ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the meeting as a practice of performing policy words and language work, imbuing specific policy values into children and preschool teachers. The meeting is a place for practicing policy, but the meeting itself also practices policy through its organization, the instruments used, and the material artefact it includes. In this way, the meeting not only makes policy, but also creates policy subjects and policy environments. It is through the meeting that the Lean model, as an example of Bruno Latour’s ‘immutable mobile’ is abstracted and transported. This includes the specific ideas, language, technologies, and actors involved. It is through the meeting that Lean becomes an event-that-models. Ethnographically, the chapter focuses on a Lean improvement-group meeting; a pedagogical reflection meeting; and the children’s circle-time meeting, in which songs are sung and attendance is taken. Jen Sandler and I have developed an analytical framework for analysing meetings, wherein we understand meetings as involving ‘architecture’, ‘practices of circulation’, and ‘makers’. The focus of this chapter is on meetings and on the architectural and material construct, through its templates and procedures and through its practices of circulation through the ideas, language, activities, power, and decision-making that circulate in the meeting. It also focuses on the meeting as a ‘maker’ of governance and management.
