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Let's pretend this is not a meeting!

Photo och people round a table and a computer. Photo: Unsplash.

Meetings are common in contemporary working life, but they are often overlooked in academic studies and sometimes defined as empty or boring by employees. Three researchers of sociology now contribute with insights into the culture of meetings.

Malin Åkerström, David Wästerfors and Sophia Yakhlef at the Department of Sociology in Lund have written the article Meetings or Power Weeks? Boundary Work in a Transnational Police Project published in the Qualitative Sociology Review.

Although meetings can be described as boring or empty by employees, the meeting society is reproduced again and again.

There seem to be hidden ways to incorporate meetings into today’s working life without arousing critique about pointless activities and deviations from what should really be done.

One strategy was illustrated in a study of a transnational police project. Police culture celebrates visible crime fighting, which is associated with action, physical toughness, and capturing criminals. The police officers involved in the project emphasized the need to avoid “a lot of meetings,” but de facto constructed their project as meetings. Nonetheless, the project was declared a success.

The article analyzes this paradox in terms of boundary work concerning meetings; the police officers turned some meetings into “real police work” by discursively and practically removing them from the category of bureaucracy and its associations with formalities, rigidity, and documentation.

The most important example is how an “operational action group meeting” was renamed “power weeks,” eradicating the very word “meeting” from the term. This was closely associated with increased informality and multi-tasking during these gatherings.

Malin Åkerström is a Professor in Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden. Her research work focuses on ethnographic studies of social control and deviance. Her most recent book is Suspicious Gifts - Bribery, Morality, and Professional Ethics, and she has also published Betrayal and Betrayers - The Sociology of Treachery and Crooks and Squares - Lifestyles of Thieves and Addicts. She has also been published in The Sociological Review, Symbolic Interaction, and Sociological Perspective.

David Wästerfors is a Professor in Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden, and teaches in sociology and criminology. His research is often focused on interactions, institutions, emotions, and social control. He has completed three research projects with ethnographic data from Swedish detention homes (on conflicts, schooling, and violence). A related interest is qualitative methodology, shown in the book Analyze! Crafting Your Data in Qualitative Research, written with Jens Rennstam and published in 2018. Other interests include narrative analysis, social psychology, disability studies, and ethnomethodology. At the moment he is working on two projects, one on accessibility for people with disabilities in urban and digital settings, and another one on people’s digital discussions and crowd sourcing activities around criminal events.

Sophia Yakhlef is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden. She received her PhD in sociology in 2018. Her research interests include collaboration, border policing, migration, gender,  identity, masculinity,  organization culture, the sociology of meetings, and emotion management. She is currently researching the role of humor in police collaboration, successful collaboration, and achievements,  obstacles, collaboration, and identities in senior high school work with students who use alcohol and drugs.