Small places, big stakes: "Meetings" as moments of ethnographic momentum

Small places, big stakes : "Meetings" as moments of ethnographic momentum

Garsten, Christina (author): Stockholms universitet,Socialantropologiska institutionen,Stockholms centrum för forskning om offentlig sektor (SCORE),Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Sörbom, Adrienne, 1967- (author): Stockholms universitet,Stockholms centrum för forskning om offentlig sektor (SCORE),Södertörn University College, Sweden

(creator_code:org_t)

Abstract Subject headings

The World Economic Forum is essentially a world of meetings: staged, circumvented, formal, organized meetings to which access is tightly restricted. The annual Davos meeting, the WEF show case meeting, is also a microcosm of the organization, set up in a small place but speaking to bigger issues. Ethnographic fieldwork in organizations such as the WEF – and more broadly incorporations, state agencies, and international organizations – often involves doing fieldwork in workshops, at ceremonies, and at other staged, formal events. In addition, such fieldwork tends to be multilocal, mobile, and discontinuous. What, if anything, can we learn from doing ethnography in such small, temporary meeting places, where we may not even have full access?The paper shows that researching an organization such as the WEF is as methodologically and theoretical challenging as it is rewarding. It is argued that to understand the practices constituting meetings we need to broaden the perspective of the meeting as a phenomenon. The meeting as research locus should not be seen as a given entity, but as a contingent and continually constructed social arena. In the WEF case the meeting is both a continuous organizing effort, and a social arena, temporarily bounded in time and space.

About the subject

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