Meetings: Discursive Sites for Building and Fragmenting Community

AbstractMeetings are talk-saturated events in which people come together to tackle a variety of explicit goals and tacit concerns. They enable accomplishments of people's most valued ideals (e.g., democracy, voice); at the same time, meetings are also practices that are the frequent objects of derision and complaint. The review synthesizes and critiques descriptive and normative ideas about meetings, drawing on both academic and popular literature. After a definitional discussion of the term and a brief history of how meetings came to be, the chapter turns to its main focus: the routine and problematic practices of organizational work meetings and public meetings. Within each type, special attention is given to how meetings build and fracture community and communities. The conclusion argues why future communication research should foreground meetings and take them as objects of study—rather than, as has been the usual practice, treat them as noninteresting containers for other communication processes.