Meetings as Rituals

Abstract

As the earlier chapters in this book have sought to demonstrate, the ability of organisations to deliver a more or less coherent set of activities depends on the extent to which they can achieve settlement, at least to some degree, between the preferred ways of organising: of their staff; their service users (and, in health and social care services, unpaid carers too); policy-makers; and their own management. As part of the process of exemplifying the espoused values that result from this settlement, organisations also need to sustain, over time, some shared sense-making both around decisions in specific areas and between their different spheres of activity. The day-to-day work of shaping and sustaining organisational cohesion (and, in particular, consistency of decisions) is typically done in meetings. As a consequence, the challenges to established patterns of settlement and sense-making represented by innovations in policy are played out in such meetings. It is important, therefore, to explore the roles of meetings as mechanisms through which the capacity and willingness of members of organisations — and, indeed, organisational partnerships — to implement policy intelligently, appropriately and on the basis of shared information are mediated.