tim newton - norbert elias and the future of organization studies.pdf

The Civilized OrganizationNorbert Elias and the future of Organization Studies

Advances in Organization Studies

Advances in Organization Studies includes cutting-edge work in comparativemanagement and intercultural comparison, studies of organizational culture,communication, and aesthetics, as well as in the area of interorganizationalcollaboration strategic alliances, joint ventures, networks and collaborations ofall kinds, where comparative, intercultural, and communicative issues have anespecial salience. Purely theoretical as well as empirically based studies are included.

General Editors

Stewart CleggSchool of ManagementUniversity of Technology SydneyQuay Street, HaymarketP.O.Box 123Broadway, NSW [email protected]

Alfred KieserUniversity of MannheimD 68 131 [email protected]

Volume 10

The Civilized Organization: Norbert Elias and the future of Organization StudiesEdited by Ad van Iterson, Willem Mastenbroek, Tim Newton and Dennis Smith

The Civilized Organization

Norbert Elias and the futureof Organization Studies

Edited by

Ad van ItersonMaastricht University

Willem MastenbroekVrije Universiteit, Amsterdam

Tim NewtonUniversity of Exeter

Dennis SmithLoughborough University

John Benjamins Publishing CompanyAmsterdam/Philadelphia

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American8 TM National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed LibraryMaterials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Civilized Organization : Norbert Elias and the future of Organization Studies / edited by Advan Iterson, Willem Mastenbroek, Tim Newton and Dennis Smith.

p. cm. (Advances in Organization Studies, issn 15661075 ; v. 10)Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

1. Organizational behavior. 2. Organizational sociology. 3. Elias, Norbert. I. Iterson, Advan, 1952- II. Series.

HD58.7 C593 2002302.35--dc21 2002027971isbn 90 272 3309 8 (Eur.) / 1 58811 278 0 (US) (Pb; alk. paper)isbn 90 272 3308 X (Eur.) / 1 58811 277 2 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)

2002 John Benjamins B.V.No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microlm, or anyother means, without written permission from the publisher.

John Benjamins Publishing Co. P.O. Box 36224 1020 me Amsterdam The NetherlandsJohn Benjamins North America P.O. Box 27519 Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 usa

Table of contents

Introduction: Norbert Elias and the civilized organization viiTim Newton and Dennis Smith

Part IOrganizing Discourse 11. The development of meeting behaviour in modern organizations

and the rise of an upper class of professional chairpersons 3Wilbert van Vree

2. Blame and praise gossip in organizations: Established, outsiders andthe civilising process 25Joseph Soeters and Ad van Iterson

3. The humiliating organization: The functions and dysfunctions ofdegradation 41Dennis Smith

Part IINegotiating Boundaries 594. About individual autonomy and the relational self: The performance

of privacy in contemporary organizations 61Marja Gastelaars

5. Figurational sociology, monopolization and corporate governance 85Ruud Stokvis

6. Boundary behaviour and organizational dynamics 99Tor Hernes

Part IIICrossing Cultures 1177. From the socio-historical macro model to organizational behaviour:

A comparative study of coordination in organizations in France andGermany 119Tatjana Globokar

vi Table of contents

8. The evolution f management theories in China: An Eliasiananalysis 131Stephen Chen

9. Cultivating Indian management: Institutions, subjectivity, andthe nature of knowledge 151Nidhi Srinivas

Part IVTheorizing Practice 17110. Norbert Elias as organizational sociologist 173

Willem Mastenbroek

11. Elias, organizations and ecology 189Tim Newton

12. Management and organization: Does Elias give us somethingto hold on to? 205Willem Mastenbroek

Notes 219

References 225

Index 247

Introduction

Norbert Elias and the civilized organization

Tim Newton and Dennis Smith

Time for Elias

Organization studies is an exciting eld: multidisciplinary, receptive to new ideas,full of argument and debate. High standards of scholarship are combined with ahigh degree of mutual tolerance among diverse approaches. But where is the eldof organization studies going?

A survey of the articles in a key American journal, Administrative ScienceQuarterly, for the period 19982001 reveals certain repeated key words or conceptsin their titles. Apart from the expected references to technology, strategy, bureau-cracy, markets, work and gender, ve clusters of ideas appear repeatedly. Onecluster relates to networks and associated concepts such as strategic alliances,interlocks, exchange relations and the complementary idea of boundaries.1 Anothercluster brings together dimensions of power, control and resistance including suchideas as conict, struggle, surveillance and coercion.2

A further cluster is concerned with aspects of culture, language and knowledgeand related ideas such as symbolic management, learning, social construction,fashion, ideology, cognition, rhetoric and legitimacy.3 Change and related conceptssuch as evolution and innovation also repeatedly appear as themes, sometimesconsidered in the short term, sometimes in the long term.4 Finally, there is a clusterfocusing upon issues of identity, the self and emotionality, which also encompassesimpression management, image and reputation.5

If we turn to a leading European journal,Organization Studies, and look at thesame period, 19982001, a similar pattern emerges. There is, once again, a preoccu-pation with

networks6

power, control and resistance7

culture, language and knowledge8

viii Introduction

change9

identity, the self and emotionality10

These varying approaches may be seen in part as forms of critical reaction againstthe functionalist and positivist paradigms that reigned supreme in the heyday ofTalcott Parsons and Paul Lazarsfeld during the 1950s. C. Wright Millss attackupon grand theory and abstracted empiricism in 1959 has been thoroughlyvindicated in the development of organization studies.11 Four decades later:

instead of strongly-bounded Parsonian systems (economy, family, state, etc)carrying out specic functional tasks, scholars now perceive complex, inter-twining networks linking individuals, groups and organizations, often obscur-ing the boundaries between dierent functions and arenas;

instead of treating power merely as a capacity that enables organizationalfunctions to be properly performed, the varying dynamics represented byresistance, conict or enrolment have been brought back in;

instead of simplymaking quantitativemeasurements of variables, researchersnow look inside social relationships so as to discover their symbolic andemotional meaning for those involved and to investigate the way meaningsare constructed and expressed; and

instead of assuming that systems have a built-in tendency to maintain a pre-ordained equilibrium, investigators treat organizational and social change asthe key tendency whose direction has to be discovered by careful analysis usingcomparative and historical techniques.

The explosion of organization studies over the past four decades has been a kind ofbig bang that has sent researchers in many directions searching for theoreticalresources to fuel their empirical inquiries. Writers have seized with enthusiasmupon (for example) Actor-Network Theory, neo-Marxist approaches, and the workof writers such as Michel Foucault, Geert Hofstede and Arlie Hochschild. But howdo these writers and their theoretical approaches relate to each other? Or, moregenerally, are there ways of making links between the thematic clusters that are, ashas been seen, prominent inmajor journals such as Administrative Science Quarter-ly and Organization Studies?

The essays in this book provide one answer to this question. The editors andcontributors share the view that the time is ripe for paying more attention withinthe eld of organization studies to the work of a writer whose approach weavestogether, within a single framework, a focus on networks (he calls them gur-ations), a concern with power, control and resistance, a deep interest in culture,language and knowledge, a preoccupation with processes of social change, and astrong interest in identity, the self and emotionality.

Introduction ix

We are referring to Norbert Elias who was, coincidentally, a near contemporaryof both Talcott Parsons and Paul Lazarsfeld.12 Elias died in 1990 at the age ofninety-three but his work remains as a valuable legacy, not least to organizationstudies.13 Elias is important because his work brings together in one take thenexus of power, emotion, subjectivity, conict and control, and shows how theyundergo long-term transformations. Hemoves quickly and skillfully between thesedierent perspectives, giving the reader a dynamic, multi-dimensional picture. Inthis way, Elias explores what are conventionally seen as the political, the cultural,the economic and the psychological, and in so doing, his work mounts a continuedattack on the divides between the social and the biological, nature andsociety, micro and macro, agency and structure etc.

Eliass most famous work is The Civilizing Process (Elias, 1994a) in which hemakes connections between long-term tendencies in social and political macro-structures (such as the state, class relationships and the organization of theeconomy) and the way structures of thought and feeling develop within thepopulation. To oversimplify, as state structures became more centralized andstable, social relations became increasingly pacied (less violent) and human beingslearned to exercise higher levels of control over themselves, each other and theenvironment.

Another key text by Elias is The Court Society (Elias, 1983) which is a powerfulexample of how to analyze the crystallization of a specic network (or guration)at a specic phase in the working out of long-term social processes. Elias showshow the centralization and relative stabilization of power balances allowed themonarchy to disarm the nobility and turn unruly warriors into disciplinedcourtiers.14 The Court Society provides insights into the formation of status hierar-chies, tensions within those hierarchies and the part played by language andetiquette in conducting and containing feuds among pacied underlings. Theseinsights could be usefully adapted by, for example, students of corporate take-overs, analysts of the European Union and anyone wishing to understand theworkings of the WTO.15

We do not think Elias was right on all matters. For example, his approach tocapitalism paid little overt attention to the growth of large corporations during thetwentieth century and appeared to be unaected by the contributions of, forexample, Schumpeter and Galbraith. However, Eliass work has an openness thatallows other theoretical approaches to be combined with it at many points.16 Thisis reected in the present volume which contains varied, and sometimes divergent,interpretations and applications of Elias. His insights are combined with conceptsand interpretations drawn from a mixture of thinkers ranging from Foucault andCallon to Schumpeter and Moore. The successive chapters illustrate the potentialof Eliasian analysis, either alone or in combination with other approaches. The

x Introduction

argument moves between the macro and the micro level, examining the broadernational and international contexts of management practice but also focusing uponthe internal dynamics of organizations.

Following this introductory chapter, the book is organized in four parts eachcontaining three chapters. In the rst part, entitled Organizing Discourse, Williamvan Vree provides an Eliasian analysis of meetings within organizations. JosephSoeters and Ad van Iterson explore the role of gossip as an aspect of organizationalpower struggles. Both chapters draw out dierent ways in which groups andindividuals compete to dene themselves and others in relation to the organization.These emphases are continued in Dennis Smiths chapter. This presents an analysisof shame and humiliation processes within organizations, one which both comple-ments and challenges Eliass approach.

The second part, Negotiating Boundaries, explores social processes andstrategic issues that traverse the boundaries of organizations. Marja Gastelaarsshows how the issue of privacy throws light onto ambiguities and tensions in therelationships between the state and other organizations. Ruud Stokvis explores thenetwork of stakeholders with an interest in the performance of corporate manage-ment, paying particular attention to the power of outside investors in relation toexecutives within the rm. Finally, Tod Hernes analyses the special role ofboundary workers in negotiating the limits of organizations, paying attention tothe part played by etiquette.

In the third part, entitled Crossing Cultures, Tatjana Globokar, StephenChen and Nidhi Srinivas draw upon Elias in their analyses of, respectively, workorientations, business systems and management education. The three chaptersprovide a comparative and historical overview of two European cases Franceand Germany and two Asian cases China and India.

The fourth part, Theorizing Practice, focuses on challenges confronted bycontemporary management. Firstly, William Mastenbroek concentrates on theparadox that managers are given increased freedom within organizations butimpose a greater degree of control upon themselves. Following this, Tim Newtonexplores the contribution of an Eliasian perspective to our understanding of thegreening of organisations, green technologies and issues of globalization. Finally,in a concluding chapter, Willem Mastenbroek shows how Eliasian concepts havehelped with practical notions and specic interventions in the spheres of organi-sational design, change management and management styles.

In the rest of this introductory chapter there are three tasks to be carried out.First, some key concepts and themes in Eliass work will be set out. Secondly, wewill relate these themes to debates in organization theory. Finally, the relevance ofElias to current concerns in organization analysis will be considered.

Introduction xi

Key Eliasian concepts and themes

FigurationThe concept of guration is central to Eliass argument. By guration, Elias refersto the complex network of social interdependencies which surround everyday life.Such interdependencies have developed gradually across the changing social andpolitical landscape of particular epochs (Elias, 1991a, 1994a). They reect theunderlying regularities by which people in a certain society are bound over andover again to particular patterns of conduct and very specic functional chains, forexample as knights and bondsmen, kings and state ocials, bourgeois and nobles.(1994a:489). Elias stresses that particular gurations are not xed since powerrelations are rarely those of total dominance but reect the changing balancesbetween individuals and groups. Elias sees power as relational, as a game ofinterdependencies where the participants always have control over each other(Elias, 1970:81, original emphasis).

A hidden orderElias (1991a:13) also stresses that any apparent social order in our world is notplanned or intended. This is because gurations, or interdependency networks,represent the interweaving of dierent groups and individuals, none of whom cansecond-guess the actions of others. As Elias puts it, any outcome represents theinterweaving of countless individual interests and intentions (1994a:389, addedemphasis). As a consequence, it is dicult for any one individual or group todetermine history since their intentions and actions are always likely to bemoderated by others on whom they are dependent.

This means that for strategists there is unlikely to be any simple relationbetween a particular strategy and a particular outcome because any particularstrategy is likely to moderate, deviate or mutate as its is interwoven within theactions of a host of dierent players. In an organizational context, corporatestrategy is unlikely to be implemented as intended since any deliberate strategywill become interwoven with the actions of employees, suppliers, clients, competi-tors, state and intergovernmental agencies etc. Any order that results from suchinterweaving is therefore likely to be as much unintended as intended.

An Eliasian perspective therefore supports Henry Mintzbergs argument thatemergent strategy means, literally, unintended order (1990:152, added emphasis).As Elias argues, something comes into being that was planned and intended bynone of these individuals, yet has emerged nevertheless from their intentions andactions (Elias, 1994a:389). More generally, we are all dependent on each other, andfrom the early Middle Ages onwards, these interdependencies have grown in lengthand complexity. Any individual or group is therefore situated in a plethora of

xii Introduction

networks and chains and their feelings and actions cannot be understood outsideof these complex interdependencies.

Homo clausus and Homines apertiElias argues that a characteristic of modernity is that people often remain largelyunaware of the complex interdependencies in which they are situated. In conven-tional terms, they feel divorced from society. Psychologically it is as though thereis an invisible barrier [that] separates their inside from everything outsidethe so-called outside world (Elias, 1970:119). In part, this feeling reectsprocesses of individualization in Western societies. For Elias, this increasingindividualization is a process of civilization where tensions between the socialcommands and prohibitions are internalized as self control (Elias, 1991a:121,added emphasis). It represents a privitization (Elias, 1991a:122 a themedeveloped in the chapter by Marja Gastelaars).

One consequence is that people increasingly experience themselves as a closedbox, what Elias (1970) called Homo clausus. Elias argued that Homo claususrepresents a common, yet limiting, assumption of much of the social sciences,especially psychology. Against this view, he argued for a recognition of people asHomines aperti, which represents a vision of people in the plural; we obviouslyneed to start out with the image of a multitude of people, each of them relativelyopen, interdependent processes (1970:121)

In promoting Homines aperti, Elias was concerned to show that we can onlyunderstand ourselves if we see how power relations reect a complex interweavingof interdependencies amongst people, a networked agency. In understandingpower and human agency, the focus is necessarily therefore on interdependenciesand networks, rather than the decisions and actions of individual sovereign actors.Conventionally, we fail to question this supposed sovereignty, to recognise howvery personal aspects of our identity may be conditioned by lengthy historicalinterdependency networks (Newton, 1998a). For instance, since the history ofembarrassment surrounding bodily exposure is hidden from us, it just seems partof us and our identity. In a related argument, Beck suggests that the divorce of theindividual from her history has accelerated in advanced modernity so that formsof perception become ahistorical (1992:135). Yet because we remain isolatedfrom historical (and contemporary) networks, we fail to recognise the complexityof people in the plural (Elias, 1970:121), the sense of Homines aperti.

Reecting his emphasis onHomines aperti, Elias could never conne himself tolooking only at the inside of an organization. He was as wary of the idea ofOrganization clausus17 (or the idea of organizations as bounded and autonomousentities) as by that of Homo clausus. Elias refused to accept the reality of a sharpdistinction between inside and outside organizations. Instead, his analyses cross

Introduction xiii

the boundaries of organizations (whether they be families, royal courts, navalbureaucracies, duelling societies or scientic establishments), a theme which isexplored in Tod Herness chapter.

Interdependency, emotion and social disciplineLike other twentieth century writers such as Weber, Foucault or Mannheim, Eliaswas concerned with how we come to learn social discipline. Following his emphasisupon gurations, he saw such discipline as a consequence of the interdependencynetworks in which we are situated, and the development of these networks overtime. In these detailed historical studies, Elias illustrates how interdependency andsubjectivity are interwoven, particular as they relate to our emotions and to whathe termed self-constraint or restraint. However as van Krieken notes, the termsocial discipline may be more appropriate since Elias was concerned with thepositive, productive aspects of the eects of social gurations on human habitus(van Krieken, 1998:133).

His best known example of the interrelation between guration and disciplinecomes from his studies of the formation of the royal courts of Western Europe(especially France), described in The Court Society (Elias, 1983) and The CivilizingProcess (Elias, 1994a). Though these analyses are clearly not concerned with presentday organizations, they are worth exploring in some detail in order to illustrate theEliasian interpretation of power and subjectivity.

Through lengthy and detailed analysis, Elias reveals how the subjectivity ofknights and chieftains was interwoven with gurational change, particularly themonopolisation of violence that occurred with the development of stable monar-chies. Elias illustrates how, prior to this monopolisation, individuals could takeopen pleasure in acts of violence and were subject to rather limited emotional andbehavioural restraint in comparison with that which pertains in contemporaryWestern society. However the monarchic monopolisation of the means of violencemeant that knights and chieftains no longer warred over their individual efdoms,but instead became the new subjects of a centralised power. Royal courts represent-ed new kinds of interdependency network characterised by pacied social spaces(Elias, 1994a:451) where courtiers begged favour to the monarch whilst othersbegged access to the court.

As knights became courtiers they found themselves in monopoly-boundcompetition for the opportunities the monopoly ruler has to allocate (Elias,1994a:474). This gurational change occasioned a disciplined subjectivity wherethe coarser habits, the wilder, more uninhibited customs of medieval society withits warrior upper class, the corollaries of an uncertain, constantly threatened life,were softened, polished and civilized. The pressure of court life, the vying forthe favour of the prince or the great; then, more generally, the necessity to

xiv Introduction

distinguish oneself from others and to ght for opportunities with relativelypeaceful means, through intrigue and diplomacy, enforced a constraint on the aects,a self-discipline and self-control, a peculiarly courtly rationality, (Elias, 1994a:268,added emphasis)

The power balance of the royal court was not a total asymmetry where themonarch ruled supreme. Instead monarchies always held some fragility, depen-dent on maintaining a coalition that could threaten to gather and depose themonarch, and where the bestowing of honour and rank could be seen as anappeasement of knights who could still entertain violence. Monarchs did not ownsome absolute power and the monopolisation of violence was never total. Yetwithin the pacied social space of this coalition, the monarch held sway, andintrigue, diplomacy, and emotional restraint were more likely to prove eectivethan the coarserwilder customs of the warrior upper class: the interdepen-dency network of the royal court therefore encouraged a disciplined, courtly,subjectivity.

The subsequent history of social discipline is not however one of a simplelinear development. In particular, Eliass work on emotion and social discipline hasbeen developed to take account of the seeming twentieth century loosening ofemotional and behavioural restraint. Particularly in the latter half of this century,people appeared to be more relaxed and informal in their relations with eachother. Yet for Eliasians, such processes of informalisation represent a renementof social and emotional discipline rather than its negation. There is a controlleddecontrolling of emotional controls (Elias and Dunning 1986:44) within thecontext of ever more complex interdependencies. Though it may seem that moreis allowed, such relaxation has taken place within sharply dened boundaries.

A rst application of this theme to organizations was presented by Wouters(1989). His study both critiqued the work of Hochschild (1983) and explored theway in which the apparently informal codes of emotions among ight attendantsrepresent highly internalised and rened forms of social discipline. Such Eliasianwork is directly relevant to the rapidly increasing interest in emotion in organiza-tions (Fineman, 2000). However, with the exception of the work of writers such asKuzmics (1991), Newton (1995, 1998a, 2001) and Mastenbroek (1993, 1999,2000a), the relevance of Eliasian argument to understanding emotion in organiza-tions has been largely ignored. Consequently there remains considerable scope forthe development of Eliasian argument within this eld.

Elias also presents a range of lesser-known arguments that explore the interre-lation of guration and discipline, and the ways in which growing interdependencycomplexity has conditioned our sense of who we are. For instance, Elias paidconsiderable attention to the social signicance of time, and the ways in whichclocks and temporal regulation provided ameans of co-ordination across increasingly

Introduction xv

dense interdependencies (Elias, 1987a, 1991b, 1992). As Richard Kilminster(1991a) notes, Elias shows how in modern societies highly self-controlled peoplehave to adjust themselves to each other as part of an increasingly intricate mesh ofcontactswhich requires a socially standardized symbol of timing (1991b:xvi).Railways and telegraph standardised clock time as a social device.

Without clock time, co-ordination across the temporally and spatially com-pressed networks of modernity would be impossible (Newton, 2002a). As Elias alsonotes, timing is central to the interdependency networks of organizational life: theprofusion of appointments of the ocial or businessman is an expressionof the multitude of interdependent actions, of the length and density of the chainscomposed by the individual actions, and of the intensity of struggles that keep thiswhole interdependent network in motion (1994a:457, added emphasis).

Elias is also concerned to illustrate how time and timing, like many other aspectsof our subjectivity, often becomes invisible to us and taken for granted. We forgethow our sense of time represents a gurational development that arose in thecontext of the complex interdependencies made possible by nancial credit(Ingham, 1999), railways, telegraph, print etc. In contemporary organizations, wetake time for granted as part of our everyday subjectivity, and often remaininattentive to the fact that the working day and our whole sense of the measure-ment of time is amodern social construction that would be entirely alien to peopleliving in pre-modern societies.

As Elias argues, once they have learnt it members of industrialized statesocieties appear to forget that they have to learn time (1992:139). Furthermore,We have slipped into an ever-present sense of time. It has become part of our ownperson. As such it becomes self-evident. It seems that we cannot experience the worldotherwise (1992:162, added emphasis).

This quotation once again illustrates the more general Eliasian argument thatpeople tend to view themselves from the perspective ofHomo clausus and forget theways in which our subjectivity is historically conditioned, whether it is our sense oftime, our emotions, or our seeming independence.

The longue dureAll the above argument is tied into an emphasis on the need to see ourselves froma long-term perspective. Indeed Elias argues that much of the limitations of socialscience derive from a failure to see things from the standpoint of the longue dure.He presents the following story as an analogy:

I once read the story of a group of people who climbed higher and higher in anunknown and very high tower. The rst generation got as far as the fth storey,the second reached the seventh, the third the tenth. In the course of time theirdescendants attained the hundredth storey. Then the stairs gave way. The

Part I

Organizing Discourse

The chapters in part one are all concerned with aspects of the relationships betweenthree things: the deployment of organizational discourse, both formal and infor-mal, the management of emotions, and the shifting of power balances, predomi-nantly away from formal hierarchy.

Wilbert van Vree explores the importance of meetings as vehicles throughwhich organization gets done. Meetings remains relatively neglected in organiza-tional analysis but they are central features of modern working life. In both thepublic and private sectors, meetings constitute the major forum for discussion,deliberation, negotiation, and decision. Van Vree draws on manuals and instruc-tion books to show how changes in power balance are reected in meetings and themanners deemed appropriate to their conduct. During the past fty years thefocus has shifted from general deliberative assemblies to more dierentiatedprofessional and business meetings; from formal rules to informal codes; and fromdebating to discussing. There has also been a shift from majority decisions toconsensus; from the attitude of parties, administration, and opposition to thebehaviour of individual meeting participants; and from a chairmans function tothe duties of ordinary meeting participants. This chapter explores the parallelsbetween contemporary meetings and Eliass study of court etiquette and illustrateshow, in both cases, slight variation in conduct are highly signicant in relation tothe power balances observed.

Joseph Soeters and Ad van Iterson examine another very important butstrangely neglected aspect of organizational life, namely the study of gossip.Drawing on the work of Elias and John Scotson, they dierentiate between praisegossip and blame gossip and indicate the signicance of organizational culture forthe forms of gossip observed. Specically, they suggest that praise gossip, mainlydirected outward, is more prevalent in homogeneous organizational cultures whileblame gossip, usually directed inward at other sub-groups within the organization,is more common in segmental or dierentiated cultures. The analysis of gossip whether top to bottom, bottom to top or horizontal is also of interest inunderstanding organizational micro-politics and organizational change. Thechapter pays particular attention to the salience of blame gossip in relation to

2power struggles and to strategic change. In these contexts, gossip can be veryinuential, acting as a kind of verbal Molotov cocktail.

Finally, Dennis Smith explores how shame and humiliation take place inorganizations, beginning with a critique of Eliass approach to these aspects ofsocial relationships in The Civilizing Process, The Established and the Outsiders andThe Germans. Smith distinguishes between shame, which may have the eect ofboth disciplining and integrating an oender within a group, and humiliation,which has the capacity to undermine the identity of its victims and expel themfrom the collectivities and social positions which they previously occupied. Atypology of humiliation mechanisms is introduced and distinctions are madebetween types of organization according to whether or not human rights arerecognized within them and whether they take the form of networks or hierarchies.The dynamics of humiliation are explored through an extended case study takenfrom academia.

Drawing upon Elias, all three chapters explore the tensions between theintegrative and divisive tendencies of discourse but emphasise dierent aspects ofthese tensions. Van Vree shows that the informalisation of manners within thecontext of meetings depends upon a reduction in the risk of being conquered andhumiliated. Meetings in modern organisations are, to a great extent, structured bythe need to combine two things: on the one hand, increasing dierentiation ofinterests and a less centralized power structure and, on the other hand, relativelyhigh levels of inter-personal and inter-group trust. As Soeters and van Itersonargue, it is not easy to do this since within dierentiated organizations since thereis a tendency for blame gossip to be deployed for psychological and politicalreasons. They point out, for example, that established groups may subject thosewho threaten them to humiliating humour and blame gossip. Dennis Smithmoves humiliation to centre stage in his analysis, arguing that the weakening offormal hierarchies is typically associated with an increased awareness of humanrights. This increased awareness of rights has the eect of making employees likelyto perceive a wider range of behaviour by managers and colleagues as disrespectfuland humiliating. The resulting resentment and conict is liable to underminetrust and focus the attention of employees upon the tasks of defending rights anddemanding redress for slights and insults. Dennis Smiths argument implies thatthe challenge for both the meeting culture of modern organisations and theirinformal gossip culture is to move towards the ideal represented by the creativenetwork.

Chapter 1

The development of meeting behaviour inmodern organizations and the rise of an upperclass of professional chairpersons*

Wilbert van Vree

Meetings, manners and civilization

This chapter explores the regimes of meetings through which organizations areconstituted. How have these regimes developed and how have the etiquette andbehaviour associated with them changed?

Societal development in the last millennium is coupled with an increase in thenumber of meetings and levels of meeting, and with the development of ancontinually broader network of mutually related meetings, in which manners andhabits pass continually faster from above to below and in an increasing degree frombelow to above. As the dierences in meeting behaviour between social groupsdiminished, the variations and nuances in meetings increased.

In Western industrial societies, especially those at the top have to live underextreme meeting pressure. The higher the individual is in society, the more thenumber of meetings. The everyday work of organizational leaders such as politi-cians, civil servants as well as company managers is dominated almost entirely bydiscussing, deliberating, negotiating, and deciding in groups. If they do not actuallyparticipate in meetings, they are preparing the meetings or processing the results ofthem. Power, status and property are largely being distributed in and throughmeetings to an unprecedented degree.

In the last two, three centuries the most powerful on earth have graduallyaltered from being courtiers and entrepreneurs to becoming professional meeting-holders and chairpersons. This is pregnantly illustrated by the derivation of titles of

* This article is based on my book Meeting, Manners and Civilization. The Development of ModernMeeting Behaviour (1999). An extensive description and analysis of the dierent national series of meetingmanuals and textbooks can be found in this book (pp.256311). I am grateful to Gerard Bos, JoopGoudsblom, Cas Wouters and Willem Mastenbroek for suggestions and support during my research.

4 Wilbert van Vree

address given to functions fullled in meetings, such as president, vice-president,chairman, general secretary, presiding ocer and congressman.

In The Civilizing Process Elias established that, as an indicator of the civilizingprocess in Western Europe, the importance of eating behaviour diminished withthe demise of court society and the courtiers, who were consumptive by nature ina never-to-be-equaled degree. If table manners indeed did not essentially changeafter the demise of court society and the accepted standard only ltered down tobroader levels of the population, then one has to consider which other behaviour(of the upper crust) could be best used to research the course of the civilizingprocess. Meetings are a most appropriate theme, in my opinion. Gathering togetherin order to talk and come to decisions about the common future has become anincreasingly important means of social integration. As a means of distinction forthe elite the stylization of meeting behaviour has replaced the stylization of eatingand drinking.

In explaining the civilizing of behaviour, Elias has pointed to the extension, thecondensing and the dierentiating of networks of interdependencies and themonopolizing of organized violence. If one approached the development ofmeetings by questioning who, and in which manner, have mutually decided aboutwhom, one would nd the same conditions, more directly however.

The restraint of physical violence, at least local and temporary, was the conditiosine qua non of meetings. The long-term development of meetings coincides withthe organization of violence within basic entities, tribes, villages, towns, nation-states, confederations; i.e. within the increasingly large and more stable survivalunits which are in fact meeting units. The process by which survival units growand becomemore specialized can bemore accurately studied by considering villagecouncils, war councils, court councils, meetings of rank, parliaments and othercentral meetings, in which the actions of an increasing number of people need tobe coordinated. The central meetings of survival units may be considered asfrontlines of civilization.

Discussions, decisions, negotiations, deliberations in groups are barelyresearched as behaviours which change along with the changes in the balance ofpower between people. Frequently, implicitly or otherwise, people assume thatpresent-day meeting manners were always as they are now. An image of howmeeting regimes and behaviours have developed is lacking.

An important source of information to ll this gap are the rather lengthy seriesof books about how to conduct and to hold a meeting provide. This literatureparticularly illustrates how, when, and which meeting manners were more widelyadopted, or became obsolete when they were no longer necessary to accentuate ormaintain dierences in rank. Meeting manuals and textbooks reect problems anddiculties which have occurred during the rise and expansion of a special sort of

The development of meeting behaviour 5

restrained aggression, measured hostility, adaptable to changing circumstances(Elias 1969c, p.411). From this series of books, one can expect to gain more insightinto changes in the relationship between power and behaviour.

Manuals for associations and meetings

The development of a literary genre totally focused upon meeting mannersoccurred after the decay of court society, as the monopolies of force and taxationbecamemore public and society became industrialized. This new genre developed,whilst conversing and speaking in company remained the subjects of etiquettebooks or general books of manners. There are many indications that with thesharper distinction between private and professional lives, etiquette books came tobe written particularly by, and for, women, whereas meetingmanuals were writtenmore particularly by, and for, men. Women had been excluded from all, more orless ocial, meetings, probably since the beginning of themilitary-agrarian society.

Since the emergence of the parliamentary-industrial society women aresuccessfully conquering the right to attend political and an increasing number ofother powerful meetings. However, this is a slow process. Even today, one does notoften see women in political and business summit conferences and meetings.

If one can speak of a leeway or organizational disadvantage for women inrelation to men, it was, and still often is, in the sphere of meetings. This impressivefact deserves more attention from students of social sciences in general, and inparticular from researchers in the eld of linguistic dierences between womenand men in particular (see Deborah Tannen 1986, 1994). The monopolization ofocial meetings by men and the long exclusion of women from these meetingsmay help to explain the historical and still-existing gender gap. Interestingquestions for further research arise, such as: To what extend does this historicaldevelopment explain the margin between informal and formal meetings andmeeting behaviour? To what extent has typically masculine (speech) behaviourdeveloped and been preserved in meetings? To what extent is mens language infact just meeting language?

As means of communicating the prevailing ways of conduct to lower layers ofthe population, the genre of meeting books is a direct progression from the courtetiquette books, used by Elias to demonstrate long-term-changes in behaviour. Therelationship between both genres is apparent from the many passages similar toboth books, in which the readers were instructed to curb anger and aggression, toavoid threatening, giving oence, and making accusations, and to present theirown opinion in a quiet, pleasant, friendly, and careful manner, so that the discus-sion remained free from arguments, quarrels, shouting, and other incidents; in

6 Wilbert van Vree

short, those conicts which tended towards bodily confrontation. The fact thatwriters of books on meeting manners continually refocus upon regulating thisprecise aspect of behaviour, is a reminder that the act of meeting is a more civi-lized way of dealing with societal conicts and tensions. Above all, the meetingrules and norms serve to regulate tensions between participants; in the sense thata ame is prevented from aring up, but also that it is prevented from becoming soweak that it no longer gives any heat or light. In this paper, an attempt will be madeto trace some main trends in the development of the genre of meeting manuals.2

In the national bibliographies of the United States of America, Great Britain,Germany, France and the Netherlands, Gerard Bos and the author up until 1990noted approximately 800 titles, inclusive reprints, which qualied as meetingmanuals or textbooks. Grouping these titles by their country of publication, thegures were as follows: 50% American, 10% British, 20%German, 15%Dutch and5% French.1 The rst titles appeared some hundred years ago. Given the numberof translations and quotations, it is clear that the writers have inuenced each otherto an increasing degree. The various national series can be considered together asa single literary genre.

Besides manuals and textbooks, other educational tools to communicatemeeting manners and rules have emerged since the decline of court society. Suchtools are regular lectures at schools and universities, audio-visual courses, andvarious training programmes. The books are merely a shadow of the enormousamount of activity geared to impress desirable meeting behaviour on youngergenerations and other groups of outsiders, in the process of establishing them-selves. Nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that a lot of modern meetingtextbooks were developed within the framework of training programmes.

The fact that, in many countries, a large number of similar meeting manualswere published, is a clear indication that these countries began to dier less and lessfrom each other in the degrees andways ofmeeting during the period of industrial-ization. Every parliamentary, industrial society has a series ofmeetingmanuals andtextbooks, which can be considered as vehicles by which the dominant meetingmanners (the meeting manners of the dominant groups) spread.

In the development of the genre, two phases can be distinguished. The rstphase comprised manuals which covered the etiquettes of national parliaments asmodels for political assemblies at lower levels, and for meetings of clubs andshareholders. The second phase comprises textbooks in which more attention ispaid to those manners and customs which should be (and already are) observed inmeetings and negotiations of managerial boards and companies. This divideoccurred around the 1950s. From about 1960 onwards, there was a spectacularincrease in the number of such textbooks.


The outlines of the dierent, national, series of parliamentary manuals areconvergent. The rst authors were practising politicians, lawyers and administra-tors of societies or they came from a legal or political background. Later, authorsalso were teachers or journalists. Everyone of them wrote primarily for (potential)administrators, especially presidents of societies, local councils, committees, andshareholders meetings and, secondly, for ordinary members. Generally, there isa legal character to the instructions and the explanations of them, although theauthors usually promise to do their utmost to make no profound, legal pro-nouncements, but in the simplest way possible answer the many practicalquestions which come up in club life in discussing and voting, in drafting anagenda and taking minutes, and in administrative practice. On reading theinstructions as to how to hold a meeting, it is apparent that these have largely beenborrowed from national parliaments.

Dierences between the national series largely run parallel to dierences in thespeed and the nature of the various national processes of parliamentarisation.Notwithstanding national variants in parliamentary behaviour, the similarities aremore striking. In all manuals, there are the same type of instructions with respectto the expression of moods, emotions, and aects. A central question is how tocontrol aggressive impulses, feelings of hostility, passions, and passing impulses.

Rules of order

The rst author who attempted to meet the procedural needs of the United Statesgrowing number of voluntary societies and local councils was Luther S. Cushing,clerk to the Massachusetts House of Representatives and a noted lawyer. In 1845,he penned a small book entitledManual of Parliamentary Practice: Rules of Proceed-ings and Debate in Deliberative Assemblies. Although this was the rst manual forassemblies of every description, but more especially for those which are notlegislative in their character, it has not become the standard work in this eld(Robert 1981, p.xxxv-xxxvi). This honour falls to Roberts Rules of Order, pennedby Major Henry Martin Robert, an engineering ocer in the U.S. army who wasalso very active in church and civic organisations. The rst edition of 4,000 of thismanual appeared in 1876, 1,000 of which Robert sent to parliamentarians, educa-tionalists, legislators, and church leaders throughout the country, at his ownexpense. This edition was sold out within four months. A second edition publishedlater in 1896 increased the size of the book by 16 pages, and changes and additionsin a third edition in 1893 added 26 more pages. The rst complete revision,published in 1915, was the product of three years of the original authors full-timeeort. This edition, Roberts Rules of Order Revised, had less than one fourth of its

8 Wilbert van Vree

content taken directly from the previous edition of 1893. The revision and expan-sion were largely the result of hundreds of letters from all over the country,submitting questions on parliamentary law arising in organisations. In 1970, a newrevision of the book was published: Roberts Rules of Order Newly Revised by SarahCorbin Robert. The three editions of the PocketManual by 1915 had totalledmorethan a half million copies. In 1970, a total of 2,650,000 copies had been printed.The 1981-edition listed 3,400,000 copies in print. The last major revision, theninth, appeared in 1990. According to the present publisher, Addison-Wesley,more than 4,450,000 copies of the book had been sold by 1997.

In retrospect, Cushings and Roberts manuals were the beginning of a long-running, continuous American series of manuals for parliamentary practice.Roberts manual is the core of the American series and had great inuence on theEuropean ones. It can be used to get an idea of these series in their entirety,covering questions such as the summoning to a meeting, the opening, the quorum,the creation of an agenda, the introduction of business, the assignment of the oor,the handling and submission of motions, propositions and amendments, theformation of boards and committees, the ways of deciding and voting, and the wayof taking minutes.

Attention is focused upon the duties of the chair. These are to ocially openthe session by calling the members to order, to announce the business before theassembly in the order in which it is to be acted upon, to conduct the discussions, tomake sure that the speakers do not digress onto subjects not on the agenda, to closethe discussions at an appropriate time, and to state and to put the vote if one is tobe held, to announce the result of the vote, and to ocially close the meeting.Another main duty of the chair is the maintenance of order,

to restrain the members, when engaged in debate, within the rules of order; toenforce on all occasions the observance of order and decorum among the mem-bers, deciding all questions of order and to inform the assembly when necessary,or when referred to for the purpose, on a point of order or practice (Robert RulesOrder 1880, p.101).

One of the most dicult (and from a civilizational point of view, most interest-ing) tasks of the chair is dealing with disorder. More attention was given to this taskas the genre developed. This is obvious in Roberts Rules of Order. Compared towhat is mentioned on this topic in the newly revised edition of 1970, in the 1880edition preserving order was not an issue. It became increasingly more urgent withthe parliamentary mingling of more dierent layers of the population as a conse-quence of the expansion of the franchise.


In dealing with any case of disorder in a meeting, the presiding ocer shouldalways maintain a calm, deliberate tone although he may become increasinglyrm if a situation demands it. Under no circumstances should the chair attempt todrown out a disorderlymembereither by his own voice or the gavelor permithimself to be drawn into a verbal duel. If unavoidable, however, proper disciplinaryproceedings to cope with immediate necessity can be conducted while a disorderlymember continues to speak (Roberts Rules of Order 1970, pp.539540).

This quotation represents a more psychological approach of meeting problems,which has become characteristic for the whole genre in the last half of the twentiethcentury. Within the meeting manuals, a more dierentiated approach to holdingmeetings became accepted. Attention was now focused on the arrangement andconduct of meetings of small groups of administrations, committees, managementteams and (local) governments. This shift of attention from large, legislative anddeliberative assemblies with emphasis on formal manners towards smaller meetingswith emphasis on informal manners included a similar shift from the duties of thechairman towards the duties of all participants. These alterations reect more-embracing societal changes, in which holdingmeetings extended enormously overpractically every area of the society, and meetings and meeting behaviour becamemore varied, more informal, and more business-like.

Meeting textbooks as modern chronicles

One of the common characteristics of the new sort of meeting manuals (usuallypresented as textbooks), was that they had been written from a social psychologi-cal perspective. They paid less attention to the formal manners and codes evolvedin parliamentary practices than to informal manners; those which largely developedin administrative and company meetings and international conferences.

This new trend started in the United States, where the publication of manualsfor parliamentary procedure and public meetings slowly began to decline in the1940s and 1950s in favour of manuals for holding business meetings, manage-ment conferences, international conferences, and negotiations. One of the mostinuential books in this genre was Successful Conference and Discussion Techniquesby the American professor of speech, H.P. Zelko, which was published in 1957.This book was revised in 1969 and renamed The Business Conference: Leadershipand Participation. It is the classic of this type of book, translated into manylanguages such as German, Japanese, and Dutch, and frequently reprinted; forexample, in the Netherlands it has been reprinted thirteen times in the period from1963 to 1993. This book will be frequently referred to in this chapter.

10 Wilbert van Vree

In Germany, the number of manuals published for holding Versammlungen(assemblies) has sharply declined since the start of the 1960s (to none after 1983),while the number of manuals for Konferenztechnik (conference techniques), andparticularly Verhandlungstaktik (negotiation tactics) increased considerably. Since1963, in the Netherlands, no new manuals have appeared in which only ocialparliamentary conduct is covered.

In the United States and the United Kingdom until 1990, there have been atleast 150 editions (prints and updated reprints) of social psychological manuals intotal. In Germany, about 120 editions have appeared, in France about fty, and inthe Netherlands about ninety.2

The arrival of social psychological, mainly company-focused, meeting manuals,and this genres explosive take o in the 1970s and 1980s is closely related tochanges in the competitive relations between states and between societal groupswithin states, by which the business and professional worlds became more meeting-orientated, and holding meetings rapidly becamemore business-like. The rst new-style meeting manuals appeared in the United States in the 1940s, when collectivelabour agreements were made and social security was introduced. This occurredwith the enlargement in scale of companies and the growing inuence of the schoolof Human Relations, which considered the (informal) relations between people incompanies as primary. These books were translated and imitated in Europeancountries in the 1950s and 1960s, when a rapid expansion of co-ordinatingfunctions took place with the pacication of the relations between Europeancountries, the increase in international (economic) transactions, and the expansionand increase in scale of organizations.

As far as meetings are concerned, these developments were translated into arapid and largely unanticipated extension of the number of meetings and meetinglevels, not onlywithin but also between states and companies. One saw the develop-ment of meeting units, like NATO and Warsaw Pact, the establishment of theUnited Nations and the arrival of continental scale consultation and negotiationcenters for the economic regulation of developments in areas such as agriculture,trade, industry, and transport, like the European Community. Within states, theconsultations rapidly multiplied between dierent administrative levels (local,regional and national), and the decision-making processes became less transparentand more dicult to control for the elected representatives and the centraladministrators.

Likewise, within businesses and other work organizations, an enormousexpansion took place as regards the holding of meetings. InWork and Authority inIndustry (1956), Reinhardt Bendix pointed out that, since the 1930s and 1940s, arapid and largely unforeseen increase had taken place in the number of meetingsand meeting levels in American companies: weekend meetings for middle


management and supervisors, evening dinnermeetings, regular stameetings at alllevels (Bendix 1974, p.321). The rapid, unplanned increase in meetings andmeeting levels in work organizations of various kinds has prompted, in consider-ation of costs, the search for more ecient and more eective meeting manners.This search began in the United States in the 1940s. Zelko reported that,

business and industrial organizations, and government agencies, have so wellrecognized the uses and values of the conference method that training in confer-ence leading has become a major training objective. Of some 150 companies andgovernment agencies in onemajor survey, more than 65 per cent said that they hadin operation conference training programs to equip supervisors to hold conferenc-es. Among the many outstanding programs are those conducted by Esso StandardOil, Johnson and Johnson, General Electric, du Pont, International Harvester,GeneralMotors,many government agencies, and a host of others (Zelko 1957, p.11).

During the accelerated development of meeting activities in the past fty years, allsorts of diculties and problems arose which psychologists began to investigate. Anew scientic community was developing: that of social psychologists, and otherresearchers from the small group. Initially in the United States, and then inEurope, individuals emerged from the ranks of these specialists, who systematicallysought for solutions to problems which went hand in hand with the increasedmeeting contacts between people of dierent societal classes and groups. Thesolutions they found were spread bymanuals and training sessions in which peoplediscussed and decided on how to arrange and hold meetings (i.e. meetings aboutmeeting). The research referred to by the new meeting specialists was generallyconducted in a manner analogous to research in the physical sciences, such thatcertain factors are held constant whilst others are varied to observe what actuallyoccurs in a certain discussion (Koekebakker 1956, p.7).

Therefore, the research reports by social psychologists, and the statements andthe lessons in the meeting manuals which are based upon them, can be consideredas modern chronicles, as contemporary historiography (Gergen 1973). They reportthe manners which contemporary Western people, originating from the middleand higher classes, employ during meetings, and the solving of the problems whichare encountered.

However, this is not the whole story. In comparison to their juridical predeces-sors, who more or less only passed on what was common at higher meeting levels,there was more elbow room for social psychologists to introduce their ownscientic insight and rules. The altered power and dependency relationships canexplain the fact that, as relative outsiders, they could, with approval of the manage-ment, concern themselves with meetings within companies and other workorganizations and could function as go-betweens or referees by appealing topsychological universals. Writing about Socrates search for moral truth, Gouds-

12 Wilbert van Vree

blom commented that whenever the distance between people, based on suspicion,enmity, and hierarchical relationships, actually becomes smaller, and individualsstart to be involved in frequent contact with dissenters, a need arises for somemutual understanding, common points of departure, and possibly for a highertruth which cancels out the original dierences of opinion (1980, p.183). Seenfrom this point of view, the development and spread of the new, social psychologi-cal approach to meetings and meetings behaviour can be explained as an expressionof an acceleration in social integration. In this process groups of people withdierent opinions and societal backgrounds have to get along with each other, andthe need grows for generally applicable principles to which all opinions could besubjected (Ibidem).

Informalization of meeting behaviour

As is evident from the meeting manual genre the manner of approaching meetingactivities has been further developed in the last fty years. Attention has shiftedfrom general deliberative assemblies to more dierentiated, professional andbusiness meetings; from formal rules to informal codes; from debating to discuss-ing; frommajority decisions to consensus; from the attitude of parties, administra-tion, and opposition to the behaviour of individual meeting participants; and froma chairmans function to the duties of ordinary meeting participants.

This shift reects a more-embracing process of informalization of manners, ascharacterized by Cas Wouters: as the power relationships became less unequal,people began to be less threatened by those feelings and behaviours, which hadbeen loaded with anxiety and shame in earlier stages of social and psychologicaldevelopment in relation to tensions between social groups, classes, and sects(Wouters 1990a). The controlled expression of feelings of anger, disappointment,and aggression were acceptable to a certain degree in meetings on the basis of anincrease in the reciprocally anticipated self-control.

The informalization of meeting manners can be substantiated by several quotestaken from several trend-setting, often reprinted and translated books from theUnited States (Zelko 1957, 1969 etc. and Dunsing 197677, 1978 etc.), Germany(Rdenauer 1980, etc.) and the Netherlands (Mastenbroek 1984, 1987, 1992 etc.).Together these books give a reliable impression of the second stage of the interna-tional genre of meeting manuals.

A striking example of the shift from formal to informal manners is,

Roberts rules of order. Such rules are necessary in some kinds of large groupsassembled tomake decisions or recommendations. And they are required in legallyconstituted meetings. But in small groups, the ponderous procedures involved


stymie human interaction and the ow of creativity. The rules stimulate a legalisticand mechanical way of thinking (Dunsing 1978, p.29).

The shift in accent from large to small meetings and from formal to more informalmeeting codes, is to be considered as an expression of the expansion and furtherdierentiation of meeting regimes and meeting behaviour, which requires agreater impute from ones own thoughts and knowledge. Thus, it is no longerexpected that the chairman mainly watches over and applies the procedures, butthat he varies his leadership according to the type of meeting and knows how tocontrol tensions and conicts neutrally and smoothly, based on his own insightand feelings.

Above all, the conference leader must be resourceful, systematic yet exible,compassionate, and ready to use his own judgment rather than relying on xedrules, mechanics, or techniques (Zelko 1969 (1957), p.119).

Attention has shifted from chairman to participants. Every one is considered to beresponsible for good order and fair turn-distribution.With this shift and the arrivalof a less formal way of controlling order by the chairman, the way in which apoint of order is raised, has also been informalized:

You can help the chairman in the exercise of his duties. For instance, I supposeto rst dene the subject, before beginning to discuss it, That seems to be amisunderstanding. You probably mean , In my view the question of Mr./Mrs.B has not been answered yet. When you dash to the help of the chairman, you donot have to ask permission to speak (Rdenauer 1982 (1980), p.27).

In comparison to their mainly juridically schooled predecessors, the writers ofmodern meeting manuals attach more value to holding discussions and strivingtowards a consensus than debating and voting.

Debate is not discussion in the true sense, for their is no attitude of inquiry andreective thinking about what is the best solution. The debater has made up hismind in advance, and he does all he can to advance and defend his point of viewwithno thought to being won over by his opposition (Zelko 1969 (1957), pp.233234).

Voting should be avoided in most conferences where group agreement is to bereached, unless it appears absolutely necessary. Voting tends to crystallize opinionand harden positions: it emphasizes the majority and minority rather than thewhole group. () This tends to emphasize a spirit of advocacy and contentionrather than the spirit of reective inquiry and open-mindedness that we strive forin a discussion (Zelko 1969 (1957), pp.161162).

14 Wilbert van Vree

Debating and voting support and promote the formation of parties on the basis ofbelief, ideals, or philosophies of life, and increase the chance of violent, hostile, andaggressive feelings being expressed and the outbreak of arguments, which hinder anopen and business-like discussion based on facts. The second generation of meetingmanuals most clearly deviates from the rst with the ban on debating and votingon the basis of already-made viewpoints and the advocacy to talk to each other andto decide on the common future in a frank and business-like manner.

The instructions which appear in modern meeting manuals are largelyintended to answer the question as to how the individual meeting participant andthe productivity of the meeting could be increased, given the prevailing balance ofpower within the meeting unit. The central question is: how can someone submitones own opinion powerfully and purposefully without having this lead to violentconicts and feelings of animosity? However, the modern meeting manualsadvocate a less anxious attitude with regard to conicts than the parliamentary,juridical manuals. People should allow themselves and others more opportunity toexpress their feelings (carefully and dierentially). Expression of emotions shouldnot be taboo. Weeping, screaming, being angry, are allowed in certain situationsand on certain conditions, at least they should not give other participants a fright.

Conicts are nothing negative. They point to problems and challenge to think ofcreative changes. We can consider conicts in society as safety valves (Rdenauer1982 (1980), p.77).

In the altered attitude towards debating and voting, the expression of feelings andthe starting of arguments comes down to the fact that the lessening of the powerdierences between the classes, sexes, and generations, made it necessary andpossible for people to take into consideration more aspects of themselves andothers in the discussions and decisions about the common future.

The civilizing process has made people psychologically more sensitive and insome respectsmore vulnerable. Some authors ofmeeting textbooks encourage theirreaders to make use of this sensitivity and express certain feelings consciously andtactically in order to attract attention and improve the quality of onesmeeting life,

Be a cantankerous participant. Squeak and chirp, complain or yell bull until youshift the tide of things or until others stop and say, OK loudmouth, well take thetime to look at what were doing here. Cry. It doesnt matter whether youre a manor awoman.Crying feels goodwhen its genuine, and itmight get you the attentionyou want. Fall out of the chair or fall asleep, or both (Dunsing 1978, p.103).

As people have become more civilized (or grown older), they may feel quicklyashamed or embarrassed when others express emotions in a way, which they hadoften painfully learned to control in their childhood.


In conclusion, it can be said that the changes in the meeting manual genre froma parliamentary-juridical approach to a psycho-sociological approach indicates agrowing insecurity with regard to what belongs in a meeting and what does notbelong in a meeting. The ambivalent character of the relationships between peoplehas become clearer and become to be seen more as a psychological phenomenon,and there has been both an increase in the tension between impulses and thecontrol of those impulses within oneself, and the attention to emotions and theregulation of those emotions (Wouters 1990a, p.351). This change was closelyconnected with the decline in the direct threat of war, and the lesser risk of poverty,sickness, and ignorance, the lessening the power dierences, and the decline ofsocietal tensions and oppositions within states.

As security, prosperity, and social mobility rose, and more people werecompelled to hold meetings, the party-political and socio-economic contrasts havelost their edge. The struggle towards revolutionary changes by advocates fromlower classes of the population ebbed and, with it, the anxiety of the establishedgroups has decreased about both people from these classes, and for the behavioursand feelings that were associated with these classes. People from dierent classes,from both sexes, and frommore varied ages, began to meet each other more oftenand more regularly at higher levels of meeting than previously. In these meetings,they could express their feelings more freely (within the limits xed by the balanceof power). It became less dangerous for ones position and prestige to do so, and itwas reciprocally expected that the necessary self-control would be employed andthere would be no misbehaviour. As the social tensions and ideological contrastsdeclined, the picture that meeting participants formed of each other becamemorepsychological and more sociological. In other words, more variegated and freerfrom brief emotions, and more tuned to the power and dependency relationshipsbetween people. After the establishment of the parliamentary norms and rules inthe social habitus of people, and with the further reduction in the risks of beingconquered and humiliated, a more dierentiated regulation of behaviour andemotions became possible and necessary. In a recent meeting manual, Mastenbroekdescribes these changes in a sharp and short manner:

more and more people are compelled to negotiate through the altered powerand dependency relationships in the networks which they are part of. The mostrecent stage in this development is that we have been compelled towards a exibleand informal style of negotiating; a style which ts well into the relationshippattern of greater mutual dependency. Therefore, we were compelled intoinformal behaviour. Such an informal style provided advantages and quicklybecame prevalent over a more cautious and formal style. Dierentiation and theblending of activities score over and above any awkward performances(Mastenbroek 1992, p.103).

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An upper class of professional chairmen

The upper classes of the industrial countries in Europe and North America havenot becomemore clearly distinguished in anything than they have in their meetingbehaviour. The everyday work of politicians and civil servants is dominated almostentirely by discussing, deliberating, negotiating, and deciding in groups. If they donot actually participate in meetings, they are preparing the meetings or processingthe results of them. Many, especially those at the top, have to live under extrememeeting pressure. When Eisenhower was president of the United States, it wasonly after he had had two heart attacks that he received permission from hisadvisors for one meal per week free frommeetings. The remainder of his extremelylong working days was practically entirely full with activities concerning meetings,conferences, and other group discussions.

In European countries, holding meetings has received sharp stimulation withthe formation of the European Community. At the tops of the national meetingpyramids newmeeting fora have been erected, from the European Council and theCouncil of European Unity to the European Commission and the EuropeanParliament and all the accompanying, continuous, ocial discussions. Politicians,ambassadors, diplomats, civil servants, and others directly involved with theEuropean integration process, are under extremely high pressure as far as meetingsare concerned. In the Council Buildings in Brussels everyday, 3000 to 4000 ocialsfrom national capitals attend meetings (Fiona Hayes-Renshaw and Helen Wallace1997, p.70). And that only concerns meetings of one European entity, the Councilof Ministers.

In all Western industrialized countries, company managers have begun toallocate more and more time to meetings. The higher the individual is in thehierarchy, the higher the number of meetings. Research from the start of the 1960samongst chief executives in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands indicatesthat members of boards, chief executives, departmental heads of huge, large, andmedium-sized concerns spend 30 to 50 per cent of their time in all sorts ofmeetings (Luijk 1963, pp.7, 69). Several hundred directors from primarily privateDutch companies were asked how much time they generally spent on meetingsduring courses into meeting practices given by the author between 1995 and 1997.According to their own estimations, those managing companies of less than tenpersonnel spent at least 10 per cent of their time preparing, executing, and con-cluding meetings, whilst those managing organizations with more than 500personnel spent up to 75 per cent (sometimes even more) of their working time onthese activities. In his survey of research into what managers actually do, as well asin his own research into the work of ve chief executive ocers in large organiza-tions, Mintzberg points out that, in the United States at the start of the 1970s,


nearly 60 per cent of a managers time was spent in meetings. Schwartzman quotedthe researchers McCall, Morrison, and Hannan, who concluded that meetingsconsumemore of a managers time than any other activity (1989, p.56). Above all,as research has learned, it seems that managers consistently underestimate the timethey spend inmeetings, whereas they consistently overestimate the time they spendreading and writing. This may be seen as an example of Eliass observation thatpeople of this highly individualized society are inclined to overestimate thinkingabove speaking (Elias 1991a, p.65). Group activities are usually lower valued thanindividual ones. Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris, who wrote a comparative studyabout meetings in a large Italian-British telephone company, concluded thatmeetings were the essence of managerial practice and the corporate communica-tion process. They wrote a link could be established between the consistency inunderestimating time spent on meetings and the implicit and explicit expressionsof skepticism or boredom vis vis this practice registered during our companyvisits. This consideration may become an important one when trying to understandthe role played bymeetings in situations of strategic and/or cultural change, wherehigh levels of uncertainty are counterbalanced by an increase in the number ofmeetings at all company levels in order to maintain a semblance of status quo(1997, p.30).

It is possible to go a step further in ones explanation of the reason whymeetings have become a grind and are often associated with boredom and dullness.In present organizations, meetings often seem to have similar functions as etiquettehad in the French court society, as described by Elias (1969c). Courtiers gatheredon set places and at set times to perform specic acts according to exact rules. Theybitterly complained about these useless rituals, but went through them again andagain. The court etiquette endured as a ghostly perpetuum mobile because of thecurrent power relationships between the most important social groupings. Theslightest modication of a ritual might have been interpreted by a group or factionas an attempt to upset the shaky social power balance. In the same way contempo-rary organizationmen seem to be socially fated tomeet and tomeet again with thesame colleagues on set places and at set times to perform similar acts every time. Inour society, power, status and property are largely being distributed in and throughmeetings to an unprecedented degree.Whoever is not a professional sportsperson,artist, lm star, pop star, or entrepreneur on a boom market and yet is willing toadvance societally, has hardly any option but to climb the meeting ladder in a(large) organization.

Meeting tables have become the outstanding symbols of power in our industri-alized world. In 1996, the photographer Jacqueline Hassink published The Table ofPower, containing pictures of the board room tables of twenty-one of the largestEuropean industrial companies (nineteen other companies refused to admit

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photographers to their board rooms for dierent reasons). Among them are AkzoNobel NV, BASF AG, Daimler Benz AG, E.N. I.S.p.A., Philips Electronics NV,Renault SA, Siemens AG, Unilever NV, Volkswagen AG. The pictures are accompa-nied by detailed information about size, material, designer and price of the table,the room in which it is standing, the usual table arrangement (seats of the presidentand the other members of the board) and some economic key gures of thecompany. In an epilogue, Henri Peretz points out that, indeed, all the table-topsshine impeccably. They aremade of several kinds of wood.Warm colours predomi-nate. The size of the table-tops is proportionate to the number of participants(p.18). The usually oval tables are original designs, save one. The oval shapeallows for a central point upon which all eyes can converge and which may beoccupied by the president. Just like their older brothers, the dining tables, meetingtables vary greatly according to social class, nationality and generation. Theglobalization of companies, the development of a complex hierarchy at the top andthe ever stronger presence of nancial power, entails a group of decision-makerslocated at the heart of a permanent structure. They are therefore invited to sitperiodically at the tables of power (p.14). Another remarkable observation is, thatthe board rooms are usually situated on the top oor of a recent building and havelarge bay windows, as if to show its dominance of the city or the immediatesurroundings. Older pendants of the meeting tables of big companies are thetables of (national) governments. Most of these tables are situated in richlydecorated rooms in old, respectable buildings. They are at least just as much, ofteneven more original, impressive and solemn. In sum, the tables of the currentmeeting classes and the above mentioned book itself once more draw attention tohow closely power and behaviour are related. The social development of power andinterdependency relationships between people have compelled them to increasinglydevelop their meeting behaviour. Gradually and in the long run, chairing andattendingmeetings havebecome thepre-eminent route to power, income, and status.

Meetings lend themselves very well to exploring, describing and explainingalterations in the (power) relationships between and within social groups. It ispossible to form a sharper picture of the social stratication in our society bystudying who how often holdmeetings with each other, in whatmanner and aboutwhat items they are talking and deciding, how somemeetings determine the agendasof othermeetings, etcetera. Bodenwrites: Meetings are the proper arena of organiza-tional activity for management, locating and legitimating both individual andinstitutional roles. Indeed, theworld ofworkmay appropriately be divided into thoseorganizational members who routinely attend meetings and those lower-echelonmembers whose duties tie them to the clerical desk or factory oor (Boden 1994,p.81). However, there are many corporations in which workers at the lowestorganizational levels have to attend regular meetings to talk about their daily tasks


and evaluate them. Such is, for instance, the case in many Japanese companies. InFrance, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavian, and many otherEuropean countries, work organizations are often legally obliged to establishelected workers councils with parliamentary-like functions.

The time that a person spends meeting and preparing meetings is closelyconnected to the number of people that he or she has under his span of control.Thus, in an inquiry conducted in a middle-sized distribution company by theauthor, it appeared that the amount of working time spent on meetings rose froma few percent on the shop oor to a good fty percent at the highest managementlevel. This trend is noticeable in all of the industrialized state societies. Thus, itappears from a series of American research that as onemoves up the organization-al hierarchy, the time spent inmeetings increases (Schwartzman 1989, p.57).Withreference to this, the comment was made that this may be punishment foradvancement in the system (Idem). However, this fact should be taken moreseriously. Meetings fulll dierent functions at every hierarchical level for theparticipants. Thus, in 1959, Melville Dalton commented in his study, Men WhoManage, that in meetings one sees the interplay of formal and informal systems inorganizations.

Right down the hierarchy one nds meetings a stage for exploratory skirmishes;for making authoritative hints to thosemoving too fast in one direction; for studiesof faces and inections; for catching slips and checking on pre-meeting tips, etc.The formal meeting is a gallery of fronts where aimless, deviant, and centralcurrents of action merge for a moment, perfunctorily for some, emotionally forothers. All depart with new knowledge to pursue variously altered, but rare theagreed courses (Dalton 1957, p.227).

Conferences of various kinds have become important meeting places in (work)organizations. In large organizations, personnel are also assessed regarding theirbehaviour duringmeetings. Due to personal capacity inmeetings, someonemay beseen in a favourable light, and thus has more chance for promotion and risingwithin the hierarchy. In consideration of this, it is somewhat surprising thatprofessionals, in depicting organizations, for the most usually disregard meetings.To obtain a practically more adequate representation of an organization, it isinsucient to only look at the (hierarchical) relationships between individuals.These are just some examples of relevant questions that come up when one putsmeetings and meeting behaviour in the center of organization studies. Organiza-tion is normally treated as something concrete, as a thing, but in fact, it is a socialactivity and process. Who thinks of organizing in stead of organization soonenough comes across meetings. Thus, studyingmeetings andmeeting behaviour isa strategic means of approaching the dynamics of organization. Studying thecomplicated regimes of meetings in which, and by which, an organization is

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continually shaped would be more important. How have these networks beenstructured, layered, and subdivided? In which direction have they developed andhow did the accompanying meeting manners and the meeting behaviour change atdierent levels? How did meeting activities change when an organization grew orshrank; if the external market became more dynamic and more complex, or evenmore stable and simple? Oddly enough, so far, little use has been made of thepossibility to study and shed light on organizations by answering such questions.

Also noteworthy are some older studies. One of them isWork and Authority inIndustry byReinhardt Bendix, which appeared for the rst time in the 1950s. Bendixcommented that with the spread ofmeeting activities in companies, an upper layerof moderate businessmen had emerged; even-tempered when others rage, bravewhen others fear, calm when others are excited, self-controlled when othersindulge (Bendix 1974, p.332). Also, others have pointed out that themanagementof large industrial concerns hadmoved from consisting of owners-cum-capitalists,usually the founders of the concern, to consisting of a new group of managers whohad gained a position in the company more due to their abilities than to theirpossession of stocks (Heilbroner 1977, p.140). William M. Whyte (1957) hasdesignated these changes as the arrival of the organizationmen. He wrote:

For a young man on the make there is no better vehicle than the conference way.Where fty years before he might have to labor unseen by all but his immediatesuperior, now via the conference he can expose himself to all sorts of superiorsacross the line of command. Given minimum committeemanship skills, by anadroit question here and amodest suggestion there, he can call attention to himselfand still play the game (William H. Whyte 1957, p.152).

Around the turn of the century, the sociologist, Thorstein Veblen had alreadyadvanced the idea of organization men in his proposal that a leisured class wouldform, an idle class of company owners, which would leave the practical operationof the rm to a soviet of engineers. In a study of 1941, James Burnham predictedboth a managerial revolution in which company directors would take over theauthoritative power concerning themeans of production and the division of wealthfrom the owners-cum-capitalists, and that politicians would lose more and morepower to ocial bureaus and their directors. Fifty years on, it can be stated that norevolution of directors has taken place, but that a professional meeting regime hadestablished itself in states and companies. As the number of meetings and meetinglevels within and between states spread enormously, a new upper layer formed,


consisting of managers who delegated, co-ordinated, and controlled functions bymeans of meetings in which they were more often primi inter pares than they werecommanders or directors.

In his explanation of the changes which occurred in the attitudes, the perfor-mance, and the ideas of managers of American companies, since the 1930s, Bendixfocused attention upon a notable correspondence with the process of courtisationof warriors which was outlined by Elias:

I suggest that the changeover from the idealization of the strenuous life to theidealization of human relations may be an adaptation of a similar kind. Themanners commended by the personnel experts of modern American industrycertainly facilitate the co-operation which management requires, much as thecommendation of polite manners facilitated peace at the Royal Court. () Thecalm eyes which never stray from the others gaze, the easy control in whichlaughter is natural but never forced, the attentive and receptive manner, the well-rounded, good-fellowship, the ability to elicit participation and to accomplishchange without upsetting relationships, may be so many devices for personaladvancement when the man is on his way up (Bendix 1974, p.335).

The ability and the attitude, which, according to Bendix, are characteristic ofmoderate businessmen or managers, developed during the mainly unplannedspreading of meeting activities and negotiations in, and between, complexcompany organizations, by which people from the lower levels of the populationand women could take part in meetings. In a summary of a historical, psycho-logical study entitledAnger, Peter Stearns and Carol Zisowitz-Stearns commented,from the late 1920s into the 1950s, American corporations devoted attention andexpense to retraining sessions for foremen, in order to replace bullying style, andto personality tests in order to winnow out ill-tempered candidates in the rstplace. () Secretaries, male and female, were now probed not just for honesty andreliability the late nineteenth century clerical virtues but also for tempercontrol (1993, p.59). Such behaviour demands can be found over and over againin meeting manuals; the following examples are illustrations of this:

Your physical listening manner should be animated and expressive. Listeners aswell as speakers can be animated. Animation should show in your face, in youreyes, and in your physical bearing. () Sloughing in a chair, leaning on elbows,supporting chin on hand, or playing with a pencil are not the habits of a goodlistener (Zelko 1969 (1957), pp.137138).

You must know your physical state as well as possible; that you know when youare having one of your good days or one of your bad days. Your conferencepartners will be no dierent. When you know that they are having one of theirstrong or weak moments, you can adjust your conference tactics accordingly(Rdenauer 1982, p.46).

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The societal signicance of the forms of conduct which were

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