Telling Meetings

Meeting is essential to political action. Social movements unfold through meetings (Haug 2014) and meeting is a central practice in policy making (Freeman 2019). As researchers, meetings are ubiquitous to our lives too: we love or hate them, often complain that they are inefficient (Allen et al. 2014) … and yet we keep organizing meetings. Why? What do we do in meetings? What do meetings do to us? To others and to the processes we are involved in? In our experience, addressing these questions through academic writing has proved to be challenging: on the one hand, academic thinking has a preference for the analytical, which forces us to break down our thinking into bits and pieces. Hence scientific publications spatialize our vision of meetings: they provide us with parts of the score but they also prevent us from getting the rhythm, that is, from experiencing a meeting in its essence, which is not spatial, but temporal, durational (Bergson 2012). On the other hand, academic production requires contextualization: the observed meetings are located in one specific field. But how can a meeting be situated in its context without losing our sense for what is happening through the meeting? How can we prevent the meeting process from vanishing into the meeting context? In this article we suggest that a meeting does not exist outside the narrative it inscribes within each of its participants. Therefore, we offer (quite literally) the story of a meeting, told from the viewpoint of one participant, who turns out to be one of this article’s authors. The story (see below: « Zooming In: The Story of a Meeting ») is based on research and encapsulates empirical observations: first, direct observation of virtual and face to face meetings in the field of health policies from 2009 onwards; second, semi-structured interviews with these meeting participants; and third, the results of a survey on virtual meetings in academia that we carried out in April 2020. Through this survey, 814 meeting participants provided us with quantitative and qualitative data about their experience of virtual meetings. This personal account of a fictional meeting is then used as a basis to reflect on how it improves our understanding of meetings, in particular with regard to the meaning it holds to its participants. The latter doesn’t only rest in the words that are spoken, but emerges from personal experiences of what is said and of how it is said. By telling such a personal experience, the story reveals a phenomenon that is very specific to meetings: that of a socially produced encounter between separated, individual pasts. This encounter unfolds in a shared present, a collective discussion that follows unpredictable directions (Bergson 2014) although it is framed by social artifacts (Arendt 1998). But once the meeting has happened, the meaning is there, the story is written: it is embodied by the participants who carry this story everywhere and behave accordingly. This story is as powerful as it is hard to grasp. And maybe that’s the reason why we keep attending boring and inefficient meetings.