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The purpose of this paper is to examine meetings as a form of meta-practice and investigate their role related to management control of innovation development.

This research draws on case studies of two biotechnology firms operating in pharmaceuticals and medicine, which represent different contexts regarding the uncertainty and complexity of innovation development.

The study suggests two distinct roles of meetings in the context of innovation development: meetings as regulating and ordering; and meetings as a resource. In the first role, meetings serve as a regulative mechanism that brings together multiple elements of control into a system. Meetings as a meta-practice regulate and order by bracketing elements of innovation in time and space, rendering the innovation process more manageable and allowing actors to handle the complexity of knowledge. In the second role, meetings are used as a resource, sporadically intervening in the ongoing activities of innovation projects. The study explains how these two roles relate to the uncertainty and complexity of innovation development and have different implications for management control.

The study challenges the instrumental view of meetings by taking a closer look at their structuring potential in the organization. Understanding the roles of meetings provides another perspective on the functioning of management control and opens new avenues for studying the practices of control and decision-making.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the discursive practices used when the agenda for a consultation process was negotiated in a contract meeting. The paper illustrates the role of sensitivity in meaning making practices, that is, how displays of sensitivity were intertwined with topic development.

The paper offers an in‐depth analysis of naturally occurring conversation in a meeting between a consultant and two client managers. The audio‐recorded data is analyzed by utilizing methodology introduced and developed in the traditions of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (CA).

The authors show how both the consultant and the clients displayed markers of sensitivity when introducing various meaning potentials relevant to the topics under discussion, and how they eventually ‘negotiated’ meanings through formulations and reformulations of the topics.

The findings suggest that indirect and complex discursive practices were functional in that they afforded the participants the possibility to exhibit prospectively threatening meaning potentials of the issues under discussion, while suspending a more thorough topic penetration. The study sheds light on the importance of the details at the early stages of a consulting relationship and the consultant's specific role at the beginning.

The paper illustrates real life practices in process consultation. This sort of data is seldom used in research.

More and more organisations are using teams to solve problems, plan for the future and improve products, processes and services. One method of enhancing group effectiveness is to use a facilitator. Facilitators, however, need to be trained in order to accomplish their role effectively. This can only be achieved successfully if trainers are aware of the competencies and skills needed to undertake the facilitation process. Explores the facilitation process and presents both the general and specific competencies that are essential for facilitation. General competencies are those that are vital no matter what type of group is meeting. Specific competencies, on the other hand, are those that are distinctive to the level of group development. Groups that are highly experienced and well‐developed will require the facilitator to have more sophisticated skills than groups that are less‐developed.

The paper seeks to develop a framework for sales and operations planning (S&OP) that is based on previous literature and company interviews. It is designed to help managers understand how effective their S&OP processes are and how to progress to advanced stages.

The S&OP literature, is reviewed and the results of a number of company interviews are presented. These lead to a new framework, with descriptions of each stage, and to implementation insights for managers.

After highlighting key dimensions for establishing a firm's S&OP maturity on a five‐stage framework and, with the use of this framework, exploring in a preliminary way the relationship between firm size or process type (job shop, batch flow, continuous flow, etc.) and its degree of S&OP plan integration, little apparent relationship was found. However, the data suggest that business processes are enablers of S&OP plan integration, but that information technology is not clearly so.

The results are based on a thorough review of the literature and on 15 in‐depth company interviews. Because the sample size is small, the results should be considered to provide only preliminary insights.

Managers can use the framework to assess their S&OP process maturity. To advance to higher S&OP integration, managers should focus on leadership of business processes that can enable effective S&OP plan integration. These processes include organizational structure, meetings and collaboration across functional areas, and performance measurements. Information technology tools may also be enablers, but they do not appear to be the primary drivers.

The framework separates business processes from information processes. It is quite extensive and therefore provides managers with an indication of the maturity of their S&OP processes. Also presented are insights into an intuitive, albeit challenging, process for advancing through the stages of maturity. Finally, a perspective on the future of S&OP integration is suggested that is focused on optimizing profits rather than myopically maximizing revenues or minimizing costs.

Proposes to review convention and meeting management articles published in the hospitality and tourism literature.

Uses content analysis of 147 articles published in hospitality and tourism journals for the 14 years from 1990 to 2003.

Identifies five core research themes, i.e. economic impact of conventions, site selection, meeting participation processes, destination marketing, and advances in technology.

Offers the first thematic view of convention and meeting management issues, derived from the literature.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

The purpose of this study is to propose a taxonomy of meeting purpose. Meetings are a workplace activity that deserves increased attention from researchers and practitioners. Previous researchers attempted to develop typologies of meeting purpose with limited success. Through a comparison of classification methodologies, the authors consider a taxonomy as the appropriate classification scheme for meeting purpose. The authors then utilize the developed taxonomy to investigate the frequency with which a representative sample of working adults engaged in meetings of these varying purposes. Their proposed taxonomy provides relevant classifications for future research on meetings as well and serves as a useful tool for managers seeking to use and evaluate the effectiveness of meetings within their organizations.

This study employs an inductive methodology using discourse analysis of qualitative meeting descriptions to develop a taxonomy of meeting purpose. The authors discourse analysis utilizes open-ended survey responses from a sample of working adults (n = 491).

The authors categorical analysis of open-ended questions resulted in a 16-category taxonomy of meeting purpose. The two most prevalent meeting purpose categories in this sample were “to discuss ongoing projects” at 11.6 per cent and “to routinely discuss the state of the business” at 10.8 per cent. The two least common meeting purpose categories in this sample were “to brainstorm for ideas or solutions” at 3.3 per cent and “to discuss productivity and efficiencies” at 3.7 per cent. The taxonomy was analyzed across organizational type and employee job level to identify differences between those important organizational and employee characteristics.

The data suggested that meetings were institutionalized in organizations, making them useful at identifying differences between organizations as well as differences in employees in terms of scope of responsibility. Researchers and managers should consider the purposes for which they call meetings and how that manifests their overarching organizational focus, structure and goals.

This is the first study to overtly attempt to categorize the various purposes for which meetings are held. Further, this study develops a taxonomy of meeting purposes that will prove useful for investigating the different types of meeting purposes in a broad range of organizational types and structures.

Teams in organizations have weekly – or even daily – meetings to exchange information, generate ideas, solve problems, and make decisions. Yet, many team meetings are described as ineffective by the participants, due to either their design or dysfunctional communication practices within the meeting. To gain new insights into addressing these issues, this chapter goes back deep in history and discusses the origins and functions of group meetings. Building upon evolutionary theories of human behavior, the authors examine the evolutionary significance of meetings and the ways in which they were adaptive for our human ancestors. Drawing from this evolutionary perspective, we then compare meetings in ancestral times with their modern-day counterparts. Using evidence from (a) ethnographic studies of small-scale societies that model ancestral group life and (b) organizational and team science, we contrast the typical workplace meeting with its ancient counterpart. In this review of ancient and modern meetings, we identify meeting characteristics that have been maintained through time as well as those that are unique/new in the modern time. In doing so, we inspect to what extent meeting practices in ancestral environments are aligned or at odds with meeting practices in contemporary organizations (the notion of mismatch). From these similarities and differences, we derive novel theoretical insights for the study of workplace meetings as well as suggestions for improving contemporary meeting practice. We also include a series of testable propositions that can inform future research on team meetings in organizations.

Previous research on workplace meetings identified critical design features, leader behaviors, group dynamics, post-meeting actions, and other factors which help determine the effectiveness of the meeting. But as much as the authors acknowledge that meetings may differ from each other, much of the research appears to assume that it is meaningful to talk about “the meeting” as a single, generic entity (most commonly, the regularly scheduled staff or department meeting). In fact, though, there are several common types of meetings which vary among themselves in terms of a number of measurable parameters such as structure, meeting members, meeting leader, timing and duration, and scope. It is a gratuitous assumption that what the authors know about workplace meetings based on one especially common type applies to all workplace meetings. This chapter offers a historical review of previous attempts to classify meeting types; it then overviews several common types which deviate from the standard staff meeting paradigm, including project team meetings, debrief meetings, committee meetings, site-wide meetings, shift change meetings, and crew formation meetings. In comparing these types to the staff meeting, the authors identify some of the critical differences, thereby providing a first step toward a true taxonomy of meetings.

Meetings are an integral function in organizations where interaction between leaders and their employees and thus, leadership, happens. A small but growing area of research within the larger workplace meetings domain has started to focus on the role of leaders in promoting effective and satisfying meetings. This chapter provides an overview of research to date on workplace meetings and leadership, and the authors identified seven studies that paired the two areas. The number of publications focusing on meetings and leadership is increasing, with the older papers largely dedicated to qualitative investigations of leader behaviors associated with successful meetings, whereas the more recent papers take a more theoretical and quantitative approach, yet are nonetheless largely isolated from one another. Next, the authors review five theories of leadership (full range of leadership, charismatic leadership, servant leadership, exploitative leadership, and followership), and relate each of the theories to workplace meetings, with a key focus on how the theory may impact subordinates’ perceptions of meetings as well as the utility of meetings for team and organizational functioning. The authors propose seven areas throughout the chapter that future research could explore to extend knowledge about how leadership operates in meetings and how meetings are an important aspect to consider with respect to leadership theories. Primary theoretical contributions are the integration of existing work on leadership and meetings and theoretically based propositions for future research.