ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how meetings turn attractive: how members of the studied organizations—e.g., social services, detention homes, the police—are pulled into the remarkably stable meeting form. Not only because “you have to” but also because these carefully regulated gatherings may constitute sites “where the action is” in an organization. This chapter pinpoints the interplay (and pendulum swings) between plight and pleasure and formalities and informalities that can be found inside meetings and shows how meetings play a crucial role when the administration society of today turns eigendynamic. We analyze how relations and positionings are played out during the meeting’s interactions. In addition, we show how jokes, ironies, and entertaining comments, among other things, bracket the meeting frame, and how participants often insert a more loose and informal jargon into the formal vocabulary by way of passing remarks and insinuations. These features energize meetings, keep the participants alert, and sustain the appetite for more meetings. Although participants also view these meetings as tedious and boring, unnecessarily long, and too frequent, meetings pull attendees together into shared engagement, contributing to the momentum that drives the eigendynamic spiral.
