The meeting landscape, its emergence and expansion

This chapter provides a background to the modern meeting society, with a specific focus upon meeting-intense, large organisations. Through empirical descriptions, we show how a specific ‘flora and fauna’ of meetings has emerged, what we call a ‘meeting landscape’ with a high density of meeting denominations and general orientations towards meetings when employees - especially managers - describe their work. Meetings also tend to become increasingly informalised, diplomatic, and consensual. The meeting denominations are often the instrumental ones, but the contemporary ‘meetingisation’ seems to imply the development of a complex negotiation organisation, where meetings lead to new meetings in a never-ending cycle. This negotiating organisation is shaped and populated by new, well-educated professionals in the service society. Even if there are more ‘meeting-thin’ environments, the chapter argues that the meeting is the most naturalised form of work for an increasing group of societal members.