Learning to meet (or how to talk to chairs).

Abstract

This chapter considers formalized meetings in local authorities, (or councils), primarily in Britain and Norway. Such local authorities, instances of the state at the local level, use standard formats for meetings between elected representatives, administrators and other participants. These meetings may vary in formality, in content, length, location or size, but they share a format that gives them legitimacy on behalf of the state. Participants have somehow to learn these formats and how to use them for different purposes. Some of the learning is implicit social learned practice, and some is explicit. I consider two instances of learning how to ‘do’ meetings where tacit and coercive norms are made explicit, which provide the exceptions to the rule of meeting-practices as tacit, learned, normative assumptions about ‘proper’ practice.