ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the very ordinary business of meetings in organizational life to reflect on one of the standard complaints about ethnomethodology, the fact that it is seemingly unwilling or unable to comment on the social reality of power, made by sociology-at-large. It examines some materials from meetings to see what parties can tell us, from an ethnomethodological point of view, about the social life of organizations and then to tease out, and hopefully correct, some of the misunderstandings about ethnomethodology's position with respect to power in organizational life. One of the key tasks of managers was to organize and monitor the work and to present this to appropriate personnel in the organizational hierarchy. Accordingly, throughout the reorganization there was a persistent emphasis on producing indicators of work and performance and the management information pack (MIP), as one particular way of constituting such information, was assuming a greater role in manager's work.
