedish studies testify to similar mechanisms. Anna Meuwisse, researcher in social work, discusses this phenomenon in an article from 1996 on projects’ hidden functions (“Projektets dolda funktioner”), about social workers who tired of grass-roots work in disadvantaged areas – which they had themselves argued for – and went back to the office. In an article on cross-sector collaboration in policy and practice (“Tvärsektoriell samverkan i policy och praktik”) from 2007, social scientists Marie Carlson and Bengt Jacobsson discuss a project in which refugees were to participate when proposed measures were discussed but, despite these ambitions, the refugees were quickly side-lined and the professionals took the floor in the conference room.

There is reason to question why meetings with colleagues can take so much time when they not only risk raising the level of conflict, but also steal time from primary tasks, in this case meeting clients. One possible attraction is that clients’ problems can be difficult to define and the solutions vague. No one really knows what the consequences of a measure will be during a limited period; instead, meetings with other professionals offer a familiar, well-known ritual.

Regarded as a community-creating rite, meetings have a function above the outwardly rational, such as decision-making, according to organisation researcher Edward Peck. Also, as in the case of the youth care coordinators, the conflict itself may be attractive. Meetings become arenas in which things “happen” and are put to the test: a social form in which you can win or lose. Working with clients is more difficult and more disheartening.

Burgeoning meeting types

As meetings increase in number and become a more important form of work, they are also being differentiated and named, as illustrated in the figure to the left. When we look through his calendar, the head of unit at the youth offender institution, whom I mentioned above, lists the following meetings in a normal November:

National head of unit days, security group, rehab meetings, union meetings, management group meeting, Monday meeting, weekly planning meeting, scheduling meeting, checklist meeting, job interview, hand-over meeting, collegial meeting, social services meeting, treatment conference, residents’ forum, meeting with specialist real estate, salary meetings, internal meetings and external meetings.

Many of these exist in most organisations, such as management group meetings, salary meetings and union meetings. Others show that the head of unit works in a specific field: treatment conference and residents’ forum. For example, in state-run care for young offenders, where our interviewee works, there are admission meetings, treatment meetings and discharge meetings, which are included in the institutional organisation of care and treatment.

It should also be noted that meetings structure and order activities in a regular rhythm: weekly meetings and Monday meetings. Even scheduling has a specific meeting. Frequently, meetings are part of various chains of meetings, which are linked to the meeting calendar that contributes to creating the organisation itself. Names such as start-up meeting indicate that a meeting is just the first in a long line of meetings (review meetings, follow-up meetings and discharge meetings).

The meetings industry

As meetings have come to organise modern working life, an entirely new sector, a meetings industry, has grown, dedicated to making meetings more rewarding and enjoyable. Its Swedish umbrella organisation is called Svenska möten, and provides advice on how meetings can be designed so they are perceived as meaningful. Keywords, like “effective meetings” are found, but it is equally common that meetings must be flexible and creative: the emotional experience of the meeting is regarded as important for the organisation’s success, according to sociologist and service researcher Erika Andersson Cederholm, in her analysis of the Swedish journal Meetings International.

People who get in touch and want help with organising a meeting can get suggestions for different types of meetings. “Outdoor conferences” are the latest trend, and can be seen as a response to the way online meetings have increased during the pandemic. We learn that meeting outdoors can be an attractive option. Organisers can also find information about how to set up a “walk-and-talk” meeting; in addition to the usual advice to be well-prepared, with agendas and documents that are distributed well in advance, organisers of this type of meeting must divide everyone into groups of two or three, preferably people who don’t already know each other, and remind them to wear good shoes for walking in. One suggestion is that if notes cannot be made on paper, then audio can be recorded with a mobile phone.

If you stay at a hotel, for a more classic-style meeting event, then Svenska möten states that room size and furnishings are important. The organisation offers its customers advice and what it calls meeting services, as well as facilities at which meetings can be held: rooms with auditorium seating, boardroom seating, islands and chairs in circles.

A new vocabulary has been created to explain and organise meetings. At a large hotel in central Malmö, the organisation offers “meeting advisers” who can be engaged on site to provide help and advice. This hotel also has rooms adapted for a variety of meetings, with names in English: Ballroom, Flexible, Learning, Purpose, Achieve, Energy, Creative, Inspiration, Inclusion, Dialogue… The presentation of these rooms (mainly written in Swedish, with a scattering of English) is as follows: “Energy is designed for meetings where energy and creativity are important aspects of a successful meeting. It has eight ergonomic swivel armchairs that support the meeting participants’ energy levels and offer movement and enthusiasm.”

In addition, the industry is home to various types of consultants who can offer suggestions for more unusual meeting forms. Sometimes their proposals are linked to general management concepts, such as the lean model, originally launched by a car manufacturer.² Examples of these kinds of meetings are “stand-up meetings” and “whiteboard meetings”. The latter gathers employees around a whiteboard to review each person’s results, such as how many activities they have had, how many patients they have met over the week or how many cases have been closed. This could be done in preschools, healthcare or social services – all types of operations can be dealt with using the same management system.

Online meetings

A new type of meeting, which has had a dramatic breakthrough due to the coronavirus pandemic, is the online meeting, for which a multitude of companies have emerged, specialising in purely virtual meetings or hybrid meetings, at which participants are mixed, both in a room together or in front of screens. One illustration of the growth in virtual meetings is the Zoom corporation’s rising sales in the pandemic year of 2020. Zoom, one of the companies that provides software for remote meetings, increased its sales in the fourth quarter of 2020 by 370 per cent compared to the same period in 2019.³

In an increasingly fragmented world, where many people work from home, therapists meet their clients remotely and students receive instruction via screens, these online meetings have kept activities going. The question is whether this form of meeting will last in itself. Remote working, which was initially enforced, has been appreciated by many employees. Some companies have discovered that allowing staff to work from home is equally productive. Google plans to make it possible for staff to work from home at least two days each week, while other large businesses in the same industry, such as Facebook and Twitter, intend to allow employees to work remotely full-time.

There are benefits to online meetings. Travel to and from work can be avoided and people who are separated by great distances are able to meet easily. But they are different; for example, participants cannot see each other’s body language, making it harder to respond to each other’s comments. Back at the end of the 1990s, when large companies tried to introduce video and telephone conferencing, linguistic researchers Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra J. Harris established that remote meetings did not reduce the need for face-to-face meetings. Their book Managing Language: The Discourse of Corporate Meetings, from 1997, states that live meetings force the participants to focus.

In the studies that my colleagues and I have conducted, and which are referred to above, we saw how employees may sigh when they are on the way to a meeting, but once there they become involved and argue in a lively manner for various issues. This rarely happens in online meetings. Another aspect of online meetings is the partial disengagement of the democratic processes that we usually place a high value on at meetings. The authors of an article in The Economist (5 June 2021) claim that the influence of British Members of Parliament declined during the period that Parliament was closed due to the pandemic. For example, it was more difficult to make spontaneous contributions during debates, and there was a particular decline in the MPs’ informal opportunities to influence ministers through chats in the corridors or chance contacts before or after meetings. In our interviews with Swedish managers, some have expressed concern that responses, questions, comments or opposition are not voiced at staff meetings held using digital platforms such as Zoom or Teams. They believe that this is due to the difficulty of making spontaneous contributions – the person talking must provide notice and will then speak to a silent audience. Regardless of what it is due to, some of the interviewed managers consider this a problem for workplace democracy.

Changed meeting ethics

Norms, or meeting ethics, are linked to the many meetings in contemporary working life. They tell us that we should attend the meetings we are invited to and that we should not leave them until they have finished – and, if we do, we should sneak out with an apologetic smile. During the meeting, we are expected not to talk out of turn, not to talk too much and to remain focused on other speakers.

To illustrate how this meeting discipline is not a natural phenomenon, we can look back through history. The abovementioned social historian van Vree has described how meetings were held in the sixteenth century, when Protestant Dutch provinces revolted against the Catholic King Filip II of Spain. The aristocracy retreated and, with some hesitancy, the city burghers took control of the country. They formed committees and councils that met in barns or meeting rooms where people came and went as they pleased. Not all invitees attended. To improve participation, a “Code of Order of the States of Holland” was agreed, where it was decided that those who were not present at a specific meeting were to be bound by the decisions that were made, which also added pressure to those who left early. An hourglass was used to measure late arrival and, depending on the level of tardiness, differing fines were issued. Collectives similar to trades unions, such as the Glass-Makers’ Society, which was founded in England in 1755, decided to use similar strategies to discipline their members. People who did not participate were fined, as were those who did not stay quiet when asked to.

Van Vree discusses how what he calls early “parliamentary meetings”, which were fairly unruly, eventually became a type of business meeting style as meetings became professionalised. In the handbooks he studies, he sees how the modern meeting culture evolved. The culture was restrained and disciplined, built upon objectivity. Displays of emotion were to be avoided, and the chairperson’s role was not only to manage the agenda in a firm and friendly manner, but also to ensure that meeting participants behaved according to the demands of the ceremonial meeting process.

In our studies, a retired high-ranking university officer talks about the university board meetings of his younger days. This was in the late 1950s, and status was clearly denoted by the seating arrangements: “The professors sat at a large, long table. There were no more than there were seats for. The lecturers sat behind them.” He continues:

 University officer: The upper level of the large Consistorium Hall, was where all the members sat; they had their names on their chairs.

 Interviewer: Like the Swedish Academy (laughs)?

 University officer: Yes, exactly. And as a speaker, you had to stand at the very bottom and begin with the invocation: “Magnificus rector”… We always had to start like that. And then present our case in a loud, clear voice. And then leave.

When, a few years into the twenty-first century, the officer was approaching retirement, he was given a task that meant he once again worked with the university’s board. At that point in time, almost everyone sat in the meeting room with a laptop in front of them. To a question about change, he says:

If you enter a meeting room nowadays, almost everyone has a laptop. It was completely unthinkable [before] to take anything other than your documents with you. Or that you could be occupied with your laptop, and even sit emailing each other. You can even sit and decide how to vote via the laptop.

 Interviewer: You email each other while you’re in the meeting?

 University officer: Yes. Communicating that way to know what to do, when I first saw it, I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. They had quite a lot of attention on the laptop and not on the speaker, not on the actual meeting.

For the official, a lack of focus on the actual meeting meant that attention was not focused on those present. However, you still had to follow the agenda, listen to the chairperson and follow the meeting’s unwritten rules. New technological tools, such as phones and computers, have changed old structures. Digital tools allow meeting participants to throw virtual notes around the room, move through electronic worlds and make agreements about how to vote.

However, the pandemic entailed the use of digital technology not only during meetings, but as a format for meetings in their entirety. This has changed our behaviour.

Political scientist Elsa Hedling has studied how people in power have organised their meetings during the pandemic, and is able to show that online meetings have changed how diplomats regard props and similar items, which previously had to be as neutral as possible. Due to the lack of established etiquette, many diplomats began promoting themselves and their nations. One phenomenon observed by Hedling was how the number of flags displayed by various diplomats co-varied with the countries’ GDP.

However, sometimes organisations want to discipline and streamline their employees’ behaviour, establishing new rules and norms for how to behave in meetings. This is an example from the University of Pittsburgh (dated 26 March 2020), but there are numerous examples from Swedish business and public authorities:

•    Position your camera properly

If you choose to use a web camera, be sure it is in a stable position and focused at eye level, if possible. Doing so helps create a more direct sense of engagement with other participants.

•    Limit distractions

You can make it easier to focus on the meeting by turning off notifications, closing or minimising running apps, and muting your smartphone.

•    Avoid multi-tasking

You’ll retain the discussion better if you refrain from replying to emails or text messages during the meeting and wait to work on that PowerPoint presentation until after the meeting ends.

Here too, the moral exhortation is about getting participants to focus on the meeting, something the interviewed university officer felt was lacking when the members of the university board were occupied by their laptops.

Online meetings apparently invite a certain amount of inattention. Pointing the camera in the right direction is not merely a technical suggestion, but also a way of creating engaging conversation with others – something that is often unnecessary if you are all in the same room.

The second point – the internet is full of these suggestions if you search for remote meetings and etiquette – touches on the etiquette of older times. This is about factors such as clothing (not wearing pyjamas or loungewear) and not eating during meetings (it may be distracting to see someone slurping their spaghetti in close-up). In addition, the virtual meeting room should be staged (for example, the laundry basket that can be glimpsed behind a participant should be removed).

Even if the old-fashioned “formal meeting” with its ceremony and chairperson’s gavel is increasingly disappearing from Swedish workplaces, meetings as a form must remain sanctified.

Guerrilla strategies and fleeing meetings

Digital technology also brings the potential to be both at a meeting and to simultaneously avoid it. This is what the abovementioned university officer regarded as a serious breach of etiquette during a meeting of the university board, or even as a way of fleeing from the meeting. During a meeting that is held in a conference room, with participants who are physically present, laptops and smartphones can provide an escape from something that is perceived to be meaningless – whether this is one item on the agenda or the entire meeting. A person who flees digitally can take the chance to sneak in some work, or enjoy themself, moving their focus between the meeting and something on the internet.

At several of the staff meetings we studied, some participants placed themselves at a distance from the chairperson and concentrated on their laptops. Afterwards, when we asked them what they had been doing, some had been on social media and others had been working in various ways. Answering private text messages or scrolling Facebook and Instagram is reprehensible, but fleeing from a meeting does not necessarily have to be regarded as something wrong, to be done on the sly. At one lecture about workplace meetings I held for middle managers from a medium-sized Swedish municipality, someone in the audience said it was absolutely acceptable to do other things during parts of a meeting; when the agenda covered topics that were not connected to her issues or competences, it was better to reply to emails.

With the arrival of online meetings, it is possible to be in both a physical and a digital space, or even in several digital spaces during the same meeting. It is also possible to have overlapping online meetings. About ten years ago, Lisa Kleinman, an American informatics researcher, studied how employees at a software company behaved during meetings. She demonstrated that, in some circumstances, escape from a meeting can be regarded as legitimate, especially when it comes to email and text messages. The norms that regulated this dealt with how coherent the groups were, the perceived relevance of the meeting and whether anyone with prestige was present. The employees “multitasked”, as their escape was often termed, by writing or reading email or sending texts, while also being present at a physical meeting. This was not reprehensible behaviour at internal meetings as long as they were not writing documents or searching for information. However, if people from outside the group undertook activities different to those of meeting participants, this was perceived as rude and disruptive.

The norms around splitting focus and being occupied by parallel activities, “multitasking”, during a meeting may be changing. One survey shows dramatic differences in how different age groups regard the use of mobile phones during meetings. Two-thirds of young professionals (under the age of 30) considered it acceptable to send text messages or emails via a mobile during a business meeting, compared to one-fifth of people who were older (aged 51–65).⁴

When meeting participants occupy themselves with simple distractions during meetings, they are at greater risk of ethical condemnation than if they were working on the sly. This was the case when the leader of a Norwegian political party, the Liberal party, Trine Skei Grande, was discovered to be focused on Pokémon Go rather than on a public debate about NATO.⁵ The late American senator John McCain was discovered playing poker on his smartphone during a senate debate on the US’ role in the Syrian conflict.

Both cases resulted in public discussion and subsequent criticism of the inattentive meeting participants. The opportunities for escape created by technology have also been accompanied by increased opportunities for the social control of side-line activities; both Trine Skei Grande and John McCain were discovered and photographed with the help of mobile phone cameras.

However, it could be discussed whether what is perceived as fleeing a meeting should instead be regarded as a guerrilla action or protest against the increasing number of meetings that professionals are now more or less forced to participate in. Poker games and similar activities could also be regarded as the new era’s doodling on a notepad – a classic pastime for chatterboxes on phone calls and the audiences of drawn-out lectures.

Mind-numbing, dull and absolutely wonderful

Sometimes, meetings are explained by the need for decision-making and coordination but, home care nurses continually collaborate without holding meetings, for example. They may do so at the start of a shift, through short chats on the stairs when leaving a client, often over the phone or via a text message. Still, meetings can have several other functions. Career ambitions, status and power are exercised at meetings, and meetings can validate expertise. For meeting professionals, they are the arena where the action is, where skills are on display and profits and losses can be brought home. Meetings also bind organisations together, as my colleagues and I showed in our research. This function increases in importance the more complex an organisation is, and the more external relationships it has. And yet meetings are rarely mentioned in the social science books about organisation theory. Instead, the authors refer to concepts such as “structure”, “leadership”, “decision-making” and “power”, while much of this leadership, decision-making and power occurs at meetings.

The organising impact of meetings becomes clear when workplaces are transformed into flexible offices, where employees do not have their own offices; instead, the workspace can be adapted and rooms booked as needed. More employees are also working remotely, using conferencing tools like Zoom or Teams. In these situations, employees do not meet as frequently and, when they gather at a meeting – face-to-face or online – it validates the organisation in general and their individual identities as employees. The company, let’s call it Music Moda, is created during the meeting and the employees can gain a sense of “being together at Music Moda”.

Online meetings, which have become increasingly common, are probably here to stay. This change may well have numerous consequences. The amount of travel can be reduced, which makes life easier for employees and saves the organisation money. The opportunity to work from home may be perceived as a benefit by employees; according to an international survey from December 2021, more job adverts are using it to attract applicants.⁶

Nevertheless, there are some discernible disadvantages to online meetings. For example, over time, what happens to people who spend a lot of time at meetings? Previously, managers and professionals may have had more space between their meetings and been able to take a walk or a break, to take time to reflect on what was to be dealt with. It was also easier to organise a “post-meeting” with selected colleagues to discuss what had been decided or proposed at a meeting. Booking online meetings “block after block” is easier. If employees are not in a place where they meet others face-to-face, chatting in the corridor or spontaneously suggesting something at the coffee machine becomes more difficult.

A number of new words also testify to the problems of online meetings. A new phrase in several languages, Zoom fatigue, is a phenomenon that National Geographic covered in an anxious article in April 2020, in which the symptoms were medicalised: researchers were reported to have said that this “illness” involved headaches and migraines, blurred vision and double vision, eye irritation and pain, a lack of focus and general fatigue.⁷

Nevertheless, Zoom fatigue is being questioned. In our most recent interviews for a new book about meetings, several people have mentioned that they believe online meetings are more restful. There are opportunities to leave the meeting without it being noticed, to take the chance to do the washing up or have a lie down while listening (with the sound and camera off).

However, online meetings are unlikely to entirely take over from our face-to-face meetings in conference rooms, with their associated coffee cup. Without physical meetings we would lose not only the sense of togetherness that can come from even the most boring meeting, via glances and discretely raised eyebrows, the opportunity to send each other messages through subtle signals, but also the energy and the buzz that can arise in real-life meetings. However, even if we do eventually return to more face-to-face meetings, the digitalisation of meetings and meeting calendars is here to stay. This means that guerrilla strategies for fleeing from meetings will develop at the same rate as the digital aids and tools. The digitalisation of our working hours and meeting-inflation is thus something we must consider when we return to the office.

Notes and list of illustrations

1. The extent of this coordinated individual plan is covered in chapters 5 and 6 of Hidden Attractions of Administration (Åkerström, Jacobsson, Andersson Cederholm & Wästerfors 2021).

2. The model was introduced by Toyota, to minimise resource wastage through efficiency measures and rationalisation, including just-in-time production and smooth process flows between a company’s departments or suppliers.

3. “Zoom sees more growth after ’unprecedented’ 2020”, BBC News, 1 March 2021, www.bbc.com/news/business-56247489 (retrieved January 2022).

4. “Are you reading this in a meeting? Women are twice as likely as men to be offended by smartphone use”, USC Marshall School of Business, 24 October 2013, www.marshall.usc.edu/news/are-you-reading-meeting-0 (retrieved October 2021).

5. Ola Söderlund, “Partiledare jagar Pokémon Go på jobbet”, Dagens PS, 25 August 2016, www.dagensps.se/nyheter/politik/partiledare-jagar-pokemon-go-pa-jobbet/?utm_source=rule&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dagliga_25aug_morgon (retrieved January 2022).

6. Alexander Norén, “Allt fler arbetsgivare lockar med distansarbete”, SVT Nyheter, 25 December 2021, www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/allt-fler-arbetsgivare-lockar-med-distansarbete (retrieved January 2022).

7. Maha Abdelrahman, “The Indefatigable Worker: From Factory Floor to Zoom Avatar”, Critical Sociology, 5 February 2021, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0896920521990739 (retrieved January 2022). Discussions about Zoom fatigue contain speculation about the causes, see for example Carl-Magnus Höglund, “Kvinnor drabbas mer av zoomtrötthet”, University of Gothenburg, 14 April 2021, www.gu.se/nyheter/kvinnor-drabbas-mer-av-zoomtrotthet (retrieved February 2022). Other speculations include “cognitive wear” from remote working, see for example Vetenskapsradion på djupet, P1, 28 September 2021, https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/distansarbetets-slitage-pa-vara-hjarnor-befarar-epidemi-av-utmattning-om-nagra-ar (retrieved February 2022).

List of illustrations

Municipal meeting, parish meeting. Bodum parish, Ångermanland. Photo: Petrus Hedström Ljungö / Nordiska museet.

Meeting diagram by Martin Thelander.

3D visualisation by Frank Boston / Shutterstock.

Meeting doodles. Harold Boxer / Cedars Art.

References and suggested reading

Allen, Joseph et al., eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Meeting Science, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Andersson Cederholm, Erika, “Effective Emotions: The Enactment of a Work Ethic in the Swedish Meeting Industry”, Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, vol. 2, no. 3, 2010, pp. 381–400.

Bargiela, Francesca & Sandra J. Harris, Managing Language: The Discourse of Corporate Meetings, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997.

Boden, Deirdre, The Business of Talk: Organizations in Action, Cambridge: Polity, 1994.

Brown, Hanna, Adam Reed & Thomas Yarrow, eds., “Meetings: Ethnographies of Organizational Process, Bureaucracy, and Assembly”, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 2017.

Carlson, Marie & Bengt Jacobsson, “Tvärsektoriell samverkan i policy och praktik”, in Migration och tillhörighet: Inklusions- och exklusionsprocesser i Skandinavien, eds. Gunnar Alsmark et al. Göteborg & Stockholm: Makadam, 2007, pp. 127–159.

Forssell, Anders & Anders Ivarsson Westerberg, Administrationssamhället, Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2014.

Hall, Patrik, Vesa Leppänen & Malin Åkerström, Mötesboken: Analyser av arbetslivets sammanträden och rosévinsmingel, Malmö: Egalité, 2019. Hedling, Elsa, “Så markerar makthavare sin status i digitala möten”, Forskning.se, 10 December 2022.

Hjärpe, Teres, Mätning och motstånd: Sifferstyrning i socialtjänstens vardag, diss. Lund: Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University, 2020.

Kleinman, Lisa, Physically Present, Mentally Absent? Technology Multitasking in Organizational Meetings, diss. Austin: University of Texas, 2010.

Meuwisse, Anna, “Projektets dolda funktioner”, in Projektets paradoxer, ed. Ingrid Sahlin, Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1996, pp. 35–54.

Peck, Edward, Pauline Gulliver & David Towell, “Why do we keep on meeting like this? The board as ritual in health and social care”, Health Services Management Research, vol. 17, no. 2, 2004, pp. 100–109.

Polletta, Francesca, Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Rogelberg, Steven G., Cliff Scott & John Kello, “The science and fiction of meetings”, MIT Sloan Management Review, vol. 48, no. 2, 2007, p. 18.

Sandler, Jen & Renita Thedvall, eds., Meeting Ethnography: Meetings as Key Technologies of Contemporary Governance, Development, and Resistance, London & New York: Routledge, 2017.

Schwartzman, Helen B., The Meeting: Gatherings in Organizations and Communities, Boston: Springer, 1989.

Thedvall, Renita, Eurocrats at Work: Negotiating Transparency in Post-national Employment Policy, diss. Stockholm: Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, 2006.

Van Vree, William, Meetings, Manners, and Civilization: The Development of Modern Meeting Behaviour, London: Leicester University Press, 1999.

Van Vree, William, “Meetings: The Frontline of Civilization”, Sociological Review, vol. 59, no. 1, 2011, pp. 241–262.

Wasson, Christina, “Being in two spaces at once”, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol. 16, no. 1, 2006, pp. 103–130.

Åkerström, Malin, “The Merry-Go-Round of Meetings: Embracing Meetings in a Swedish Youth Care Project”, Sociological Focus, vol. 52, no. 1, 2019, pp. 50–64.

Åkerström, Malin, David Wästerfors, Sophia Yakhlef, “Meetings or Power

Weeks? Boundary Work in a Transnational Police Project”, Qualitative Sociology Review, vol. 16, no. 3, 2020, pp. 70–84.

Åkerström, Malin, Katarina Jacobsson, Erika Andersson Cederholm & David Wästerfors, Hidden Attractions of Administration: The Peculiar Appeal of Meetings and Documents, New York & London: Routledge, 2021.

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond:
promotes, inspires and participates

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) is an independent foundation with the goal of promoting Swedish research in the humanities and social sciences. The foundation was established through a resolution in the Swedish Riksdag in 1964, when a donation from Riksbanken (the Swedish Central Bank) was approved and the statutes adopted. RJ’s establishment was part of the tercentenary celebrations for the world’s oldest still operating central bank. These celebrations also included the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel and the bank building on Brunkebergstorg, Stockholm. The Riksdag and Riksbank aimed to use the foundation to benefit an urgent national issue: scientific research linked to Sweden.

For more than fifty years, the foundation has promoted research in the humanities and social sciences. In 2021, total funding for research and collaboration amounted to more than SEK 500 million. Hundreds of researchers in these disciplines have received grants for conducting research, building infrastructures and networks, establishing new contacts and participating in conferences and seminars, as well as in public debate.

RJ 2022

After Digitalisation

Editor: Jenny Björkman

Editorial board: Nicklas Berild Lundblad, Ingrid Elam, Lisa Irenius, Sven Anders Johansson