Meetings: The Frontline of Civilization

Meetings: the frontline of civilization* Wilbert van Vree Abstract: The meetingization of society as a central aspect of civilizing processes is the theme of this article. This term refers to a long-term social process: as larger numbers of people become mutually dependent over larger areas and/or differences in power decrease between people, an increased number of problems needs to be solved through talking and decision-making in meetings which require an everincreasingly precise, more equal and more embracing regulation of impulses and short-lived affects. This ‘compulsion to meet’ is less well developed when the networks of mutual dependence are smaller and less stable, and/or the balances of power are more unequal. Transformations of the ways in which people behave in meetings are important aspects of the formalization and informalization processes that have been so central to research in the figurational tradition. In the past, people participating in meetings in societies characterized by large internal power differences greatly feared each other’s emotions and were unable to trust each other to control themselves and keep polite manners when social tensions increased – for instance, because of differences of opinion about their common future. During the most recent phase of social development, the challenge of ambitious people is to regulate the necessary meetings not so much by the second nature of rigid rules and stately customs but more by what Cas Wouters has called a ‘third nature’ of conscious considerations of efficiency, effectiveness and pleasure. Those who are more skilled at this gain a social advantage. Meetings, manners and civilization Meetings are not covered in manners books, the literary genre that Elias used in The Civilizing Process to trace the changes in the behaviour of the worldly *This article elaborates on my book Meeting, Manners and Civilization: The Development of Modern Meeting Behaviour (1999) and my article ‘The development of meeting behaviour in modern organizations and the rise of an upper class of professional chairpersons’ in van Iterson, A. et al. (eds), (2002), The Civilized Organization: Norbert Elias and the Future of Organization Studies, Amsterdam: John Benjamin. © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review. Published by Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA Wilbert van Vree elite of Western Europe. Manners books mainly concern what Elias terms ‘outward bodily propriety’: forms of behaviour that had until then been studied only as psychological or biological phenomena.1 Tracing the development of eating from the manners books, Elias proposed that this development was to a certain degree a pars pro toto of a general behavioural change. Different aspects of human behaviour are inseparable from each other: ‘We may call particular drives by different names according to their different directions and functions. We may speak of hunger and the need to spit, of the sexual drive and of aggressive impulses, but in life these different drives are no more separable than the heart from the stomach or the blood in the brain from the blood in the genitalia.’ (Elias, 2000 [1939]: 161). An entire complex of many aspects of behaviour has been altered in a similar way and in the same direction; people have forced each other to behave in a more ‘civilized’ manner. This is evident in the development of meeting behaviour. Meeting in the specialized, modern sense of gathering together in order to talk and come to decisions about the common future appears to be a most appropriate theme.2 This behaviour has become an increasingly important means of social integration. As a means of bonding and distinction for the elite, the stylization of meeting behaviour has replaced the stylization of eating and drinking. The development of society in the last millennium in Europe (and other places) is coupled with a slow and non-linear increase in the number of all kinds of meetings and levels of meeting, and with the development of a continually broader network of meetings, in which manners and habits pass from above to below and in an increasing degree from below to above. As the differences in meeting behaviour between social groups diminished, the variations and nuances in meetings increased. I call this long-term process the meetingization of society. In the last two or three centuries the ‘most powerful on earth’ have gradually changed from being warriors, courtiers and entrepreneurs to being professional meeting-holders and chairpersons. This is significantly illustrated by the derivation of titles given to functions fulfilled in meetings, such as president, vice-president, chairman, general secretary, presiding officer and congressman. In parliamentary-industrial societies, power, status and property are to an unprecedented degree largely distributed in and through meetings. The upper classes have not become more clearly distinguished in anything than they have in their meeting behaviour. The everyday work of politicians, civil servants and managers is dominated almost entirely by discussing, deliberating, negotiating, and deciding in groups. If they are not actually participating in meetings, they are preparing the meetings or processing the results of them. They live under relatively extreme meeting pressure. ‘Civilizing’ indicates the course of psychological processes in a certain direction. Characteristic of the West European civilizing process of the last millennium is that more and more people have become dependent upon each other because of the division of tasks and the monopolization of organized violence, and have been forced to focus upon increasingly longer, more permanent and more specialized chains of actions and, while practising them, 242 © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Meetings: the frontline of civilization take the actions and intentions of an ever increasing number of others into account. As Elias explains, Through the interdependence of larger groups of people and the exclusion of physical violence from them, a social apparatus is established in which the constraints between people are lastingly transformed into self-constraints. These self-constraints, a function of the perpetual hindsight and foresight instilled in the individual from childhood in accordance with his integration in extensive chains of action, have partly taken the form of self-control and partly [the form] of automatic habit. They tend to a more even moderation, a more continuous restraint, a more exact control of drives and affects in accordance with the more differentiated pattern of social interweaving. (Elias, 2000 [1939]: 375) In explaining the civilizing of behaviour Elias has pointed to the extension, the condensing and the differentiating of networks of interdependencies and the monopolizing of organized violence. This can be seen quite directly in the development of meetings if one asks who, and in what manner, have mutually decided about whom. The restraint of physical violence, at least local and temporary, was the conditio sine qua non of meetings. The long-term development of meetings coincides with the organization of violence within basic entities, ‘tribes’, villages, towns, nation-states, confederations – that is, within the increasingly large and more stable ‘survival units’ which are in fact ‘meeting units’. The process by which survival units grow and become more specialized can be more accurately studied by considering village councils, war councils, court councils, estates assemblies, parliaments and other central meetings, in which the actions of an increasing number of people need to be coordinated. Those meetings may be considered as frontlines of civilization. The collective mind of organizations Studying meetings leads right to the dynamics of organizations and, consequently, to what should be a main territory of the sociology of organizations. Most contemporary students of meetings consider them as activities to create consciousness and the conscience of an organization. Meetings are ‘the talk which realizes organizations’ (Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris, 1997: 29). They are ‘that very social action through which institutions produce and reproduce themselves’ (Boden, 1994: 81). John E. Tropman, who studied meeting behaviour in the USA for many years and wrote several meeting manuals, sees an organization as a dynamic decision matrix: innumerable decisions about the common future being made every day, most of them in all kinds of (electronic) meetings. He concludes that ‘the output of meetings is a decision stream that runs the company and that produces, finally, organizational success or failure’ (Tropman, 2003: 164). The anthropologist Helen B. Schwartzman looks to meetings from a different perspective. In her book The Meeting: Gatherings in Organizations and © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 243 Wilbert van Vree Communities (1989) she juxtaposes her research at an American mental health organization with anthropological research in non-Western societies to examine the significance of meetings in American society. By comparing the forms and functions of meetings in a variety of cultures, she develops a view of meetings contrary to the common assumption, at least in the Western world, that meetings are a tool for making decisions, solving problems, and resolving conflicts. Meetings are important in American culture ‘because they generate the appearance that reason and logical processes are guiding discussions and decisions, whereas they facilitate . . . relationship negotiations, struggle, and commentary’ (Schwartzman, 1989: 42). She points out that decisions, problems and conflicts are tools for creating more meetings, while organizations and communities need meetings to present the organization as an entity to their members. Through back-and-forth talk, as well as the exchange that occurs in pre-meeting and post-meeting interaction, participants negotiate who they are, both as individuals and as a group. Schwartzman based her view of meetings mainly on Emile Durkheim’s study The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. The general conclusion of this study is that ‘religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities; the rites are a manner of acting which take rise in the midst of the assembled groups and which are destined to excite, maintain or recreate certain mental states in these groups’ (Durkheim, 1965 [1915]: 22). The source of religion and morality is in the ‘collective mind of society’ and not inherent in the ‘isolated minds of individuals’. In shaping this collective mind meetings are of the utmost importance: There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments. (Durkheim, 1965 [1915]: 475) Both apparently completely different approaches of meetings have a short-term, rather static, perspective in common. From a more distanced, longterm perspective they complement each other well. The first, most popular, approach of meetings does not render sufficient account of unintended consequences. Outcomes of intended actions are not (or not limited to) the results originally intended by a particular action. An earlier, more dynamic and more-encompassing version of the same idea was formulated by Norbert Elias – a fundamental, sociological notion that the interweaving of decisions, plans and intended actions of people (as individuals, organizations or groups) constitutes and drives more embracing, unintended, social processes: from the interweaving of countless individual interests and intentions – whether tending in the same direction or in divergent and hostile directions – something comes into being that was planned and intended by none of these individuals, yet has emerged nevertheless from their intentions and actions. And really this is the whole 244 © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Meetings: the frontline of civilization secret of social figurations, their compelling dynamics, their structural regularities, their process character and their development; this is the secret of sociogenesis and of relational dynamics. (Elias, 2000 [1939]: 312; my italics) Johan Goudsblom called this passage ‘paradigmatic’; ‘the ‘secret’ alluded to belongs to the category of what Thomas Kuhn would call the ‘fundamental problems’ (Goudsblom, 1977: 148). The paradigmatic meaning of the passage just quoted will increase if it is explicitly added that society’s development in the direction of increasingly larger networks of interdependence has been coupled with the development of meeting behaviour, the activity through which people more consciously make communal aims and plans. Schwarzman’s approach partly clarifies the functions and impact of meetings for people, but it does not fit the fact that the meetingization of society (an unintended process itself and as such an outcome of the blind dynamics of people intertwining in their deeds and aims) ‘gradually leads towards greater scope for planned intervention into both the social and individual structures – intervention based on a growing knowledge of the unplanned dynamics of these structures’ (Elias, 2000 [1939]: 367). Meetings in modern societies differ from the predominantly religious meetings of less developed societies like those studied by Durkheim. For the most part, meetings are now held in order to facilitate talk about mutual plans and relationships. The development of meeting behaviour is a process in which people constrain each other towards control of their mutual relations and thus also of themselves, by orientation to ever-longer, more permanent, and more differentiated chains of action. Thus, the development of meeting activities is a manifestation of the ‘rationalization’ of human behaviour. In this context, moreover, the minutes of meetings, especially the most central ones, become an extremely strategic research field for those who want to sharpen the picture of long-term changes in the relationship between social ideals and social facts, between language and social reality. In what words and terms did successive generations of dominant groups depict society? What societal changes and goals did they aim at? What, in fact, happened to their plans? From this long-term perspective, what does the meeting behaviour and language of the present upper classes look like? The sociogenesis of meeting behaviour Discussions, decisions, negotiations, and deliberations in groups are barely researched as forms of behaviour that change along with the changes in the balance of power between people. Frequently, implicitly or otherwise, people assume that present-day meeting manners were always as they are now. An image of how meeting regimes and behaviours have developed is lacking. Yet many codes and manners we employ in meetings today have developed as standardized solutions of regularly recurring problems. In a long-term collective © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 245 Wilbert van Vree learning process, some of these solutions were handed on, almost unchanged, from generation to generation, while others disappeared or were changed together with the functions they had for the group, nation, class, gender or any other social grouping employing them. We may speak of ‘functional continuity’ in the first case and of ‘functional change in structural continuity’ in the second case. These formulations are borrowed from biology. One of Darwin’s first critics, George Mivart, asked how natural selection can explain the incipient stages of complex structures, like wings or eyes, which can only be used in much more elaborate form. Stephen Jay Gould put the problem as follows: ‘if complexity precludes sudden origin, and the dilemma of incipient stages forbid gradual developments in functional continuity, then how can we ever get from here to here?’ After all, it is impossible to fly with two percent of a wing. According to Gould, Darwin worked out an adequate and interesting resolution. He suggested that ‘if incipient stages originally performed a different function suited to their small size and minimal development, natural selection might superintend their increase as adaptations for this original role until they reached a stage suitable for their current use’ (Gould, 1991: 143). This conversion from one function to another is referred to as ‘functional change in structural continuity’. The development of meeting behaviour can be explained with the help of these original biological notions. An example of ‘functional continuity’ is the development of the agenda. Composing, in advance, a relatively fixed list of items for a meeting probably originated in ancient Greek city councils, passed on to the meetings of the Roman empire and medieval church, developed further in the court society, found its way to estates parliaments and spread to ever more sectors of society. During this journey the agenda requirements were gradually modified up to the present day, when listing the items of a meeting has to conform to new standards involving the avoidance of boring repetition and even the generation of a certain pleasurable tension (akin to that which Elias and Dunning (2008 [1986]) see as being involved in sports and other leisure pursuits). Other manners and procedures developed as a result of functional change in structural continuity. Many of them, such as opening and closing ceremonies, largely functioned as a means of power and distinction for social upper classes, and were altered in a more practical sense when constraints on the upper classes and pressure from lower classes increased. Another striking example is the development of the chairman’s gavel. This attribute, used to open the meeting, close a debate, restore order or confirm a decision, descends from a fighting axe with two sharp blades, which was used in folk meetings to execute lawbreakers and chop off limbs or pieces of cloth from those who violated meeting rules and broke the holy peace of a meeting. The sharp axe has gradually become a blunt gavel, while its functions for the conductor of the meeting and for the assembled group changed in a particular direction. This instance of functional change in structural continuity is to be regarded as a metaphor for what happened to the 246 © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Meetings: the frontline of civilization dominant ways in which people hold their meetings. In the long run the standard meeting behaviour of the most powerful groups has become more ‘polite’ and ‘civilized’: more peaceful, more differentiated, more regular, more balanced, more informal and smoother. Phases in the meetingization of European societies In the long-term, unplanned or blind process of civilizing meeting behaviour in Europe (and other parts of the world), several phases can be discerned. We do not know much with any certainty about meeting behaviour in the earliest stages of human development. Nevertheless, it is possible to form a plausible idea of the meeting regimes of prehistoric societies by ‘reasoning back’ on the basis of archaeological and anthropological material and empirically tested regularities in the dynamics of meeting. So it is possible to say that meeting regimes in small, pre-agrarian, relatively egalitarian societies of gatherers and hunters probably had the characteristics of a ‘campfire democracy’.3 People usually met around a fire, eating, drinking, chatting, singing, making music, dancing, doing some manual work, resolving conflicts and planning common actions. Between these activities there were no sharp boundaries. As we have seen before this view matches with Durkheim’s observation of the way people of ‘primitive’ societies hold their meetings. Although the meeting regime was to a great extent dominated by adult men, the other group members, women and children, could also exert important influence on the course and outcome of the decision-making process. The relatively large predominance of men was based on their greater physical strength and their arms monopoly. In fact, excluding hunting, the use of weapons was rare. As long as the number of people in relation to the available open land remained small, and groups could avoid each other, aggression remained limited to skirmishes. Presumably, based on the assumption of a monopoly of arms by men, women had played at least an equally important role in the plans of action. Features of subsequent stages in the development of meeting behaviour in European societies when they developed into agrarian and industrial ones are sketched in the following diagram: © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 247 Wilbert van Vree Features of societal stages Features of dominant meeting standards Features of corresponding self-regulation Agrarian Small, vulnerable, unstable, territorial monopolies of organized violence Incidental, martial, masculine, coarsely regulated, ritualistic, sectional Less embracing, unsteady, rather undifferentiated, hardly predictable, enforced Industrializing Larger, less vulnerable more stable, territorial monopolies of organized violence Regular, more peaceful, elite, more regulated, solemn, fairly particularistic More embracing, steadier, more differentiated, more predictable, stiff Further development in direction of continuous, generally peaceful, common, increasingly varied, more informal, global processes continue Further development in direction of allembracing, steady, highly differentiated, generally predictable, smoother (Post)industrial Further development in direction of more effective, transnational monopolizing of organized violence processes continue processes continue Meeting behaviour in agrarian societies: militarization and demilitarization The common structural characteristic of agrarian societies, the dominance of warriors, manifested itself in the development and spreading of formal, martial rules of meetings and manners. This development was initially due to the ‘spiral of wars’ by which larger numbers of people were compelled to act as one body. Waging war demanded, from the able-bodied men in particular, activities such as training boys for defence, the selection of leaders, the discussion and announcement of the strategy to be followed, the court-martialling and punishing of warriors, deliberations about surrender or truce, and the division of seized goods and conquered land. For this purpose warriors issued commands and orders that they sanctioned by harsh physical punishment. Due to permanent warfare or threats of war, the martial meeting rules acted as an example for others. Threats of war, and waging war itself, forced people to organize themselves into units of offence and defence led by warriors who could protect them against the organized violence of other warriors. Through pressure from above, by imitation, and resulting from habit, the meeting manners of warrior councils spread and participation in meetings became strongly dependent upon military power and military considerations. In such a way, women, children, and often 248 © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Meetings: the frontline of civilization non-able-bodied men were excluded from the central meetings of survival units and from many other meetings. In Europe until long after the Middle Ages, unrelenting rules forbidding women to take part in meetings of courts of justice, guilds, churches, and towns, remained in force. The trend in the direction of the militarization of meetings was coupled with opposition from the non-military population. This opposition worked in the direction of a further differentiation of manners in meetings. The importance of warrior councils as a general model for meetings decreased as these non-military groups rose in power. The functions of meetings expanded from those concerned with the administration of the law, preparations for war, and the establishment of peace, to controlling taxation, water boards, trade, industry, social services, and many other activities and problems stemming from the extension and differentiation of the chains of actions. As long as the monopolies of violence remained vulnerable and unstable, holding meetings remained limited and they only came to seem to some degree natural within the small upper layers of society. As long as many people were strongly inclined to settle a dispute or difference of opinion by coming to blows or by armed combat, the necessity for holding a meeting was relatively limited, and meetings retained a highly ritualistic character. Compared with later developments, there was little discussion and argumentation. Corresponding to the relatively short and little differentiated series of transactions, the high level of danger, and the large divisions in power in the society dominated by warriors and priests, the tendency to solve problems by discussion and agreement was, in general, relatively weak. Ecclesiastical meetings mainly consisted of praying and performing religious rituals. For the most part, many secular meetings consisted of swearing oaths, reciting incantations, and indulging in bouts of eating and drinking. Activities used as a means to obtain decisive answers to the question of how to proceed were: trials employing bodily injury; man-to-man fights where men cursed, wounded, or killed each other; dreams; loud screaming; collective hymn singing; communal catcalling; spontaneous flashes of the imagination; and other highly affective behaviour. Agreements were frequently undocumented, but orally endorsed by sworn oaths, meals, and prayers. It was only during the process of state formation, when organized violence was monopolized over extensive areas and a small number of monopolies came to dominate the rest, that more groups and layers of the population came to participate in meetings and sanctioned rules of conduct were created. The emerging meeting regimes of new, dominant groups presumed and demanded greater and more differentiated self-restraint. While previous meeting regulations contained numerous stipulations referring to disruptions to order, such as fighting, shouting, drunken talk, drawing knives, throwing glasses, and bearing arms, the new meeting rules were more concerned with regulating verbal battles, and made greater demands upon an individual’s capacity for thinking and upon his (or, occasionally, her) ‘conscience’. Although everyday social intercourse was still far from peaceful, the more violent aspects of society were excluded from the prescribed meeting behaviour, more than they were in the previous © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 249 Wilbert van Vree period. The meeting rules were not formulated as worldly wisdom or practical requirements for social behaviour, but rather as ethical norms or laws of God, and learnt as ‘semi-automatic functioning impulses of conscience’. As conflicts and tensions between states, and between classes and groups within states lessened, conditions became more favourable for the processes of individual learning about how to hold and attend meetings. The rules became more self-evident. This development accelerated during the process of industrialization and the formation of nation states, when more people were forced to consider the results of centrally held verbal struggles and the decisions prescribing the do’s and don’ts to which they could be forced to comply by the use of organized violence. One of the resulting developments was the gradual standardization of manners in meetings or the diminishing of differences in the ways of meeting between groups within nation states. As more layers of the population, by means of their chosen representatives, took part in the struggle for the control and the use of the organized violence, the central meetings were precisely those places where different meeting manners melded together to become new standards of meeting behaviour. Meeting behaviour in industrial societies During the process of industrialization in the last few centuries, many societies have developed into differentiated, multi-layered, meeting units which, in turn, are constituents of continental and global units.4 The number of meetings and meeting levels in the areas of politics, economics, culture, and almost everything else, has increased enormously. More than ever before, opportunities for social success are dependent upon an individual’s competence and experience in talking and decision-making concerning lengthy and differentiated chains of actions. The upper level of industrialized society was, and increasingly is, shaped in and by meetings that require a relatively large, precise, constant and flexible self-regulation of expressions of affects and emotions. The development of meetings during the process of industrialization was maintained by the need to solve the complex problems of co-ordination which arose during the unprecedentedly powerful, extensive and intensive economic growth,5 and the accompanying processes of the division of tasks, urbanization and organization of people into larger and closer political, economic, and cultural units, in which the power differences became smaller and smaller or, at least, became less pronounced. Likewise, forces against these developments constantly manifested themselves. At their gravest, these took the form of revolts, authoritarian intervention, and wars; less serious forms were laments that meetings were dreadful, boring, and time-consuming. Having to meet has become the fate of civilized people. It is the price that has to be paid for greater security and a more prosperous standard of living. Two stages can be distinguished in the development of meetings, during the beginnings and then the spread of industrialisation; they are the sign of two 250 © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Meetings: the frontline of civilization consecutive, dominant trends. From the latter half of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, there has been a dominant trend which could be designated as the parliamentarization of meetings. The trend that later became more prominent could be designated as the professionalization of meetings. Parliamentarization Elias concluded in The Civilizing Process that the courtization of the warriors was a ‘key event’ in the West European process of civilization: ‘Not only in the Western civilizing process, but as far as we see within every major civilizing process, one of the most decisive transitions is that of warriors to courtiers’. (Elias, 2000 [1939]: 389). Elaborating upon this, it can be said that a subsequent decisive event in this process of civilization was ‘the parliamentarization of the courtiers’ (Van Vree and Bos, 1989). Initially, in the parliaments, which took over the co-ordinating tasks from the royal courts, many courtiers were given a seat next to people originating from common stock. The more peaceful, more differentiated, and more businesslike etiquettes which developed in parliaments functioned as examples; a function similar to that of court manners in the previous social stage. The parliamentarization of the competitive struggle between people within states developed under conditions precipitated by an increasingly faster growth in trade, in lines of transport and communication, and in industry. In the competitive struggle between states, success and failure became more dependent on the resources and support that governments had to demand from commerce and industry. While the production process, involving the increasing use of fossil fuels, became more extensive, more complex and more vulnerable, and more and more people became dependent upon each other as producers and consumers, so too did opportunities arise which made possible a continuous parliamentarization of the social competition within states. In all European and in many other countries, discussing and deciding about the monopolies of physical force and taxation sooner or later became more public and also centred in elected national parliaments. The continuous competitive struggle between states forced groups within these states to close ranks and take each other into consideration to a greater extent. While increasingly more people became more strongly tied to individual states with the introduction of national duties, such as military service, tax obligations, compulsory education and obligations to social security, and national systems developed for the registration of the population, jurisdiction, the police, education, social and medical care and social security, the competitive struggle for power, possession, and status within states acquired more the character of a regulated battle of words or a parliamentary struggle. This parliamentarization of the population occurred in waves. With every change in the composition and the position of power of the national parliaments, © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 251 Wilbert van Vree the rules were altered, adjusted or newly stipulated in the regulation codes. These regulations acted as an object for study for juridical specialists and served as models for the legal regulation of meetings and meeting practices within companies and corporations, societies, associations and other social organizations, with whose help, large groups of outsiders were integrated into society. During the extension of voting rights, a rapidly growing number of manuals appeared for establishing, managing, and running the meetings of associations and companies. The rise of an upper class of professional chairmen and the professionalization of meeting behaviour Since the 1930s in the Unites States, and since the Second World War in Western Europe, a trend in meeting behaviour towards professionalisation has become more prominent. This trend became dominant with the integration of national states into continental and worldwide meeting units, with the acceleration of the division of functions, with the enlargement of the scale of institutions, and with functional democratization. Particularly in professional life, more people were more frequently obliged to hold discussions with each other – to negotiate the implementation, division and payment of functions, and to reach agreement on the acquisition, management and spending of capital. In everyday social intercourse, meetings acquired a central position. As far as meeting behaviour was concerned, competence and knowledge became essential ingredients for a successful social career. Anyone who wishes to rise in present-day society has to climb the meeting ladder. Every rung upwards carries with it the consequences of holding discussions with others and making common decisions more frequently and more regularly, about lengthier, more enduring and more differentiated chains of actions. Little or no participation in meetings is characteristic of an outsider position in society (see Elias and Scotson, 2008 [1965]). Learning how to participate in meetings has become an important part of the rearing and education of the young. Anyone who wants to participate in society with some degree of success needs to know and be able to apply elementary meeting rules, and to have mastered the type of language spoken in meetings. Pressure increased in meetings for people to take more into account the wishes and feelings of more people, and more aspects of their own personality. Central to this trend was the obligation to refer to oneself and others in a businesslike manner. Self-aggrandising comments became less acceptable. With this, it was quite apparent that there had been increases in the social pressure during meetings to suppress megalomaniac fantasies, and to speak about people in a more distanced manner. In meetings, mutual fear between representatives of different classes and groups diminished. Meeting manners in general became more easy and informal. 252 © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Meetings: the frontline of civilization In his study Work and Authority in Industry, which appeared for the first time in the 1950s, Reinhard Bendix commented that with the spread of meeting activities in companies, an upper layer of ‘moderate businessmen’ had emerged; ‘even-tempered when others rage, brave when others fear, calm when others are excited, self-controlled when others indulge’ (Bendix, 1974 [1956]: 332). In his explanation of the changes which had occurred in the attitudes, performance, and ideas of managers of American companies since the 1930s, Bendix focused attention upon a notable correspondence with the process of courtization of warriors as it was outlined by Elias:6 I suggest that the changeover from the idealization of the ‘strenuous life’ to the idealization of ‘human relations’ may be an adaptation of a similar kind.7 The manners commended by the personnel experts of modern American industry certainly facilitate the co-operation which management requires, much as the commendation of polite manners facilitated peace at the Royal Court. . . . The calm eyes which never stray from the other’s gaze, the easy control in which laughter is natural but never forced, the attentive and receptive manner, the well-rounded, good-fellowship, the ability to elicit participation and to accomplish change without upsetting relationships, may be so many devices for personal advancement when the man is on his way up. (Bendix, 1974 [1956]: 335) The ability and the attitude, which, according to Bendix, are characteristic of ‘moderate businessmen’ or managers, developed during the mainly unplanned spread of meeting activities and negotiations in, and between, complex company organizations; through those people from the less powerful levels of the population – including women – who came to take part in meetings. Demands for such behaviour can be found over and over again in meeting manuals; the following quotes are illustrations of this: Your physical listening manner should be animated and expressive. Listeners as well as speakers can be animated. Animation should show in your face, in your eyes, 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 good listener. (Zelko, 1969 [1957]: 137–8) If you start out by calling the other person ‘foolish’, ‘ignorant’, or ‘utterly lacking in common sense’, you are insulting him, and he is likely to send back an equally strong reply. Moreover, you are attacking the man rather than his point; this is one of the best ways to destroy good human relations. . . . As you take up someone else’s point, do it in a pleasant manner; try to avoid such words as ‘disagree’ in stating your own position. (Zelko, 1969 [1957]: 135) The social significance of the forms of conduct that were developed in company meetings and other work organizations has increased even more with the extension of the international market, the growth of world trade and capital exchanges, and the expansion of companies. As the number and levels of meetings within and between states spread enormously, a new upper layer formed, consisting of managers who delegated, © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 253 Wilbert van Vree co-ordinated, and controlled functions by means of meetings in which they were more often primi inter pares than they were commanders or directors. One of the first modern meeting manuals noticed: We have come face to face with the fact that the work scene is a part of the total social and democratic environment of a democracy, no less important as a medium for the discussion process than the legislative hall or the club meeting. . . . Since the work environment strikes so close to the well-being of all of us, we might examine more fully the part that discussion plays in the business world of today. (Zelko, 1969 [1957]: 7) In all Western industrialized countries, company managers have begun to allocate more and more time for meetings.8 The higher the individual is in the hierarchy, the more the number of meetings. Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris, who wrote a comparative study about meetings in a large Italian–British telephone company, concluded that meetings were the essence of managerial practice and the corporate communication process. They noted that a link could be established between the consistency in underestimating time spent on meetings and the implicit and explicit expressions of scepticism or boredom vis-à-vis this practice registered during our company visits. This consideration may become an important one when trying to understand the role played by meetings in situations of strategic and/or cultural change, where high levels of uncertainty are counterbalanced by an increase in the number of meetings at all company levels in order to maintain a semblance of status quo. (Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris, 1997: 30) It is possible to go a step further in one’s explanation of the reason why meetings have become a grind and are often associated with boredom and dullness. In present-day organizations, meetings often seem to have similar functions to that which etiquette had in the French court society, as described by Norbert Elias. Courtiers gathered in set places and at set times to perform specific acts according to exact rules. They bitterly complained about these useless rituals, but went through them again and again. The court etiquette endured as a ‘ghostly perpetuum mobile’ (2006 [1969]: 95) because of the current power relationships between the most important social groupings. The slightest modification of a ritual might have been interpreted by a group or faction as an attempt to upset the shaky social power balance. In the same way contemporary organization men seem to be socially fated to meet and to meet again with the same colleagues at set places and set times to perform similar acts every time. Conferences of various kinds have become important meeting places in work organizations. In large organizations, personnel are also ‘assessed’ regarding their behaviour during meetings. Individuals may, as a result of their performances within meetings, be seen in a favourable light, and thus enjoy greater chances of promotion and rising within the hierarchy. In view of this, it is somewhat surprising that professionals, in depicting organizations, for the most part usually disregard meetings. To obtain a practically more adequate 254 © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Meetings: the frontline of civilization representation of an organization, it is insufficient to only look at the hierarchical relationships between individuals. These are just some examples of relevant matters that come up when one puts meetings and meeting behaviour in the centre of organization studies. Organization is normally treated as a thing, but in fact, it is a social activity and process. Anyone who thinks of ‘organizing’ instead of ‘organization’ soon enough comes across meetings. Thus, studying meetings and meeting behaviour is a strategic means of approaching the dynamics of organization. Studying the complicated regimes of meetings in which, and by which, an organization is continually shaped would be more important. How have these networks been structured, layered, and subdivided? In which direction have they developed and how did the accompanying meeting manners and the meeting behaviour change at different levels? How did meeting activities change when an organization grew or shrank; if the external market became more dynamic and more complex, or even more stable and simpler? Oddly enough, so far, little use has been made of the possibility of studying and enlightening organizations by answering such questions. Informalization of meeting behaviour Parliamentary9 procedure and motions should be avoided in reaching decisions in most conferences. Parliamentary procedure is the most formal method a group can use, and conference process is based primarily on informal methods. Some informal conference processes do involve controls, but not in the rigorous and exacting sense that prevails under parliamentary procedure. . . . members should feel free to speak up and make contributions at any time, without recognition by the chair or first indicating their desire to speak. (Zelko, 1969 [1957]: 162–3) After the establishment of the norms and rules of meeting procedures in the social habitus of people, and with the further reduction in the risks of being conquered and humiliated, a more differentiated regulation of behaviour and emotions became possible and necessary. As is evident from meeting manuals, the dominant meeting manners have been further developed in parliamentary – industrial countries in the last fifty years. Attention has shifted from general deliberative assemblies to more differentiated, especially professional and business meetings; from formal rules to informal codes; from debating to discussing; from majority decisions to consensus; from the attitude of parties, administration and opposition to the behaviour of individual meeting participants; and from a chairman’s function to the duties of ordinary meeting participants. This shift reflects a more-embracing process of informalization of manners, as characterized by Cas Wouters: as power relationships became less unequal, people began to be less threatened by those feelings and behaviours, which had been loaded with anxiety and shame in earlier stages of social and psychological development in relation to tensions between social groups, classes, and sects (Wouters, 1990). The controlled expression of feelings of anger, disappointment © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 255 Wilbert van Vree and aggression were acceptable to a certain degree in meetings on the basis of an increase in the reciprocally anticipated self-control. Meeting manuals reflect these changes clearly, as in the following example: Meeting leaders and participants must bear in mind that encouraging the expression of feelings will free the flow of thoughts – and suppressing or ignoring them will filter, distort, or block thoughts. Our feelings come from basic human needs that, though now and then openly discussed, are infrequently served in meetings – or anywhere else in organizations, for that matter. (Dunsing, 1978: 41) Recent trends The latest development of meetings in public and private life was able to take place under the condition of a relatively high level of violence control within and between national states and of a resulting, corresponding level of mutually expected self-control. The common regulation of social changes has developed in the direction of an increasingly wider continuum of variants of meetings. The further development of this variation seems to be dependent upon a continuing pacification in the struggle for power, prestige, and wealth and the development of meeting regimes and meeting behaviour at continental and global levels. Parliamentarization and professionalization of meetings have been continued in many parts of the world in the last twenty years, albeit not at the same pace and in the same degree. With the extension of the European unity we see processes of parliamentarization, with difficulty, in all post-communist countries, while such processes in the Middle East have been slowed down rather than advanced by an ingenuous ‘democratic offensive’ led by the USA. As with every long-term process, one sees periods of stagnation and even regression followed by periods of slow and accelerated continuation. National meetings have lost significance with respect to more-embracing meetings such as those of the European Council of Ministers and the Security Council of the United Nations. The growing significance of continental and global negotiation-like meetings is closely related to the strongly increased social interdependencies in the military, economic, and ecological areas. The globalization of the economy and the risk of large-scale wars and ecological disasters forces individual states to discuss closer co-operation and implementation of policy. The biggest tensions and problems of today seem hardly solvable without more representative and more adequately functioning assemblies at higher levels of integration. The latest financial crisis and ecological threats make that quite clear. However the meetingization of the global society often proceeds slowly, with setbacks and temporary stagnations. The recent spurts in the globalization of the economy and political integration are accompanied by the scaling up of public and private organizations, by mergers and takeovers of companies in the world of insurance and banking, car 256 © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Meetings: the frontline of civilization making, the press and publishing trades, accountancy and consultancy, and almost any other line of business or branch of trade and services. The emergence of bigger companies requires new facilities and organizational structures, involving a marked increase in conferences, conventions and congresses to talk and decide about the common future. The coming together of people from societies with various traditions has made them more conscious of their mutual identities, similarities and differences in thinking and acting. During meetings they are forced to take each other into consideration to a greater extent, to assimilate with each other and to soften and narrow (national) differences in standards of behaviour. Traditional differences and sharp contrasts are being transformed into cultural variations and local colour. Conferences, congresses and assemblies of companies and clubs pre-eminently offer opportunities for people of different countries to get to know each other. Etiquette and manners in meetings are stricter and more compelling than those on tourist spots. Meetings require more self-discipline. Words and gestures require more precise attention, while the need for mutual understanding and consideration is bigger. That is exactly why meetings strongly promote the development of common etiquettes and languages. They are the trailblazers of contemporary, continental and global, integration processes. Getting together for consultations has become easier in many cases. Furthermore, it has become possible ‘to meet at a distance’ via telephone connections, computer networks, and video-conferences, by means of which people in various places in the world take part in front of a camera and video screen, and enter into consultations with each other. These types of meetings appear to have developed rapidly because, particularly for multinationals whose managers almost live in aeroplanes, meeting through a video screen can demonstrably lead to lower costs and higher productivity. The use of such techniques makes consultations and negotiations within companies, and between representatives of companies, states, and other organizations, simpler; so much that it can be expected that in the future they will be further extended. Nevertheless, in their study, Managing Language: The Discourse of Corporate Meetings, Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra J. Harris point to research which suggests that video-conferencing has not lessened the importance of meetings in organizations, including companies in their various forms. ‘Whether two-party or multi-party, internal or crossorganizational, intra-cultural or cross-cultural, face-to-face meetings continue to provide a forum where participants can arguably expect total commitment to the interaction, . . . [a] maximum degree of urgency exerted by the parties and no technical problems . . . as an excuse’ (Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris, 1997: 6). Electronic meetings are just another way of talking and deciding in groups about the common future. They have become serious alternatives for face-toface-meetings even if meetings involving corporeal co-presence continue to be important. © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 257 Wilbert van Vree Conclusions The latest acceleration of the professionalization of meetings in parliamentary– industrial societies occurred together with the privatization of public organizations and the erosion of national power in the Western world.10 In large parts of the industrial and post-industrial world, the power balance between private companies and national states has shifted in favour of the companies. As a result, business-like meeting manners have been rapidly developed and widely spread in the last two decades, while the significance of the meeting ideals and manners developed in and spread from national parliaments, political councils, committees and associations has decreased. The older, parliamentary, democratic habitus has come to be at odds with the demands of efficiency and the differences in function, position, and expertise required for the face-to-face and digital meetings that have widely spread in work organizations in the last fifty years. This development has created two related problems in parliamentary– industrial societies. While parliamentary manners are still for many people the most dominant guidelines for meetings, professional life increasingly requires a different habitus, less democratic and making greater demands on one’s own initiative and feeling of responsibility. More varied types of meetings have been developed for every sort of problem. On the one hand, the emphasis lies on the exchange of information, exploration or discussion; on the other it lies on brainstorming, advising or deciding. The older, predominantly political-parliamentary ways of meeting have often proved to be inadequate; they are too little differentiated, geared to debates between parties, to the use of the majority rule and other democratic conditions which do not fit work relations very well. Compared with parliamentary-like meetings, company-like meetings demand more knowledge and abilities, more team spirit, more mutually anticipated self-control and flexibility. These are qualities that advance the opportunity for social success in terms of income, power, and prestige. On the other hand, the deep-rooted parliamentary meeting codes and manners during gatherings in work organizations can be disadvantageous in the context of more severe economic competition on a global scale, if only because the parliamentary – democratic way takes relatively more time and money. The same trend creates another problem, which Judith Brett put forward, elaborating on my study (Van Vree, 1999) about the development of modern meeting behaviour. With the waning of the parliamentarization of associational life, parliaments – the product of an earlier civilizational wave – ‘are left exposed to the criticism of citizens who now do their day to day and community politics in quite different ways. Where once parliament led the way, establishing procedures and protocols which became the model for other assemblies, parliament is now being left behind, its rigid adversarial procedures deployed by our rigidly disciplined parties no longer according with the community’s experience of the processes necessary for good decision making’ (Brett, 2002: 156). 258 © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Meetings: the frontline of civilization These problems are reasons for doing more systematic research into the development of meeting regimes – meeting relations and behaviour – in connection with more-embracing social processes. Besides, this study might improve our knowledge of people and societies and anticipate further misjudgements like those made at the attempts of the governments of some parliamentary–industrial states to democratize military–agrarian societies in Asia11 and at the integration of new generations and newcomers from military– agrarian societies into parliamentary–industrial societies. Summary Societies without meetings in which a common future was discussed and decided have never existed as far as I know. However, the way people hold meetings is variable and continually changing. The theme of this paper has been the meetingization of society as a central aspect of civilizing processes. This term refers to a long-term social process, the gist of which is: as larger numbers of people become mutually dependent over larger areas and/or differences in power between people decrease, an increased number of problems needs to be solved through talking and decision-making in meetings which require an ever increasing precise, more equal and more embracing regulation of impulses and short-lived affects; this ‘compulsion to meet’ is less well developed when the networks of mutual dependence are smaller and less stable, and/or the balances of power are more unequal.12 Transformations of meeting behaviour of the kind mentioned above can be further explained as aspects of formalization and informalization processes (Wouters, 2007). My research shows that, in societies characterized by large, internal power differences and great fears for each others’ emotions, people could not trust each other as meeting participants to control themselves and keep polite manners when social tensions increased – for instance, because of differences of opinion about the common future. In order to decrease these risks, meeting-people decked their gatherings out with ceremonies, formalities and rituals. The dominant – stipulating – meeting manners slowly formalized, became a ‘second nature’ for many people and were obviously passed on to new generations. Such processes of formalization are characteristic of the military– agrarian phase of social development. When in the next, parliamentary–industrial phase the differences in power and status between people decreased, together with the direct threat of war, the trend of formalization switched in the opposite direction. As fears of overt physical violence, humiliation and feelings of inferiority in everyday life decreased and the mutual anticipated self-control increased, the dominant meeting manners became smoother, easier, and more flexible. After the establishment of the parliamentary norms and rules in the social habitus of people, and with the further reduction in the risks of being conquered and humiliated, the number of meetings and meeting levels in the areas of © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 259 Wilbert van Vree politics, economics, culture, and almost everything else increased enormously. A more differentiated regulation of behaviour and emotions became possible and necessary. Attending meetings lost much of its exclusiveness and some formal meeting manners, which primarily developed as a means of power and distinction for the social upper crust, lost significance. Instead, meetings were making greater demands on one’s own initiative and feeling of responsibility. During this most recent phase of social development, the challenge of ambitious people is to regulate the necessary meetings, not so much by the second nature of rigid rules and stately customs but more by a ‘third nature’ of conscious considerations of efficiency, effectiveness and pleasure. Deciding if a meeting is necessary or the most effective thing to do or not, choosing the most efficient or appropriate (electronic) form, inviting the right people and the right number of people, tuning procedures in to the current goal of the meeting, choosing the right location, appropriate light, fitting attire and food, using informal but direct manners during meetings, moderate expression of emotions – these are ingredients of a new third nature of meetings, which groups of people are developing today. Those who are better at this have social advantage. It is to be expected that when, in the long run, social differentiation and integration continue and increasingly larger groups of people become more interdependent, people will develop more-embracing meeting regimes and more civilized meeting behaviour. However, these are not linear processes, but characterized by accelerations, stagnations and reversals. The degree to which these processes will be accompanied by the use of – new forms of – organized violence, is greatly conditional upon the speed, scale and impact of the development of meeting behaviour. And the other way around: one of the most important conditions for a better control of organized violence and the increase in safety, welfare, and quality of life is the further civilization of people’s meeting manners – manners that make it possible to focus more adequately on increasingly more complicated and more embracing human figurations and prevent needless sorrow and suffering. Notes 1 Emile Durkheim’s first lines of Les Régles de la Méthode Sociologique (1895) were that ‘each individual drinks, sleeps, eats and thinks, and it is to society’s interest that these functions be exercised in an orderly manner’. He commented further that these facts should not be considered as ‘social facts’, because in that case sociology would have no exclusive scientific territory for itself, because this would be confused with that of biology and psychology. 2 This meaning of the word ‘meeting’ has become the dominant one during a long historical process that I have described at length in Meeting, Manners and Civilization (1999: 11–19). 3 These ideas are mainly based on Ronald Glassman’s work Democracy and Despotism in Primitive Societies. His ‘ideal type’ description of the ‘campfire democracy’ corresponds mainly to the image of those political processes in societies of hunters and gatherers (Johnson and Earle, 1987; Woodburn, 1980; Silberbauer, 1982; Leacock and Lee, 1982). 260 © 2011 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2011 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review Meetings: the frontline of civilization 4 In Meeting, Manners and Civilization, I outlined extensively the development of meeting behaviour during the industrialization and the emergence of inter-state organizations, with the help of European and North American meeting manuals. These books provide a continuous series of detailed information about the problems, ideals, precepts, prohibitions, and customs of meetings. They are a rich source of information about changes in the behaviour and selfcontrol of people at the latest stage of society when meeting, with the increase in mutual dependency and the decrease in power differences, became a central and everyday behaviour. This literature particularly illustrates how, when, and which meeting manners were more widely adopted, or became lost when they were no longer necessary to accentuate or maintain differences in rank (Van Vree, 1999: 256–311). 5 For the distinction between extensive and intensive growth, see chapters 4 and 5 (by Eric Jones), in Goudsblom, Jones and Mennell, 1996: 63–99. 6 This is not so surprising: Bendix and Elias were acquainted with each other – see Bendix’s foreword to Elias’s What is Sociology? (1978). 7 The allusions are to Theodore Roosevelt’s celebrated address ‘The Strenuous Life’ (1900) and to the American ‘Human Relations’ school of industrial relations centred on Elton Mayo. 8 I reported at length about the time company managers in Western countries spend on meetings in my article ‘The development of meeting behaviour in modern organizations and the rise of an upper class of professional chairpersons’ (Van Vree, 2002). 9 The word ‘parliamentary’ is here being used in the American sense pertaining to formal rules of procedure – standing orders and so forth – rather than in the European sense of pertaining to a legislative assembly as an organ of government. 10 The financial crisis might be the beginning of a period of stagnation or regression of these processes. On the other hand, the climate crisis and other global problems might promote integration and meetingization processes on a global scale. 11 See for instance Wittes (2008) and Zakaria (2008). 12 Changes of meeting standards and behaviour are being studied and explained as aspects of social differentiation and integration processes – main social processes that can increase and decrease (Elias, 2009 [1977]). References Dates given in square brackets are those of first publication. Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca and Sandra J. Harris, (1997), Managing Language: The Discourse of Corporate Meetings. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin’s Publishing Co. Bendix, Reinhard, (1974 [1956]), Work and Authority in Industry. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Boden, Deirdre, (1994), The Business of Talk: Organizations in Actions. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brett, Judith, (2002), ‘Meetings, parliaments and civil society’, Papers on Parliament (Canberra), 38: 43–160. 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