Status Contests in Meetings: Negotiating the Informal Order

Meetings can be more than an occasion to do work. Schwartzman (1986) argued that meetings often become arenas where a group’s status order is “played and displayed.” This view of meetings has received little attention in research on behavior in organizations. In this chapter, we develop Schwartzman’s observation. We describe the status organizing processes that occur in face-to-face groups and treat meetings as occasions for status contests (Maclay & Kneipe, 1972).