Toward an organizational theory of meetings: Structuration of organizational meeting culture

For decades, scholars of organizations, groups, and teams avoided studying meetings as a distinct phenomenon in their own right, theorizing their place in organizational life, and developing evidence-based approaches to improving practice (Schwartzman, 1989; Tracy & Dimock, 2004). However, scholarly interest has grown considerably in the last 20 years (Allen et al., 2018). Academic journals have produced special issues on the topic (e.g., this issue; Scott et al., 2011), and the first handbook on work meetings has been published (Allen et al., 2015).

The recent flurry of research on meetings has been overwhelmingly applied in focus, and the lack of robust organizational theory on the topic is a common lament (Allen et al., 2018; Scott et al., 2015). This is not to say that recent work has been atheoretical. Indeed, meetings research has employed a range of existing theoretical traditions, from sensemaking theory (Dunn et al., 2016) to conservation of resources theory (Luong & Rogelberg, 2005) to affective events theory (Rogelberg et al., 2010), to job-demands resources models (Lehmann-Willenbrock & Allen, 2018), and so on. However, none of these theories were intended to address meetings as a phenomenon that is closely tied to the organizational settings in which they occur.

Although much of the literature implicitly regards meetings as a common activity in organizations (e.g., Scott et al., 2015) related to their cultures or climates, studies of meetings typically stay at the group or individual level of analysis and stop short of examining interrelationships among group- and organization-level meeting patterns. Group level research and theorizing is certainly necessary. It has brought this literature forward in important ways and will no doubt continue to do so. But scholarship may also benefit from a view of meetings as something more than just one among many group processes contained within static “already organized organizations” (Axley, 1984; Hawes, 1974). We contend that meetings are a foundational type of work activity that constitutes organizational cultures over time, influencing their distinctiveness and shaping perceptions of what is valued, expected, rewarded, and supported across the organization (Cooren, 2007; Duffy & O’Rourke, 2015).

Scholars wishing to examine meetings from an organizational vantage point would also benefit from coherent frameworks explaining interdependencies among group and organization level meeting phenomena, including how distinctive patterns of meeting norms and behavior emerge and endure over time, wither away, or are purposefully abandoned. The lack of organizational theory on meetings (Scott et al., 2015) may be one reason such frameworks have yet to emerge in scholarship, a shortcoming this article seeks to address. One pathway scholars may take in addressing this gap is to focus on explaining within-organization similarities and between-organization differences in how group meetings are conducted and how these similarities and differences may change over time. Some recent scholarship has begun to address the distinctive ways meetings occur in some organizations and their relationship to organizational values and assumptions (Hansen & Allen, 2015). For example, the typical way a new idea is presented and the circumstances in which meetings are (or are not) viewed as necessary is likely to be far different in an advertising agency than in an engineering organization or an accounting firm. However, this work so far has stopped short of providing a robust theoretical framework for explaining how distinctive organization-level meeting patterns are developed, maintained, or transformed.

Contrasting disciplinary emphases on particular levels of analysis may also explain the paucity of organizational theory on meetings. Meeting researchers trained to examine organizations from a more psychological point of view are most likely to focus on micro-level meeting behaviors and processes (e.g., multi-tasking, psychological safety, decision making procedures). Meeting researchers trained to examine organizations from a more sociological perspective tend to focus on the relationship between meeting activity and more macro-oriented social patterns that also make up organizational and institutional life (e.g., organizational culture and climate, collective minding). Frameworks that examine micro and macro explanations in tandem are absent (Scott et al., 2015).

Organizational theories of meetings, then, should ideally reflect a more balanced approach that neglects neither the micro nor the macro, examining how micro phenomena enable and constrain macro phenomena and vice versa (Conrad & Haynes, 2001; Scott & Myers, 2010). A micro-oriented theory might posit that meeting cultures are produced in voluntaristic, “bottom up” fashion based on the assumption that what happens in group meetings is largely explained by the groups that hold them, an explanation that excludes the influence of organizational factors. Alternatively, at the other extreme, a macro-oriented approach would suggest that meeting cultures are developed and sustained in a primarily “top down” manner in which group-level meeting behavior results from the influence of the institutional or organizational structures, leadership practices of senior management, or cultural indoctrination. This explanation ignores the agency of individual employees, the impact of individual characteristics, and the capacity of employees to influence their work environments. Rather than pursuing either of these views to the exclusion of the other, a practice that appears to result in groups of scholars talking past one another, the framework proposed here uses the concept of organizational meeting culture and the theory of structuration to pursue a “both/and” approach in which micro and macro meeting processes mutually influence one another (Conrad & Haynes, 2001; Giddens, 1984).

Improved synthesis between theory and practice would also seem to result from this more integrative approach. The most cursory search of the literature reveals that practitioners have had much more to say about the concept of meeting culture than academic theorists. For example, popular press accounts of meeting effectiveness highlight as positive examples those organizations that have improved meetings by establishing ground rules about meeting design, facilitation, and participation intended to increase standardization and consistency (e.g., Tellis, 2020). Thus, efforts to use what is already known about meetings to improve everyday practice would be enhanced if our theories addressed them as an organizational phenomenon as many practitioners do. How do the norms that guide the conduct of meetings develop and endure over time? How do those norms reflect and sustain the organization's culture? How can they be changed? Practical, organization-level interventions intended to improve the effectiveness of meetings need to be informed by organizational theory. If firms wish to improve meetings across the organization, then interventions should be grounded in a realistic set of assumptions about the relationships between meetings, organizational structure, and organizational culture.

We propose an organizational theory of meetings that conceives of meetings as a work activity that powerfully shapes and reflects an organization's culture. The paper begins by establishing the concept of meeting culture and distinguishing it from meeting orientation. Next, it proposes structuration theory as an explanation for organizational meeting culture. Then, combining research and theory on meetings, structuration theory, organizational culture, and communication genre, it presents a structurational framework for explaining how organizational meeting cultures emerge, become reified and endure, or change over time. The paper concludes with theoretical propositions and an agenda to be pursued in future research on the structuration of meeting culture.

Meeting culture and meeting orientation

Although meeting culture has been intimated in a few different articles and books (e.g., Allen et al., 2015; Meinecke et al., 2020), the closest construct to the notion of meeting culture that has received empirical attention is meeting orientation. We assume that all organizations have meeting cultures, but not all organizations have meeting orientations, an index of an organization's policies, procedures, and practices that emphasize, promote, or lead to meetings (Hansen & Allen, 2015). Recent research found that an organization's meeting orientation is related to their teams’ meeting effectiveness as well as individual employee's job-related attitudes (e.g., intentions to quit and employee engagement) (Mroz et al., 2019).

Meeting orientation is composed of four facets: policy focus, rewards for meetings, strategic use of meetings, and overuse of meetings (Hansen & Allen, 2015). Organizations with a high meeting orientation implicitly or explicitly encourage employees to use group and team meetings as an important form of interaction and the overall work process. Likewise, organizations with low meeting orientation may hold fewer meetings. Meeting orientation, it should be noted, does not necessarily describe the quality of an organization's meetings.

Meeting orientation has been described as an outcome or a downstream indicator of an organization's overall culture. For example, Hansen and Allen (2015) discuss how an organizational culture that values storytelling may have a more salient meeting orientation. Based upon our assumptions, characteristics of the organizational culture combine with the norms within meetings to enact a meeting culture, which then potentially establishes a meeting orientation. However, the key message from the meeting orientation literature seems to be that all organizations have a meeting culture, which is potentially manifest in a meeting orientation (Mroz et al., 2019). Thus, this paper develops the idea of organizational meeting culture and proposes a structuration theory-based approach to explaining how organizational meeting cultures endure and evolve over time as well as how they reflect and reinforce the larger organizational cultures in which they operate.

Deliberate effort in building an orientation is what distinguishes meeting orientation from our postulation of meeting culture. That is, all organizations have an observable meeting culture, or the way meetings are done “around here,” as a facet of their overall organizational culture. That is true even as subunits (e.g., teams, divisions) may have variations upon the organizational-level meeting culture. In developing meeting culture as a concept, we follow Schall (1983) in defining organizational culture as:

a relatively enduring, interdependent symbolic systems of values, beliefs, and assumptions evolving from and imperfectly shared by interacting organizational members that allows them to explain, coordinate, and evaluate behavior and to ascribe common meanings to stimuli encountered in the organizational context; these functions are accomplished through the mediation of implicit and explicit rules that act as cultural warrants. (p. 557)

Although this view of organizational culture attends to the importance of formal or informal rules that endure and can be more or less directly observed, a topic we address later in this paper, it also recognizes that culture is emergent and perishable. Thus, an organization's values, beliefs, and assumptions can only be maintained if they are continually reinforced through the communicative actions of its members (e.g., in meetings). For example, if an organization truly values employee empowerment and participative decision making, those values will be reflected to one degree or another in how meeting facilitators across the organization include or exclude members from meetings where decisions are made, how they elicit involvement in the group's deliberations, and the interactive processes they use to allow employees to influence decisions about their work (Barker et al., 1993).

They may vary in their strength and uniqueness, but meeting cultures are present at all organizations. But few organizations have a meeting orientation. Not all organizations are deliberate in their attempts to establish meeting policies, procedures, and practices. Thus, organizations that work on their meeting culture likely develop a meeting orientation, whereas those that do little or nothing to strategically shape or reinforce their organizational meeting environment, instead allowing their meeting culture to develop organically over time, likely do not establish a meeting orientation.

Thus, in the context of the current theoretical framing, meeting culture is the organizational-level construct related to how meetings are done in any given organization. Incorporating the distinctions we describe above along with key elements of Schall’s (1983) definition of organizational culture, we define meeting culture as a relatively enduring system of values, assumptions, and beliefs about group communication, deliberation, and decision making that are reflected in, reproduced by, and occasionally transformed through the interaction of its members inside and outside of meetings. Meeting cultures enable and constrain how members interpret, evaluate, coordinate, explain, and develop shared meanings for what occurs in meetings through the use of implicit and explicit rules that apply to specific meeting genres (e.g., the staff meeting, the decision-making meeting, etc.). In doing so, meeting cultures mediate the relationship between groups and teams within organizational subunits and the larger organizational cultures in which they operate. For more details and examples of the subconcepts within this definition, please see Table 1.

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Table 1.

Key concepts in the definition of organizational meeting culture with examples.

Concept	Definition/explanation	Meeting culture example
Meeting culture	A relatively enduring system of values, assumptions, and beliefs about group communication, deliberation, and decision making that are reflected in, reproduced by, and occasionally transformed through the interaction of its members inside and outside of meetings.	Organizations A and B are both large, well known public accounting firms. In firm A, meetings are used to mark time, enforce deadlines, coordinate activity, and make decisions participatively. Employees have a fairly high meeting load, but many employees say they want more. Firm A seems to value the use of meetings to support a participative work environment in which work is performed with a high degree of collaboration. But in organization B, meetings are treated like a necessary evil and are mainly held when no other modality will work nearly as well
“relatively enduring”	Meeting cultures, like organizational cultures, have characteristics that generally persist over time, but they are also emergent and may change gradually or dramatically, depending on the actions of leadership and how events in the organization's external environment are interpreted.	Organization X had a meeting culture that had not changed significantly in a decade or more, but a pandemic the organizations took very seriously forced an unanticipated shift in which nearly all employees worked from home for over a year. Employees at all levels had little choice but to learn how to use new video conference technology. As the new technology was implemented, some elements of the previous meeting culture were maintained, but a number of new norms were developed that represented substantive change.
“reflected in”	Meeting cultures are observable, especially by outsiders. Meetings themselves are excellent sources of observational data that analysts and practitioners may use to assess or develop systematic descriptions linking normative behavior in meetings and the values, assumptions, and beliefs about communication, deliberation, and decision making that those interactions represent.	Organization Y had a new CEO who has been brought in by the board to bring about major changes. Upon arrival, she immediately noticed employees at all levels appeared to have unusually high meeting loads, and even meetings attended by the new CEO seemed to be poorly organized and facilitated. The CEO decided that an external consulting group should be hired to observe a representative sample of meetings, develop a systematic description of the organization's meeting culture, and design training and other interventions needed to modify what employees believe is expected, rewarded, and supported in meeting communication.
“reproduced by”	Change is always possible, but meeting cultures generally endure over time because they are sustained, continuously reproduced by participants and facilitators who consciously or unconsciously interact in ways that are faithful to meeting culture norms and expectations, a process that tends to reify them.	An employee recently promoted into a managerial position is looking forward to the opportunity to run meetings in a way that overcomes many of his pet peeves about how meetings are run at organization Z. For example, he has always been annoyed that all meetings seem to last an hour even when the agenda is not long enough to justify the time. After three months in his new role, he notes that in spite of his efforts to facilitate his meetings differently than his past managers, all of the meetings he has led have lasted about an hour.
“occasionally transformed”	The process of leading and participating in meetings typically just reproduces an organization's meeting culture, but sometimes meeting cultures undergo significant change, typically when leadership purposefully attempts to foster change via modeling or when undeniable change occurs in the external environment.	The new CEO in organization Y needs not only to understand the current meeting culture but also to work with employees to transform it. This will require the development of new norms that reflect and reinforce new ways of meeting and that gradually alter the values, assumptions, and beliefs employees have about communication in groups and about processes of deliberation and decision making. Based on the idea that communication not only reflects culture but also shapes or reinforces it, the meeting culture is unlikely to change unless a range of employees, especially leaders, are willing to adopt these new practices and buy into the cultural changes they facilitate.
“inside and outside of meetings”	Meeting cultures are an ongoing outcome of the ways organization members meet and the ways they discuss and appraise meetings beforehand and afterward.	Members interact prior to meetings to decide whether meetings are necessary, who should be invited, and how meetings should be structured. They also interact after meetings to make sense of ambiguous events in meetings (e.g., “What do you think he meant when he said that at the end?”) and to discuss likes and dislikes.

Meeting orientation, in contrast, is likely the attempt by organizational leaders and followers to introduce structure overtly into the meeting environment by prescribing, modeling, and providing feedback on what meeting practices and design characteristics are expected, rewarded, and supported. Meeting structuration then becomes both naturally occurring and emerging (i.e., meeting culture) as well as intentionally contrived and created (i.e., meeting orientation).

Meeting culture and structuration theory

Structuration theory assumes a mutual relationship between micro- and macro-level behavior and the reproduction or occasional transformation of social systems (e.g., organizational cultures, institutions). Giddens (1984) proposed a broad but complex explanatory framework that suggests micro and macro phenomena not be understood, as most social science suggests, in conceptual isolation (either/or) but rather in ongoing, mutually influential loci of control. Rather than suggesting that phenomena of interest are mainly influenced by micro factors (individual differences, behavioral choices that occur in dyads and groups) or macro factors (national culture, societal norms, organizational structure, organizational culture, economic trends), the metatheory of structuration is an attempt to explain how macro and micro factors influence one another simultaneously. Macro phenomena operate the way they do because they are enabled and constrained by micro phenomena, and micro phenomena unfold in ways that reflect and reproduce macro forces. Structurational approaches have become mainstream in fields such as management information systems, organizational communication, sociology, and organizational studies that emphasize explanations stemming from relations between social actors as well as between group, organizational, and institutional levels of analysis (McPhee et al., 2014).

Balancing action and structure: the impetus of structuration theory

A primary goal of structuration theory is to give roughly equal weight to action and structure as explanatory factors in the production, reproduction, and alteration of social structures. The purpose of this theoretical balancing act is to avoid the extremes of voluntarism and determinism (Conrad, 2004; Scott & Myers, 2010). Overemphasizing action to the exclusion of structure would result in excessively voluntaristic explanatory frameworks that fail to account for macro structures that enable and constrain action. For example, suggesting that patterns of interaction in meetings are mainly or exclusively the product of the behavioral choices of the groups that hold them or the individuals who participate in them would, in a fairly voluntaristic way, gloss over the role of top-down macro processes like organizational politics and the societal, institutional, and organizational norms that no doubt shape (and are simultaneously sustained by) micro-level behavioral choices of individual meeting participants (Riley, 1983). Individuals and groups decide what they will and will not talk about in meetings and how they will do so, but those micro-level choices are of course influenced by the established norms actors perceive in the work environment. People do have freedom to make micro-level choices about how to behave in meetings, but they cannot choose the macro-level circumstances in which they do so (Giddens, 1984). An employee may choose to correct a factual error in a statement made by their supervisor in an important team meeting, but that choice is made with an understanding of cultural (national, organizational) norms about superior-subordinate interaction, social status, and the degree to which maintaining face is prioritized.

Overemphasizing macro structural features of organizational life to the exclusion of the micro interactive processes through which they are sustained, on the other hand, runs the opposite risk of overly deterministic explanations in which meeting participants are mere “cultural dopes” without the agency to choose otherwise (Winchester & Bailey, 2012). The tongue-biting meeting participant who chooses not to correct their supervisor is indeed making a relatively knowledgeable choice and could have decided otherwise, something meeting theory should not overlook in spite of the undeniable influence of structural norms and organizational culture.

This tricky balancing act unique to structuration theory is enabled by a series of concepts we describe next that index a coherent set of assumptions related to social structure, agency, social integration, and interaction that explain how social action in a given setting (e.g., organizational meetings) reflects, reproduces, and occasionally alters the social norms of that setting over time. See Table 2 for conceptual definitions and examples.

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Table 2.

Key concepts in structuration theory and meeting culture examples.

Concept/Subconcept	Definition	Meeting culture example
Structure	Social rules that operate inside or outside the consciousness of actors but nevertheless enable and constrain normative action and the resources that give these social rules significance and influence.	Many organizations have meeting cultures that emphasize formal, informal, or even tacit rules about the length of meetings. These rules influence behavior to the extent that employees consciously or unconsciously associate these rules with negative consequences, formal or informal, if they are violated.
-Rules	Tacitly understood general procedures for calling, facilitating, participating in and/or appraising meetings in a given organizational culture	In organization A, meetings are typically scheduled for either 30 min or 60 min, and they often conclude before the scheduled end time if there is no further business to discuss. But in organization B, meetings are typically scheduled for either 30, 60, or 90 min and almost never end more than a few minutes early. Neither organization has written rules or best practices about the length of meetings.
-Resources	Sanction these norms and give them cultural “weight” or significance	A new supervisor is hired externally by organization B and begins scheduling weekly 60-min staff meetings. The supervisor is an efficient facilitator and ends many of these in less than 40 min when there is nothing further to discuss. Employees are not sure what to think of staff meetings they see as ending prematurely. Is the supervisor mad about something? Why do they keep trying to rush things? A few of the more outspoken employees mention that some of their peers are reluctant to say much in meetings for fear of frustrating the supervisor by taking up too much discussion time and preventing the meeting from ending early.
Duality of structure	The idea that a recursive relationship exists between agency (a capacity for action) and structure (rules and resources that enable and constrain action) such that communicative action (e.g., decision making, symbolic behavior, messages within and about meetings) is analytically inseparable from the social structures that enable and constrain it.	Those attempting to understand the meeting culture of an organization may look to meeting interaction (among other sites of interaction) for evidence of (1) what topics, perspectives, and behaviors are more or less valued and (2) the social practices within meeting (among other sites of interaction) that shape and reinforce those values. So meeting interaction both reflects and drives meeting culture.
Reflexivity	The tendency of individuals to self-monitor behavior and to modify goals, plans, and future actions accordingly. It involves both practical consciousness and discursive consciousness.	Facilitators and participants develop perceptions about how other people respond to them in meetings, attribute those responses to their sense of what kind of meeting behavior is expected, rewarded, and supported in the organization, and attempt to change future meeting goals, plans, and actions accordingly.
-Practical consciousness	When actors reflexively monitor, revise, and adapt their behavior in accordance with social structures without consciousness or intention.	An employee isn't entirely sure why, but it wouldn't occur to them to ask anything beyond simple questions of clarification in a weekly staff meeting.
-Discursive consciousness	When actors are conscious enough of social structures that they are able to not only monitor, adapt, and revise their behavior in light of those structures but also use language to describe and understand the act of doing so.	A new employee asks a fairly complicated “big picture” question about strategy in the weekly staff meeting and immediately senses the discomfort of others in the meeting. There is a long pause, and peers seem to be avoiding eye contact. “That's a good question, but I’m afraid that's a bigger question than we have time for today,” the supervisor responds. After the meeting, a peer privately warns, “Staff meetings are just about announcements and updates, so it's best not to ask anything unless you just need to clarify something someone said.”
Social integration	When a shared repertoire of social practices is carried out with consistency and reciprocity among social actors across time and space in situations of co-presence.	When members of the same organizational culture engage in meetings through shared social practices that reflect and reinforce collective norms over time at different levels of the organization.

Meeting genres and structuration of organizational meeting culture

One useful framework for explaining continuity and change in communication norms that is popular among scholars in organizational behavior, organizational communication, and organization studies is genre theory (Orlikowski & Yates, 1994). That framework is based in part on the idea that episodic workplace interactions are shaped in part by employees’ understandings of how a particular genre of organizational communication (e.g., a pitch meeting, a performance evaluation, a job interview, an email, etc.) is normally performed in the interaction that reflects and reproduces an organization's culture (Yates & Orlikowski, 2002). They define genre as “typified communicative action invoked in response to a recurrent situation” (p. 301). Communication that responds to a recurring situation and comprises a genre type tends to take on similar substance and form, where substance includes “the social motives, themes and topics being expressed” (e.g., acceptable rationales and purposes for meeting, acceptable topics of discussion) and form refers to the observable physical and linguistic features of the communication (e.g., verbal and nonverbal communication, language used to frame problems and solutions) (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992, p. 301). This theory is relevant to our task because (1) it is grounded in assumptions held in common with structuration theory (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992), (2) it moves beyond representational models to conceive of communication as constitutive of organizations (Orlikowski & Yates, 1994), (3) its proponents often point to meetings as a prototypical example of organizational genre (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992), and (4) the theory shares our assumption that meetings are a group activity that responds to “socially defined demand for … interaction underlying organizational culture” (p. 301).

Scholars have often related the idea of culture to an organization's distinctiveness. As Pacanowsky and O’Donnell-Trujillo (1983) put it, “Each organization has its own way of doing what it does and its own way of talking about what it is doing” (p. 128). The content and enactment of meeting genres varies from organization to organization, functions as a source of cultural distinctiveness, and thus is among those communication processes that reflect and reproduce organizational cultures. From this perspective, “Meetings are more than just meetings. They carry important aspects of organizational culture” (Morgan, 2006, pp. 141–142). Genre theory provides a framework for understanding how specific meeting types emerge in organizations and become associated with rules that are culturally significant and distinctive but often unwritten and unspoken.

The concept of genre allows us to consider in more specific terms the “what” and the “how” of organizational meeting culture. For example, consider Yates & Orlikowski’s (1992) description of work meetings as one example of a genre of organizational communication:

To illustrate, consider the meeting genre. Individuals invoke this genre in response to a recurrent organizational situation, defined generally by the set of organized group practices emerging from the socially defined demand for face-to-face interaction underlying contemporary organizational culture. In staging and participating in the meeting, participants draw on the characteristic features that constitute meetings: substance, defined generally as the participants’ joint execution of assigned tasks and responsibilities, and form, including prearrangement of time and place, the face-to-face medium within which the meeting is typically executed, and structuring devices such as an agenda and the chairperson's role. (p. 302)

Although Yates and Orlikowski never fully develop the idea of meeting genre repertoire, they clearly position work meetings both as a group phenomenon and as a cultural product of the ways in which employees enact the repertoire of communication behavior they believe is valued and accepted in their work environment.

We propose that different types of meetings (e.g., debriefs, staff meetings, decision making meetings, etc.) commonly held in an organization comprise distinct genres of meeting communication. Consistent with the approach to structure espoused in structuration theory, meeting cultures in general and meeting genres specifically are comprised of largely unspoken and unwritten rules and the symbolic resources that sanction their normative significance (Schall, 1983; Witmer, 1997). These rules regard the circumstances in which types of meetings should be used normatively in the culture of an organization and the specific ways in which meeting participation and facilitation should be enacted in accordance with an organization's identity and values (Yates & Orlikowski, 2002). For example, in some organizations, meetings may be understood as post hoc forums for sharing, rationalizing, and celebrating ideas mainly developed by a smaller number of individuals in another setting (Cohen et al., 1972). In others, meetings may also be employed as vehicles for not just sharing and celebrating ideas but also developing, questioning, and refining them (Deetz, 1994).

In contrast with the focus on individual motives, group processes, and an individual level of analysis that pervades much of the literature on meetings, genre as a concept focuses on socially constructed, collective purposes for communicating in typical situations faced by an organizational community (Yates & Orlikowski, 2002). Once established in an organization's culture, genre “serves as an institutionalized template for social interaction,” one that shapes the ongoing communication of members through their use of it across time and space (p. 15). In some situations, members may draw upon genre tacitly out of habit (e.g., using what has become a standard agenda for Monday morning staff meetings). In other episodes, people may employ genre norms more deliberately (e.g., a leader recognizes the need for brainstorming in a meeting and facilitates a particular brainstorming exercise because it is popular with the group).

The repertoire of a genre (e.g., meetings) includes the acceptable purposes, means, processes, and behaviors from which individuals may choose as they propose, design, facilitate, participate, and interpret meetings in a given organizational culture. Genre includes expectations about how a particular form of communication (e.g., work meetings) should be normatively executed. Following Yates & Orlikowski (2002), these expectations can be understood in terms of why, what, who, how, when, and where.

The question of why considers the recognized purpose of using a genre. For what purposes do we have meetings in this culture? How do those purposes vary from meeting genre to meeting genre?

Key propositions

Based on the theoretical assumptions and concepts outlined above, we turn to a series of theoretical propositions illustrating the central conceptual relationships of the framework we propose for explaining how meeting cultures develop and endure. Following Cornelissen’s (2017) suggestion, the following propositions are purposefully broad in scope and intended to reflect the assumptions and line of argument developed above. Just as a theory is not a hypothesis, these propositions are purposefully conceived at a higher level of abstraction than variable analytic hypotheses. Although some of these propositions are potentially testable as hypotheses in the traditional hypothetico-deductive sense if articulated in much more specific terms, we present them mainly as conceptual relationships based on the integration of theoretical assumptions that, like much in the realm of organizational culture and structuration, cannot be verified empirically but are generally accepted in prior research and intended to spur further research and theoretical speculation (McPhee et al., 2014; Smirchic & Calas, 1987). For propositions that cannot be verified with testing of specific variable analytic hypotheses because the phenomenon of interest does not lend itself to quantification or experimentation, research that employs systematic description, analytic induction and abduction, and theoretical sampling with qualitative data will be needed to fill the gap. A number of the following propositions include constructs from genre theory to develop the concept of meeting culture. Although research with an explicit focus on genre repertoires in meeting culture has yet to be conducted, we employ the concept in our model of organizational meeting culture for purposes of prospective conjecture (Hallier & Forbes, 2004) and as a means of linking theoretical concepts and propositions.

As with organizational cultures (Smirchic & Calas, 1987), meeting genres emerge and take form not in a vacuum but in relation to a particular surrounding cultural context. Although they may endure for reasons related to different cultural moments and context, the established norms that comprise meeting cultures originally develop as a result of the actions of founders and other influential members and in response to both local and institutional conditions (Yates, 1989a, 1989b). For example, Schwartzman (1989) and later Van Vree (1999) discussed how meetings emerge as part of the socio-historical context within which they occur. Schwartzman discussed the idea from an anthropological perspective, demonstrating with observational data how tribes in various cultures developed norms concerning who arrived to meetings and when, with the most important individuals often arriving later and later, signifying their importance. Van Vree took a perspective on meetings focused more on civilization and the origins of modern government, demonstrating that the emergence of Robert's Rules of Order was an outgrowth of an expanding need to organize the disorganized argumentation within government meeting processes. In both examples, early socio-historical factors exert a long term influence on meeting genres.

As organizational cultures develop over time in relation to shifting environmental and institutional conditions, members become indoctrinated to genre rules, the repertoire of communication practices befitting a genre through socialization and meeting participation processes that indicate seemingly natural, normal, and good ways of calling meetings, participating in them, and evaluating their efficacy. With varying degrees of knowledgeability, members act upon what they have learned about the use of genre rules as they instigate and participate in their own meetings. Assuming they do so in ways that are deemed culturally appropriate, the ongoing enactment of meeting subtypes and associated behaviors reifies meeting genre rules, bolstering their significance and expectedness as well as the social costs of violating them (Witmer, 1997).

Rather than conceiving of meeting cultures as static or fixed, we see meeting cultures as fluid, emergent, perishable, and continuously reaccomplished through the behavioral choices meeting participants make. How members choose to meet in response to recurrent situations and problems either reinforces existing meeting genre rules or changes them by introducing and normalizing new variations of their substance and form. This is not only in line with structuration theory, which conceives of social structure as emergent and ongoing (Barley & Tolbert, 1997; Witmer, 1997) but also with descriptive approaches to organizational culture that see the cultural elements as emerging from formal and informal symbolic phenomena (e.g., mission statements, rituals and ceremonies, meetings, gossip, organizational heroes and villains). For example, Witmer's structurational analysis of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings demonstrated how local meeting groups interacted in ways that often reflected organizational norms and values while also sustaining them when groups and individuals engaged in authentic local performances of sobriety in the course of their meetings.

Work meetings typically happen within organizational subgroups that may have their own group cultures that, to one degree or another, overlap with the broader organizational culture. When groups get together, their meetings function as disembedding mechanisms to the extent that members appropriate (often reproducing, sometimes changing) normative elements of the organization's culture in group level meeting interactions. For example, Witmer’s (1997) study of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings demonstrated how group meeting norms included rituals that drew upon and sustained features of that organization's cultural value system. When genre rules are observed and reflected in the social action (i.e., behavioral choices, content, and form of communication) that occurs in meetings, an organization's cultural norms about what communication behavior is more or less valued are reinforced.

As structuration theory suggests, members may draw upon existing structures in interactions in ways that are either faithful, consistent with the original intentions behind the structure, or ironic, intentionally or unintentionally at odds with structural intention (Poole & Desanctis, 1992). For example, a leader may encourage a group to use a particular decision-making procedure by highlighting its traditional use in the organization historically and its track record of being used to make decisions regarded as successful. The rationale may be genuine, or it may serve the leader's interests by increasing the likelihood that the group will make the decision they prefer. And both could be true at the same time. Although faithful appropriation of structure may be more effective in reifying an organization's meeting culture regardless of whether this was the leader's intention, ironic appropriation may also produce similar results.

Organizational meeting culture may also be sustained in times of change and transition, such as when environmental conditions or when groups face unusual situations. Rather than reproducing the structures of meeting culture, groups may intentionally or unintentionally alter existing genre rules through elaboration (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992). The impact of such micro level elaboration on the macro structures of meeting culture may not be significant or long lasting unless a group employs the elaborated structures somewhat consistently in similar circumstances over time and unless other groups in the same culture do the same. Elaboration is possible because as institutional, technological, or cultural shifts in the organizational environment occur, the symbolic resources that sustain genre rules become less influential or relevant, enabling rule violations. For example, groups in many organizations resisted the regular use of teleconferencing applications like Zoom and Webex until the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, producing circumstances that required alternate meeting platforms if organizations were to continue functioning. New norms regarding the degree to which colocation was required for authentic meetings developed, and existing genre rules were modified in ways that elaborated meeting cultures more or less faithfully. The format of many meetings changed, but the underlying values and norms of meeting cultures were not altered dramatically.

Although meeting cultures, like the organizational cultures of which they are a part, typically change slowly through elaboration and resist change, there are circumstances in which the genre rules of a meeting culture may change significantly when they are violated to a significant degree over an extended time frame (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992), such as when organizations experience new leadership or when change programs involve the purposeful adoption of new interactive norms (e.g., Barker et al., 1993). A recent example of this occurred for most organizations when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020 (Reed & Allen, 2021). Granted, this is a bit larger scale than a leadership change or program change, but the result was a dramatic and sudden shift in how meetings occur, from face-to-face to online. That shift likely changed meeting culture in many organizations the world over. Furthermore, these sorts of genre rule violations (e.g., switching meeting formats) are one way in which meeting culture may function as a driver of organizational change rather than as a barrier.

Future research on meeting culture

The framework developed above will hopefully lead to future work providing empirical description, validation, elaboration, and extension. Like most topics in the domain of structuration and organizational culture, meeting culture is a highly contextual, interpretive, and symbolic phenomenon, and many, though not all, of the above propositions are difficult or impossible to validate with experimental methods designed to isolate phenomena from situated social and historical organizational contexts (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992). Quantitative field research may be used, for example, to examine relationships between the distinctiveness of an organization's culture, established dimensions of organizational culture, and elements of meeting culture that may be quantified, such as the distinctiveness of the meeting culture itself. Where hypothetico-deductive research is not feasible, other methodological traditions, such as those commonly used in interpretive research on organizations (Putnam, 1983) emphasizing systematic description and analytic induction and abduction (Tracy, 2019) may be needed to incorporate the normative scope of specific organizational cultures.

We anticipate that future work will need to involve synchronic and diachronic study (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992). Synchronic analysis would be well positioned to develop systematic description of existing genre elements that comprise specific organizational meeting cultures, including the forms of meeting communication, commonly associated meeting content, and situational characteristics that lead to the espoused need for meetings and specific meeting purposes. Diachronic studies, in turn, could be used to analyze how meeting cultures develop, are reproduced, and are transformed over time in response to changes in organizational and institutional environments (e.g., technological or regulatory change).

Whether synchronic or diachronic, application of structuration theory to the topic of meeting culture would not only illuminate meeting culture as a phenomenon, but also provide opportunities to extend, revise, or enrich structuration theory. This may involve incorporation of other theoretical frameworks that can be combined harmoniously with structuration. For example, recent work on structuration theory by Haslett (2012) extended it by incorporating micro concepts from frame theory and Goffman's interaction order, which she argues provides an expanded view of the impact of local organizational context and the relationship between practical consciousness of members and the behavioral choices they make in interaction.

Conclusion

Research on meetings has flourished in recent years, and there is a growing recognition that meetings are related to important outcomes for individual employees and the groups and organizations in which they work. We have argued that this important research stream would benefit from theory that conceives of meetings not just as activity that happens in organizations but also a critical factor in the ongoing production and transformation of organizational cultures. Our hope is that the framework we presented here will spur future research that does even more to acknowledge the role of meetings in shaping the texture and experience of organizational life.