The Communicative Creation of Meetings: An Interaction Analysis of Meeting Thought Units and Meeting Activities in Three Natural Meeting Contexts

Abstract

Research on meeting interaction often reads like a how-to book, as both academic and popular literature focus primarily on normative, prescriptive strategies designed to produce effective meeting outcomes. Unfortunately, this approach has often led to ill-fated attempts at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of meetings, potentially hindering the progress of many theories in areas of decision making, leadership, social interaction, and information sharing. Specifically, scholars have either limited their approaches to a certain type of meeting activity (i.e., decision making) that by definition excludes some meeting interaction from analysis, or they have chosen an inclusive scheme (i.e., Interaction Process Analysis) without considering how task and relational interactions are used by group members in accomplishing meeting-specific tasks. Communication scholars are well situated to contribute to the development of interaction research in meetings, specifically focusing on the dynamic nature of communication (Burleson, 1992). In this study, three meeting contexts are analyzed using two interaction coding schemes, Bales' (1950a) Interaction Process Analysis (IPA) coding scheme and an adapted version of Scheerhorn, Geist and Teboul's (1994) communication in meetings coding scheme. This project investigates breast cancer support group meetings, nonprofit Internet service provider meetings, and local government commissioner meetings in order to clarify how messages function to accomplish meeting activities, how this differs within and between meeting contexts, and how task and relational messages influence meeting activities. In essence, it moves research past the what and explores the how of meetings through interaction.