The meeting as subjunctive form: public/private IT projects in British and Turkish state bureaucracies

Alexander, C.

doi:10.1111/1467-9655.12595

The meeting as subjunctive form: public/private IT projects in British and Turkish state bureaucracies

Alexander, C.

Authors

Professor Catherine Alexander catherine.alexander@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Contributors

H. Brown
Editor

A. Reed
Editor

T. Yarrow
Editor

Abstract

Drawing on meetings within structured project environments in Turkey and Britain, this essay explores how and if this kind of highly rational, instrumental meeting travels and why so much frustration is typically expressed by British participants in such meetings. Meetings held in the Turkish senior government bureaucracy did not conform to expectation: they embraced formal and informal relations and were spectacles and tournaments of skill. I suggest that expectations of what constitutes a proper meeting are shaped by a specific British genealogy of common sense and technologies of fact creation, neither of which necessarily have purchase elsewhere. Nor is their applicability ‘at home’ straightforward, despite the fact that ‘common sense’ is often treated as simply commensurate with cultural systems as practical action: how one gets things done. Rather, the meeting, as shaped by this tradition, appears as a subjunctive form, a fiction of selective relationality where the meeting and project are treated as if they were set-aside spaces, participants act as if they had single formal roles cut from a web of internal and external relations, and highly summarized information allows discussion towards a shared goal.

Citation

Alexander, C. (2017). The meeting as subjunctive form: public/private IT projects in British and Turkish state bureaucracies. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23(S1), 80-94. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12595

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Dec 21, 2016
Online Publication Date	Mar 16, 2017
Publication Date	Apr 1, 2017
Deposit Date	Jan 25, 2017
Publicly Available Date	Mar 16, 2019
Journal	Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Print ISSN	1359-0987
Electronic ISSN	1467-9655
Publisher	Wiley
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	23
Issue	S1
Pages	80-94
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12595

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Copyright Statement
This is the accepted version of the following article: Alexander, C. (2017), The meeting as subjunctive form: public/private IT projects in British and Turkish state bureaucracies. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23(S1): 80-94, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12595. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.