“Stepping Stones” in Opening and Closing Department Meetings

Data and Method

Data have been collected from four Danish companies (medical, petrochemical, consumer products, service industry) and a national trade union, from departments of research, human resource, communication, or public affairs. Names of companies and persons have been rendered anonymous.

In each department, between one and nine meetings were recorded (17 in total). The meetings last from 30 minutes to 2 hours. All meetings are in Danish and chaired by the department head. All meetings were video and audio recorded (using two cameras with wide-angle lens and a tape recorder), except for two meetings that were only audio recorded. In order to capture all premeeting and postmeeting talk, all recorders were set up and switched on before the first participant entered the meeting room and only turned off after all participants had left the room. Therefore, the data show participants gradually arriving at the meeting room, talking together—often with parallel conversations, preparing food, ¹ and so on. The researcher left the room once taping began, except in one meeting, the first recording made. All recordings were analog and later digitized.

The micro level is relevant to study since it is the locus of participants’ rhetorical strategies, regardless of the greater context. In order to make out conduct, attention to detail is necessary, calling for a conversation analytic approach. Conversation analysis (CA) is an inductive method aiming at disclosing the interactional order (“why that now”), which the interlocutors orient to in their local negotiation of identity and intersubjectivity. Each interactional move is shaped by the global and local context and is renewing/shaping the context for the next action. Participants show each other, and the analyst, their shared understanding (next turn proof procedure).

To show the gradually progressing interactional work at participant level, data extracts have been analyzed with analytic sensitivity toward participants’ strategic options as the interaction unfolds step by step. Working with transcripts of authentic, recorded data, lifts the analysis from conjecturing interlocutor motives (“how they do it before why they do it”). Since all details are not equally important in such analysis, attention is paid to show how little details, such as turn design, prosody, posture, and sequential order are co-creating meaning (“show it in the data”).

Laying out the transcription is a methodically central part of CA’s approach to verbal interaction. Not letting the transcript show details, even those not given closer examination in the analysis, deprives the reader the opportunity to falsify the analysis. The meetings have been transcribed according to an adaptation of the Gail Jefferson transcript notation system (see the appendix). In the data extracts, the speaker initials of the department heads are marked with bold. The data have been translated into English for the purpose of this article. The analysis was done on the original data. Both languages are shown for each transcript line.

Results From Studying Openings: Marked Shift in Turn-Taking System

Before discussing the techniques of opening and closing meetings, I will show how opening a meeting represents making a fundamental shift in turn-taking system. The participants move in and out of formality when opening and closing meetings. Formality is serving the purpose of furthering distinct and goal-oriented interaction while saving time, and this may be solved via preallocation of participant roles, topics, turn types, and placement of turns, preformatted utterance design and turn production, and participants may be made visible and audible by special garments, boundary signals, turn mediation, speaker identification, and allocated spot for speaking (Atkinson, 1982), which is probably most evident in courtroom interaction and church ceremonies. This article will show how distinct and goal-oriented interaction is achieved in business meetings by shifting to a special turn-taking system.

Below is shown an extract from a research department meeting in a medical company. Some of the participants (Kevin, Pia, and Tina) have been joking about dressing during the morning, getting ready for the meeting, which they knew in advance was to be recorded (it is the second meeting being recorded in this department). Kevin is asked about having a new tie, which he responds to by saying that he was too busy this morning (it does not appear from the data whether he usually wears nicer ties or no tie at all but that he has dressed this day with the prospect of being video recorded in mind), when the chair (John) makes an attempt to open the meeting:

John cuts through the participants’ initial jokes on dressing up and being busy with the incomplete request “should we::” (l. 3), but is ignored. They continue their talk, and Kevin is preoccupied with the cameras (l. 8-15). In l. 12-13, John responds to Tina’s comment in l. 11 or Karen’s in l. 10, which could be heard as an assessment of Kevin’s behavior. At least three different activities/conversations seem to be going on in parallel, all “meeting preparatory talk” (Mirivel & Tracy, 2005). Again in l. 20, the chair cuts through the conversations, and this time he succeeds in opening the meeting.

There is a distinct before-and-after the “[§I wa:n:ted§ to sug]gest thateh:” in l. 20. Before l. 20, the participants take turns at talk, they self-select as speakers and they seem to decide themselves when to talk, whom to talk to, what to talk about and how to design their talk. There is a local negotiation of turn taking; they use the turn-taking rules of ordinary conversation (Sacks et al., 1974). Any topic choice is possible at this point in the interaction. Before l. 20 it is absolutely doable to talk about clothes and being busy, after l. 20 it is not, and it would take some interactional work, for instance by misplacement marking, to make it relevant or to insist on continuing to talk on that topic. After l. 20, only John speaks for quite some time. He opens a completely different topic, is doing non-next to the prior utterance, not relating to the prior speaker’s immediate talk. Kevin speaks in overlap but drops out (l. 19). The participants are treating his turn as anything else but the relevant thing to do here in this particular sequential position. After l. 20, John controls the floor and all talk is produced with the meeting as a frame. The participants have made a transition from one turn-taking system to another, from multiparty talk to meeting talk. During these few seconds, John takes the floor, secures a multiunit-turn and shifts to another turn-taking pattern that gives him the fundamental right to speak and select the next speaker and topic.

Results From Studying Openings: Five Opening Techniques

There are several kinds of openings: of informal conversations, of turns-at-talk, sequences, topics, stories, of business meetings, rounds of speakers, and so on. The challenge of achieving an opening is taking the initiative to begin something new and having it ratified and accepted as such by the interlocutors. Openings may be more or less formal (Atkinson, 1982), longer or shorter, successful at first attempt or needing several attempts in order to be accomplished.

In the following, we will explore three chairman’s techniques used to open a meeting: “boundary marker,” “reference to procedure,” and “start declaration”; and two participant’s techniques used to open a meeting: “showing readiness to open the meeting,” and “passing opportunity to talk.”

Category Work in Meeting Openings

In this corpus of department meetings, opening a meeting is a category bound activity (Sacks, 1972a, 1972b), each meeting chaired by the department head. Typically, the arrival of the chair of the meeting/the department manager is an indication that the meeting is about to begin. Often, the chair of the meeting arrives as the last person, with everyone else already there and ready. The department chair is the “pivotal person” (Levinson, 1992, p. 73) for the activity of opening a department meeting. For other kinds of meetings (e.g., leader group meetings), this membership category would not be crucial, and therefore opening the meeting not a designated task.

Opening meetings entails identity work, building on turn type preallocation and turn-type mediation (Atkinson, 1982). Utterances like “WELL” does not by itself give the participants enough material to detemine if they, as participants in a meeting soon to begin, are intended recipients. Not even “the omni-relevance of a meeting” and the fact that people have been summoned and are waiting for the meeting to begin necessitate such an interpretation. The same is true for signals such as tapping a teaspoon on an empty cup, ringing a bell, and so on. A decisive factor is who the speaker is. The participants categorize the speaker (e.g., as “chair” or “department head”) to determine in which “capacity” she/he speaks.

The fact that the participants have experienced a certain person in the role of a chair before cannot be separated from the analysis of using a particle to do boundary marking. If that person uses a language item that can function as summons, they might be prone to take it as a summons-to-meeting, which is different from just any one of the employees tapping a teaspoon on a cup, and so on.

Unequal distribution of knowledge and differences in professional status give participants different access to the floor in shifts between participation frameworks (Grosjean, 2004). If someone not belonging to the category “chair of the meeting” performs an action like this, it may be understood as a joke since some activities are seen as “category bound activities” (Sacks, 1972b). Compare Extract 1 with Kevin preoccupied with the cameras (l. 8-15) staring into them and “playing at checking the equipment” as if he was working on a film crew. If a person not belonging to the category “chair of the meeting” performs the relevant actions of a chair, the participants will not immediately see this person become the meeting chair; rather, they might see the person as acting improperly, being pushy, ambitious, or witty. In order to determine whether or not the potential opening is intended as one and has relevance to them, the participants present will look for several signs simultaneously:

When people at a meeting make such findings as “chairman” for speaker, “summons-to-a-meeting” for utterance, and “co-member of meeting” for hearer, they do not make each finding separately; they do not latch on to just one of these findings as the “crucial” one. By saying that such findings are mutually constitutive, we mean that these categories and actions are co-selected; ( . . . ) The use of category-boundedness to produce such findings facilitates the ability to read off, to make co-selections of appropriate category pairings. (Atkinson et al., 1978, p. 139)

This raises the question of how the identity “chair” is achieved in talk. The social actions employed at local turn level shape local discourse identities (e.g., “telling a story” creates the local discourse identity “storytelller”; cf. Zimmerman, 1998). Situated identities

come into play within the precincts of particular types of situation ( . . . ) brought into being and sustained by participants engaging in activities and respecting agendas that display an orientation to, and an alignment of, particular identity sets ( . . . ) [resting] on the underlying alignment of discourse identities. (Zimmerman, 1998, p. 90)

The speaker category “chair” is a situated identity shaped by local actions as opening a meeting. The category evokes reciprocal categories for the rest of the participants as “meeting participants” or “employees in the department,” building on the omni-relevant identities ³ in the premeeting phase: “meeting participant” and “meeting chair” (cf. Sacks, 1972b).

Social categories are organized in collections or families of categories, (e.g., Buddhist/Jew/Catholic), making certain activities and norms relevant. Categories have obligations and rights relative to each other; a “mother” is for instance expected to care for her “baby,” so that a woman picking up a crying baby usually will be seen as the mother of the baby picking it up because it cries and not because she is bored (Sacks, 1972a). In meetings, omni-relevant identities make participants orient to allowable contributions (Levinson, 1992), such as different strategies in opening and closing a meetings:

persons present have to be, and have to be seen to be, occupying their appropriate roles (and that includes listening and talking properly), so that those present can see the meeting to have been properly and seriously constituted, so that business may be seen to have been done in a proper and legitimate manner. (Atkinson et al., 1978, p. 146)

By aligning with a chair’s local actions shifting to meeting talk, the participants may confirm her “discourse identity of “authorized starter,” which invokes her situated identity of chairperson and allows her to accountably perform the act of opening the meeting, which is “category-bound to chairperson” (Clifton, 2008, p. 89).

This collaboration begins already when the participants are in a premeeting phase, showing to be ready to begin the meeting (§4.1). When the chair gives a “contextualization cue” (Auer & di Luzio, 1991; Gumperz, 1982) using strategies like “boundary marking” (§4.2) or “reference to procedure” (§4.4) to open the meeting, all other talk ceases, and the participants further collaborate by passing the opportunity to talk (§4.3). The chair now has the floor until he takes the initiative to pass it on. On the video, the participants are seen monitoring the chair (e.g., Extract 3b).

In Extract 2, someone other than the department head is taking the first initiative to make the transition. But note how he does not himself open the meeting, but draws attention to the fact that one condition for opening it is fulfilled: They are all present. He orients to the department head’s omni-relevant identity as chair. The activity of opening the meeting is category bound to the chair and though the activity itself has no fixed slot in the interaction when it is done, the “doer” invokes his or her omni-relevant identity (Sacks, 1992, pp. 313-314). In this instance, the participant displays an orientation to the identity “chair” and thus an orientation to the projected action of opening the meeting. And note that it is the chair responding to this utterance with a confirmation. This way, he shows that he sees himself as the most relevant recipient of this utterance, and the most relevant to respond. He confirms the projected identity by responding at this point. So, even when someone other than the chair sets the stage to open the meeting, it involves the chair. The employee in question shows the chair that an opening would be relevant, an implicit way to motivate the chair to do open the meeting, and a way to potentially speed up the transition.

Results From Studying Closings: Six Closing Techniques

There are several kinds of closings. There are closings of: turns-at-talk, topics, extended turns as a part of a super format of the speaker taking turns around the table to talk, rounds of speakers, business meetings, informal conversations, and so on. The challenge of achieving a closing in the latter is to organize the participants’ simultaneous arrival at a point when one person’s completion of a turn does not lead to another person speaking and when the lack of continuation is not heard as silence from one of the participants (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973, pp. 294-295). It is not merely a question of ceasing to speak, as silence does not equal closing. Even though informal business meetings tend to be closed as key persons leave (Boden, 1994, p. 102), closings in general should be understood as achievements.

In the following, we will explore four chairman’s techniques used to close a meeting: topic bounding and preclosing, concluding remark/moral/lesson, last call for new mentionables, and declaring closure by thanking; and two participant’s techniques used to close a meeting: showing readiness to close the meeting and passing opportunity to speak.

Category Work in Meeting Closings

Parallel to opening meetings, closing meetings entails identity work, building on turn-type preallocation and turn-type mediation (Atkinson, 1982). The categories “chair” and “meeting participants” are already in play. Going from meeting talk to multiparty talk, they are shifting to another collection of categories: “colleague,” “employee,” “chair of the department,” and so on. By aligning with the chair’s local actions shifting from meeting talk to multiparty talk, participants may confirm the chair’s discourse identity of “authorized meeting closer.” This confirms and reinvokes his situated identity of chairperson, allowing him to accountably perform the act of closing the meeting, category-bound to chairpersons (cf. Clifton, 2008, p. 89). This collaboration begins already when participants are in a meeting preclosing phase, showing to be ready to close the meeting (§6.1). While the chair uses strategies such as “topic bounding and preclosing” (§6.2), participants collaborate in closing down topical talk, and when the chair produces a “concluding remark/moral/lesson” (§6.3) and a “last call for new mentionables” (§6.4), participants further collaborate by passing the opportunity to talk (§6.5). The chair still has the fundamental right to the floor (Nielsen, 2010b) until he “declares the meeting closed” (§6.6).

Conclusion: Openings and Closings Mirroring Each Other

Meeting openings in my data have a stable pattern; using “stepping stones” to accomplish openings and to perform the transition from multiparty talk to meeting talk:

Openings occur at different paces, and it differs how long it takes to open a meeting. It takes a mutual effort to accomplish the transition. Each move by the chair creates a slot that gives other meeting participants the opportunity to derail the process. Not exploiting that opportunity is a display of collaboration. Not talking and displaying readiness to open the meeting play a crucial role. If a meeting participant does not collaborate in suspending multiparty talk, then the chair of the meeting will have to make more than one attempt at employing the “stepping stones” in order to accomplish opening the meeting. It is only possible for the chair to succeed with an opening if the rest of the participants collaborate in letting it happen.

Similarly, meeting closings also have a stable pattern, using “stepping stones” to accomplish closings; transitioning from meeting talk to multiparty talk:

Closings occur at different paces, and in the data it differs how many chances the chairs give to reopen the meeting and how many closing markers the chairs utter. At each of the “stepping stones,” the meeting may be derailed from the closing track if the participants continue topical talk, reopen topics, continue turns, self-select, and so on. When the chair demonstrates last call to bring up something new, any participant may bring up a new topic. If a closing is derailed, then the closing track must be begun anew. Therefore, a meeting closing is something the meeting participants accomplish when they collaborate in moving the meeting further down the closing track. Not to speak is a participants’ primary technique in moving a meeting toward a closing track and once it has been established, maintaining that closing track.

Closings and openings of Danish department meetings are structured very orderly. The “stepping stones” of moving from multiparty talk into meeting talk and the “stepping stones” of moving from meeting talk into multiparty talk mirror each other.

Stepping along these stones, meeting participants accomplish opening and closing of turns at talk, topics, rounds, and meetings (see Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Stepping stones in moving in and out of meetings ⁷

A Canonical and Cross-Cultural Model?

This study of openings and closings in Danish department meetings was originally part of an unpublished doctoral dissertation (Nielsen, 1998), but the fundamental elements have since been found by a study ⁸ of three formal business meetings in a Hong Kong company, documented in an unpublished doctoral dissertation (Chan, 2005). Chan (2008) found that opening sequences included noticeable pauses, explicit signals, transitional markers, and formal meeting opening declarations (see Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Chan (2008, p. 206): Proposed sequential structure of meeting openings at Rainbow

Chan (2008) found that closings included noticeable pauses, transitional markers, requests for additional meeting items, and formal meeting closing declarations (see Figure 3).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Chan (2008, p. 217): Proposed sequential structure of meeting closing at Rainbow

In the Hong Kong meetings opening/closing were “achieved through the following steps:

Finding the pattern in both meetings in Scandinavia in Danish and meetings in Hong Kong in Cantonese suggests that this model might be canonical and cross-cultural. Moreover, it seems to be backed by studies of formal business meetings in New Zealand business organizations (Marra, 1998, an unpublished MA paper mentioned in Chan, 2008). It is still too early to say if the model is indeed global. More studies will be needed on international meeting data.

Interestingly, a study of virtual meetings in chat forums shows that participants in meeting opening sequences adopt a two-stage process for opening their meetings, consisting first of a so-prefaced turn that usually references previous communication by the team and second of an agenda-setting turn that offers a specific candidate for the current meeting’s discussion (Markman, 2007); and participants in closing sequences of these meetings similarly use a two-stage process employing so-prefaced turns in the first stage and a second turn that projects future action of some sort. Both meeting openings and closings could be delayed, or even derailed completely, by competing turns posted in the chat.

Even though these data are very different from the data of face-to-face interaction used in this study, it is interesting that the participants go through a two-step procedure in order to move in/out of their meetings and that implicit reference to procedure seems to be a crucial step. The fact that such a two-step procedure exists in opening and closing virtual meetings in chat forums is another indication of the possibility of a model of wider application.

Lessons and Implications

This study has implications in three rather different arenas. For the CA community, one fundamental insight produced in this article is a canonical sequential analysis of openings and closings based on a corpus of Danish department meetings. Three chairman’s techniques (“boundary marker,” “reference to procedure,” and “start declaration”) and two participant’s techniques (“showing readiness to open the meeting” and “passing opportunity to talk”) were used to open a meeting. Four chairman’s techniques (“topic bounding and preclosing,” “concluding remark/moral/lesson,” “last call for new mentionables,” and “declaring closure by thanking”) and two participant’s techniques (“showing readiness to close the meeting” and “passing opportunity to speak”) were used to close a meeting.

For business communication studies, one fundamental interest in openings and closings concerns formality (Atkinson, 1982), the passing of the “informal into the formal” (as is the case with openings) and the “formal into the informal” (as is the case with closings). These are spaces where new auspices for interaction are constructed. Some crucial points have been made about how formal and informal flow into one another in practice: collaboration between all participants is necessary, category work is entailed, with certain strategies for opening or closing available for participants, and “stepping stones” are used. Furthermore, the special turn-taking organization of meetings should not just be seen as present in certain formal environments but as products of the conversational strategies of the interlocutors, as an achievement for the participants aiming at achieving these particular environments for particular purposes. Moving in and out of formality is a joint undertaking, requiring collaboration and using interactional strategies from ordinary conversation. The ordinary is a point of departure and a resource for producing formality.

For practitioners, the implications of this research are threefold. First of all, the article explores the business meeting format as an interactional achievement, which requires intense collaboration. The article shows just how such collaboration takes place, and which social actions are relevant for a chair to take (and to monitor) in order to open or close a meeting. Second, the article shows how not talking is a primary technique for participants in moving a meeting down the closing track. For a chair, silence may be taken as an indication of unwillingness to share ideas and knowledge, but it may represent a desire to close the meeting and move on to other tasks. Therefore, scheduling meeting end points or being explicit about how much time is allotted for each meeting item might help participants navigate. Third, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of the benefits of formality and informality. Formality is an achievement and performs particular institutional tasks, not to be considered old fashioned and rigid.