Planned meetings: Multiplicity,boxed-in dialogues,and deliberative bureaucracy as social form

Abstract

In what ways are meetings a social form? How are meetings organized and how do organizations structure meetings to produce consensus around visions of the future? In this article, planning meetings, which gather representatives from the regional Public Transport Authority and the municipalities involved in public transport planning in Stockholm, Sweden, is probed as a social form. By structuring the meetings as collaborative planning processes, the Public Transport Authority’s ambition is to draw on the municipalities’ multiplicity of experiences and views but then arrive at a consensus, on which a strategic document is produced. However, these meetings are perplexing as a social form. While expectations of their outcomes vary, dialogues in the meetings are boxed-in as they follow standardized protocols for agendas, discussions, and decision points. Planned meetings, as this article shows, are an undertheorized aspect of attempts at future-making among formally independent bureaucracies. The article concludes by proposing that deliberative ideals in bureaucratic settings allude to deliberative bureaucracy through the social form of planned meetings.

Introduction

Walking through the open office space of the Regional Public Transport Authority (PTA) in Stockholm is an experience in and of itself. The interior design resembles many similar modern office spaces in Stockholm in that it is bright, white, and minimalistic. Yet, there is something else about it which makes it stand out: on the ground floor, the subway network is represented in various forms. Each meeting room has the name of a subway station in Stockholm. Blue, red, and green lines run along the walls, representing the three lines on the subway network. In the lobby, everyone entering the building must go through turnstiles, as when entering the subway network. Either you enter by swiping your personal ID-card or, if you are a visitor, the staff in the reception in the lobby opens the gates to let you in. The open and bright office spaces are inviting to spontaneous, informal meetings, and collaborations, presumably both within and across departments in the bureaucracy. Having done research on this bureaucracy for many years, I could easily make the connections between the physical design of the office space and the planning work carried out here.

Since public transport planning is a regional matter, it is contingent on collaboration with municipalities in the greater urban agglomeration. Collaboration is generally translated into, or taking place during, formal meetings with stakeholders (e.g. Healey, 2010; Kornberger et al., 2017). After all, in many impersonal bureaucratic settings, face-to-face interactions are often seen as a first step to enable the building of trust and legitimacy. And such face-to-face interactions are regularly equated with formal meetings. Deliberation and dialogue are often supposed to take place during formal meetings, when representatives of bureaucracies, civil society organizations and/or members of the general public are gathered in the same room for a period of time to discuss a predefined issue (cf. Haug, 2013; Kornberger et al., 2017).

While such meetings are forward-looking, involving consensus-building around future plans or about communicating objectives for the coming year, some meetings are arranged for communicating past performances and therefore more evaluative. Despite the frequent occurrence of such gatherings in and between bureaucracies, ‘meetings have not received the kind of detailed scrutiny that has been afforded to other kinds of bureaucratic tools and techniques’ (Brown et al., 2017: 12). Even though many meetings tend to matter to more people than those present, as future plans are made up and new agreements negotiated in these gatherings, ‘the meeting is arguably the most important and under-theorized phenomenon that ethnographers encounter’ (Sandler and Thedvall, 2017a: 1). There is, however, an emerging field of research devoted to the study of meetings in sociology and organization studies. This emerging field explores what meetings are, what they accomplish as well as their role for understanding contemporary bureaucracies, but it also explores how wider socio-political issues are imbricated in meetings (Allen et al., 2015; Brown et al., 2017; Haug, 2013; Svennevig, 2012). What many of these studies have in common is their focus on the micro-interactions, power relations, and temporalities at work in meetings, as well as their interest in exploring how meetings reproduce social structures and categories (e.g. class, ethnicity, and gender).

This article contributes to this emerging field in sociology by investigating not so much an actual meeting as it unfolds, but rather how ideas surrounding ‘the meeting’ as a social form, designed to facilitate collaborative processes, reverberates wider socio-political issues. The article, more specifically, zooms in on the following question: What is ‘the meeting’ for and how is it designed to enhance collaborative planning in and between bureaucracies? This question is explored in the bureaucratic setting of the Regional PTA in Stockholm. This is an ideal context for exploring meetings as public transport planning depends on the Regional PTA’s ability to collaborate with landowners, property developers, and municipalities (e.g. Hull, 2008). Without collaboration, or at least some exchange of strategies and plans, developing public transport becomes a challenge, if not outright impossible, due to the complex interdependencies and contingencies between different levels of authority in the public governance structure.

Meetings in settings

Turning to previous studies, there is not a clearly defined body of literature on meetings. The most common view of meetings in sociology and the social sciences has been to treat meetings as a method for studying other things, like agenda-setting (Wodak et al., 2011) and decision-making (Kaplan, 2011), but also as spaces for studying jokes and humor (Pouthier, 2017). This has meant that ‘the meeting’ as a social form has not been particularly visible. Perhaps this is due to the fact that meetings are so common in our organized lives that they have not been seen as worthy of theorizing (Schwartzman, 2013 [1989]: 4). Rather than seeing ‘the meeting’ merely as a method for studying other things, the emerging field of research on meetings recognize ‘the meeting’ as a unique social form that opens possibilities of investigating the production and reproduction of broader social structures and categories, albeit at a smaller scale (see, for example, Scott et al., 2011). Much of this research builds up on the pioneering work done by Helen B Schwartzman in her 1989 book, The Meeting: Gatherings in Organizations and Communities.

Documenting meetings

According to Weber, bureaucracy is governed by rules. These rules are written-down and disseminated across the bureaucracy to facilitate impersonal relationships and unbiased decision-making. Decisions and meetings are also recorded and everything carried out in the bureaucracy is stored and filed (Weber, 1978). Because of a need for specialization, each department or unit in the bureaucracy is preoccupied with a well-defined area or a clearly defined set of tasks. While rules and files are used to make the bureaucracy operate effectively, the need for meetings emerges when specialized units have to collaborate, negotiate or define the boundaries of each unit’s responsibility (Swedberg and Agevall, 2005).

Several scholars have picked up this theme, as suggested by the surge in publications during the past years. Many of the recent contributions to the anthropological literature on meetings explore documents and what these textual artifacts do in bureaucracies (e.g. Hull, 2012b; Riles, 2006). Riles (2017) suggests that unless a meeting results in tangible deliverables, its participants feel it has not been as productive as it possibly could have been. The agenda and preparatory documents circulated before a meeting, as well as the knowledge drawn upon during a meeting, manifest the bureaucratic setting in which the meeting takes place. Both the setting and the agenda shapes the content and subsequently also the outputs of a meeting (cf. Boden, 1995; Riles, 2017).

Although documents are central outputs from meetings (Hull, 2012a; Riles, 2006, 2017), it would be equally possible to argue that documents operate as devices that reconnect the immaterial and the material in bureaucracies. ‘The meeting’ is not an artifact, but rather a unique social form. As such, it orders interactions in predictable ways, with a significant bearing upon professional identity and social status (Schwartzman, 1986). Yet, meeting-specific documents (such as agendas, minutes, and supporting documents) turn ‘the meeting’ into a reference point in space and time, and so an object from which bureaucratic formality and objecthood is elicited (see also Brown et al., 2017; Strathern, 2017: 198).

Reconnecting the silos

A planned meeting is a way to get people to gather together. Schwartzman (2013 [1989]) has suggested that

a meeting is defined as a communicative event involving three or more people who agree to assemble for a purpose ostensibly related to the functioning of an organization or group, for example, to exchange ideas or opinions, to solve a problem, to make decision or make an agreement, to develop policy and procedures, to formulate recommendations, and so forth. (p. 7)

Although Schwartzman here tries to go beyond the traditional way of understanding ‘the meeting’ as a method, her own definition remains within a functionalist conceptualization, where ‘the meeting’ is defined based on its purpose. There is an interesting circular line of reasoning here. For as much as the conversation during ‘the meeting’ is structured around the purpose of it, ‘the meeting’, too, frames the proper way of talking and behaving. Again, as a social form, ‘the meeting’ imposes a certain order on interactions and conversations, as does the professional identities of the participants in ‘the meeting’. This becomes evident during coffee breaks. Abram (2017) has noted that the most interesting discussions and reflections emerge during coffee breaks, not during the official Q&A sessions. It is during coffee breaks the form of the meeting is lifted, whereby spontaneous and informal interactions tend to emerge. This illustrates how the meeting works as a social form.

Besides the recent ethnographic engagements with ‘the meeting’ as a social form (e.g. Brown et al., 2017; Sandler and Thedvall, 2017b), there is a whole range of mainstream business literature on meetings (e.g. Streibel, 2002; Tomalin, 2014; Tropman, 2013). One notable example in this genre is an old but often-cited piece in Harvard Business Review titled ‘How to Run a Meeting’, penned by Antony Jay (1976). He argues that meetings are costly but that they are, and have always been, part and parcel of human communities and social organization, be it in small gatherings, in modern, large-scale corporations. For Jay, meetings constitute a relational space where the group is reproduced. Without weekly or monthly standing meetings, there would be no shared sense of belonging to the group, even though the same people formally would do so. While sounding like an anthropologist-gone-corporate-consultant, he nonetheless touches upon matters that are of concern to any analysis of meetings. He brings to the fore the idea that the participants constitute themselves as members of the group at the meeting. Jay undeniably offers insights about the social aspects of meetings, but he does not discuss the wider socio-political issues that meetings attain to, both within and beyond bureaucratic settings.

Knowing this mainstream business literature, riddled as it is with its functionalist explanations, is crucial for understanding the normative frameworks at work when managers and employees explain how they understand what is an ‘efficient’ and ‘productive’ meeting. Because in this literature, meetings are habitually portrayed as a device for bridging silos and for middle managers to translate past performances and work-practices to both upper-echelons and across the organization (e.g. Thomas et al., 2018; Tomalin, 2014). Although this perspective has been recognized in the organization studies literature, meetings are still primarily treated as a method for studying other things, for example, as a site where strategy-as-practice can be studied (e.g. Tropman, 2013; see also Jarzabkowski and Seidl, 2008) or where leadership-as-performance can be observed (see, for example, Mroz et al., 2018; Odermatt et al., 2016).

Unlike such business meetings, the meetings explored in this article are characterized by ideals of deliberation. Deliberative ideals have influenced a lot of thinking and practice in urban planning during the past 20 years (see, for example, Forester, 1999). Inclusive and collaborative meetings influenced by these ideals, therefore, do not immediately resemble formal meetings between two businesses, or meetings inside a corporation. The deliberative ideals referred to here are based on notions of democracy, transparency, and inclusiveness (Beza, 2016; see also Kornberger et al., 2017). These ideals imply the involvement of an engaged group of community stakeholders in an open dialogue. However, the engagement and the degree of involvement in collaborative meetings vary. Some participants tend to represent strong interest groups, while others may be invited because the organizers know they will be ‘reliable’ participants (cf. Gastil and Richards, 2013). But deliberative democratic ideals are also difficult to translate into practice because broader social power relations come into play (e.g. Beza, 2016). Even in collaborative meetings explicitly characterized by deliberative ideals, it is inevitable that agenda-setting and power-games affect the dialogues (Allmendinger and Tewdwr-Jones, 2002). So, rather than leading to an open and inclusive decision-making process, built on a communicative rationality, ‘the meeting’, reflects the broader power relations that exist in society and the political life outside the meeting room (see, for example, Abram, 2017; Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009).

Based on the previous studies of meetings and of the deliberative ideas discussed above, this study will probe how ‘the meeting’, being unique social form, can be conceptualized as deliberative bureaucracy. The concept of deliberative bureaucracy has been used in some circles already. For example, Boswell and Corbett (2018) introduced the term to denote a normative ideal for reconciling democracy’s trade-off between social inclusion and overall economic performance. Unlike their discussions of political theory, deliberative bureaucracy here is referring to the bureaucratic practices of establishing collaborative processes through dialogically oriented meetings. Another more empirically oriented study by Puustinen et al (2017) draw the contours of what they term the ‘deliberative bureaucrat’. However, this figure is largely undertheorized and unlike Boswell and Corbett (2018) they do not engage in discussions of the ideals informing deliberative democracy. Moreover, Puustinen et al (2017) do not pay any attention to the meeting as a social form. But this study will do precisely this as it will be exploring how ‘deliberative bureaucracy’ can be used to conceptualize ‘the meeting’ as a social form in bureaucratic settings.

Exploring the meeting

The empirical material for this article originates from a 6-year-long engagement with researching public transport. It started out with interviews with employees at the Regional PTA in Stockholm, as well as interviews with traffic planners in municipalities within the County of Stockholm. A colleague and I approached employees at the PTA and asked whether we could arrange face-to-face meetings at their office to interview them. We successfully managed to arrange meetings with both managers and strategic planners with long-term experience. During this first round, 13 interviews were carried out in Stockholm during 2015–2016. All the interviews lasted between 45 and 60 minutes and were subsequently transcribed. Since then, my engagement with the PTA in Stockholm has continued. Over the years, I have probably interviewed more than 40 persons working in various capacities there.

The purpose of the interviews was first to understand the collaboration between the PTA and the municipalities in the region. Inspired by interpretive epistemology (Alvesson, 2010), a few open-ended questions were used to guide the interviews. Rather than seeing interviews as a way to tap people for data about ‘the world out there’, an interpretive epistemology involves self-awareness about the meaning-making processes occurring during interviews. Being reflexive about the meaning-making processes, I noticed that many of the interviewees referred to meetings while talking about collaboration. This is how meetings emerged as the object of the study. Thanks also to the interviewees’ ability to reflect upon their own work and experience, qualitative insights were gained into the meeting as a social form designed for enhancing collaboration.

Meeting cycles and document production

The PTA in Stockholm is a regional entity, responsible for planning and developing public transport across the urban agglomeration. It is also the PTA that procures traffic from bidding companies and ensures that those who operate buses, trams and trains fulfill and honor the contracts. Around 700 people are directly employed by the PTA, but more than 10,000 people are involved in the operations via the sub-contracted bus and train companies.

The PTA collaborate with the 26 municipalities in the urban agglomeration, as these municipalities have the sole authority to decide on land-use, including the planning and use of the local road network and new areas for housing development. This means that everything from new large-scale projects, such as a new metro station, to minor changes in the bus network, like changing the location of a bus stop, involve some collaboration between the PTA and the affected municipality.

There are a number of departments, including Operations, Infrastructure, and Customer Service. In the department of Strategic Planning, around 100 people work, mostly with long-term visions and strategies. A few of these also collaborate and work directly with the municipalities in the region. To integrate land-use, housing development and public transport planning, a host of formal and standing meetings – meetings as routine events (Haug, 2013) – are arranged by the PTA. At these meetings, they invite the municipalities to discuss new plans or propose new strategies. A public transport law that entered into force in 2012 also explicitly stated that the PTA’s in Sweden must engage in consultation and collaborate with ‘relevant authorities’ (including the municipalities) and other stakeholders in the process of producing the legally mandated Regional Traffic Supply Program (for an analysis of how authority is networked in this regionalized process, see Paulsson and Isaksson, 2019).

The Regional Traffic Supply Program is a strategic document, in which the PTA defines and decides on the Public Service Obligation, that is, the scope of the tax-subsidized public transport system. The vice-director of the department of Strategic Planning described the collaborative process of producing this document as follows.

. . . there has been a pretty good job of reaching out and asking the public, our travelers, as well as those who do not travel with us, what they like about public transport and what’s going on [. . .]. We have also had quite a lot of consultations with professional actors, especially early in the process, as it was important to gather as many views as possible from municipalities and the National Traffic Administration as well as all sorts of other actors. [Right now] . . . we work to get the consultations under way in the spring [of 2016]. We will meet all the municipalities in each municipal sector, and we will have different themes for these meetings . . . and also meet different organizations. So, it will be a busy and intense time during February and March.

Besides the legal requirement, that the PTA must arrange collaborative meetings when producing the Regional Traffic Supply Program, the PTA collaborates with a range of stakeholders and organizations for other reasons as well. Deciding on the appropriate location of bus stops, bicycle stands and access to train stations all involve formal decisions on land-use and therefore require some form of collaboration between the PTA and the municipalities.

The way that these collaborative processes are organized has changed over the years. In the City of Stockholm, the head of traffic planning in the Department of Urban Development reflected upon this when asked about the collaborative processes with the PTA. He mentioned that a few years ago, in 2008–2009, the PTA had carried out an investigation of what the municipalities ‘really thought about them [the PTA], and how things worked and so on’. Although he did not know all of the results of that investigation, the general understanding was that, at least in the City of Stockholm, he explained, ‘it was a bit difficult to get in touch with the PTA and find ways to collaborate’. Subsequently, the PTA listened to this criticism, and reorganized its collaborative processes by setting up cyclical meetings with groups of municipalities in different sectors of the region.

A formal decision in the Traffic Board in 2009 also made clear that these cyclical, sectoral meetings were to be held on a regular basis during the year, while thematic consultations were to be held as needed. The thematic consultations aimed at addressing specific issues that did not necessarily align with the grouping of municipalities based on the geographical administrative boundaries of the region. The PTA also states that meetings with user’s organizations are held twice a year to take special account of the needs of these groups (SLL, Trafiknämnden, 2011: 1).

In 2011, based on the results from the investigation mentioned earlier, a report was produced and a new policy concerning collaborative meetings was approved by the politicians in the Traffic Board of the County Council of Stockholm. In the report, the head of the PTA presented this new policy as follows:

The first suggestion included ‘Sectoral strategic dialogues’, involving municipalities in the production process of the Regional Traffic Supply Program, traffic plans, implementation plans and major projects. The ‘Sectoral strategic dialogues’ were to be conducted at a high level of civil servants and arranged twice a year. The second suggestion centered on ‘Planning and follow-up meetings’, which included municipal plans, traffic reviews, customer environments, accessibility, depots and sustainable development. Meetings were to be held at least 1–2 times per year, or more often if necessary. (SLL, Trafiknämnden, 2011: 1)

With the introduction of this new policy, a small group of employees at the department of Strategic Planning were tasked to devote their work to organizing these meetings. The meetings are cyclical as the Regional Traffic Supply Program must be produced anew once a year according to the legislation. However, since arranging these meetings is a huge undertaking, the PTA has decided to only revise it once a year, and instead produce a new Regional Traffic Supply Program once every 4 years. This also coincides with the political term. Newly elected politicians are then given the chance to shape the strategic planning of public transport in the region, not only administer past investments and existing infrastructures. Like the other municipalities in the county, The City of Stockholm is clustered into one the four municipal sectors, but it rarely has any representatives present at these meetings. The head of traffic planning at the department of Urban Development confirmed this. The city and the PTA do not have ‘very frequent’ meetings, but they do meet. ‘I would say’, he explained, ‘that we often meet them for substantial issues but less for this general dialogue . . . and less for meetings with a social purpose only’. The meetings between the city and the PTA must concern ‘sharp projects’ and ‘real questions’, he explained. But it is, of course, ‘always good to meet and shake hands and see what’s happening in the different organizations and so on’, he added, before moving on to justify why this is the case: ‘there is always some staff turnover, changing positions, and so on’. This suggests that the city has more leverage and bargaining-power than smaller and suburban municipalities. While the smaller municipalities and its inhabitants depend on the PTA for getting access to the city center, the PTA is dependent on the city. Subsequently, the meetings reflect underlying asymmetric dependencies between the municipalities in the region and the PTA.

In the process of producing the Regional Traffic Supply Program, a series of workshops was organized during 2015 and 2016 to ensure that it became a product of a collaborative process involving both interested and affected stakeholders. Brown et al (2017) has also discussed the ostensive connection between documents and meetings. ‘Just as documents produce meetings, so meetings produce documents, but the logic of production looks different depending on which of these artefacts one takes as the start of inquiry’ (Brown et al (2017: 22). By starting from the point of view of the document, it is possible to trace its production, circulation and consumption in and around meetings. By starting from the point of view of the meeting, the document submerges into the background, while opening possibilities for exploring pre-meetings, where discussions orbit around which strategies to pursue during the upcoming meeting.

In addition to the formal and cyclical meetings with each of the four municipal sectors in the region, project-related meetings are also arranged as needed. But since these meetings focus on specific interventions in the urban landscape, or concern costly investments in infrastructure, arriving at a common vision is generally difficult, several people stated. One planner, who had worked intensely with expansion of railway infrastructure, bus depots, as well as major procurement projects, said that:

. . . continuous dialogue is important. However, at the project meeting, there will be discussions on some specific and substantial questions. But, maybe you should add a bit more of the workshop format, to get this overall perspective, so we do not lose the direction. We have missed out on this project [the major urban development project] the City of Stockholm is running [called Slussen]. They have not invited us; how we look at this . . . [. . .] This should be lifted to a more common level, otherwise it will not be possible to move forward. There is no point in sitting and arguing.

As suggested in this quote, the links between multiplicity and particularity emerge in these collaborative meetings. While multiplicity tends to be ‘the meeting’s’ point of departure, as a diverse set of participants are invited, Brown et al. (2017) has argued that ‘singularity (eg in the form of an objective agreement) is often their achieved outcome’ (p. 14). This is also articulated in statements by many civil servants in the PTA. If only all participants had embraced a ‘helicopter perspective’ (i.e. an objective view from nowhere), it would have been much easier to arrive at ‘the right’ decision (i.e. a decision not biased or motivated by self-interest), explained several civil servants.

While the content of these meetings quickly came to the fore when interacting with the civil servants at the PTA, the meeting as a social form was rarely reflected upon. Because it is so mundane and possibly self-explanatory it is also difficult to intellectually engage with it. Schwartzman (2013 [1989]) has similarly pointed out that the meeting’s emphasis on decision-making as well as on the goal of achieving a common vision, thwarts and diverts a deeper engagement with ‘the meeting’ as a social form. By not considering the social form, wider socio-political issues, which are both embedded and reified in meetings, tend to be overlooked. At the PTA, the purported objectivity that the meeting is supposed to be eliciting can be derived from the impersonal, value-free and impartial decision-making that is part and parcel of the ideal-type bureaucracy (Hoag, 2011). This is expressed in the idea that it is possible to arrive at a ‘right’ decision if only all the participants at the meeting look beyond their own self-interest and apply, what they term, a ‘helicopter-perspective’.

Paradoxically, however, ‘the meeting’, at least in this abstract sense, is deeply personal and the desired objectivity becomes nothing more than an ideal-type, like that of the bureaucracy (Graeber, 2015). Because ‘the meeting’ is an opportunity to meet face-to-face and share experiences, a meeting where people agree is more pleasant than a meeting plagued with disagreements. That said, embracing disagreements and conflicts may lead to bolder and better solutions in terms of urban planning, Pløger (2004) has proposed. This was also expressed by one strategic planner. His reflection on this matter is worth quoting in full, as it reveals the built-in tensions of the dialogically oriented meetings.

. . . if we only had been a bit harder, and not so soft and agreed on things, then maybe we would have had a sustainable solution in the long-term, which would also have benefited [everyone]. Perhaps the meetings would have been less pleasant and involved more conflicts . . .

This quote suggests that the challenge is to design meetings in which the ‘right’ conflicts emerge. What the ‘right’ conflicts are, though, is not something he touched upon, but it is presumably conflicts that lead to some notion of constructive outcomes. Self-interest prevailed though, as the planners and politicians attending the collaborative and dialogically oriented meetings tended to favor their own municipal growth ambitions. Subsequently, these meetings are reverberating and reproducing wider social-political structures in the urban agglomeration, as the different municipalities’ interests are partly shaped by their socio-economic and ethnic fabrics.

Professions, technical roles, and persons

Who, then, attends these meetings? This issue emerged when informally talking to the planners at the PTA. Unless the ‘right’ professionals participate at the project meetings, decisions are hampered, whereby the whole process risks slowing-down. For example, one municipality once sent their highest administrative manager to a meeting with the PTA, while the PTA only participated in the guise of rank-and-file staff. Frustration ensued because these professionals occupied different offices, with different mandates, each linked to the hierarchy in their respective bureaucracy.

Linked to this is another issue: the problem of high staff turnover. When a new planner replaced a more experienced one in a project a few years ago, this meant the project had to take a few steps back, I was told. Learning takes time and getting up to speed is difficult for new staff. More meetings could compensate for this, but not entirely.

A third aspect is the imbalance between urban planners, on one hand, and the traffic planners, on the other hand. As professionals, they have different educational backgrounds (urban planners being social scientists, while traffic planners are engineers), meetings between these professionals also mean meetings between different forms of knowledge. As such, they use different languages and methods to understand and reflect upon their work (see, for example, Bucher et al., 2016). Urban planners generally have a broader perspective on spatial and urban development, while traffic planners primarily look at the capacity of transport systems and the potential of optimizing traffic flows, some of the staff at the PTA explained. Emerging here is a picture in which the various technical and official roles that persons occupy when entering a meeting either enable or obstruct dialogue and collaboration (e.g. Huq et al., 2016). One planner who had worked with the expansion of the infrastructure system, explained this in the following way:

. . . it’s always easy to interpret everything based on your mandate and what role and function you have. It will be different for each individual. Perhaps it will always be like that. Someone will always think that electrical conductors are more important than urban development, but a common ground level must be found. You must have a common starting point. Otherwise, everyone will immediately just zoom in on their favorite solution. The reason that there may be contradictions between the PTA and the municipalities is because of their different official roles. They govern different domains and issues, and that is what they are supposed to do. However, if the helicopter-perspective is lost, then this may lead to further challenges. Diverse skills are present and participate at the meetings: from the engineers and technical experts to the architects and urban planners. It is not always easy to get them to communicate. It is a communication issue.

This quote illustrates how meetings operate as a social form. Professions get together to engage in dialogue in a structured setting (Abram, 2017). Yet, in every professional meeting, there is always a gap between the person and the technical role he or she is embodying. This gap becomes evident when a person is assigned a role by the organizer, alternatively by the others attending the meeting, a role that does not correspond to the role the person routinely attributes to him- or herself. Connected to this is also the issue of mandates, which are linked, as it were, to the offices occupied by the persons present at the meeting. What promises and commitments are they authorized to give? An answer to this question must be given by the bureaucracy to the person representing the bureaucracy before ‘the meeting’ begins, several civil servants suggested while talking about the formal decision-making procedures. This question was also important when the PTA was about to engage in dialogue-oriented meetings with municipalities on how public transport should develop. One strategic planner at the PTA explained, for example, that

. . . each of the municipalities must write something about how cooperation should work and what mandate (the planners have) and what issues to push. [. . .] Otherwise – if it’s only officials and planners – they often go to meetings and do not really know if they can decide on this or that, nor if they can agree on something or not . . .

While the distribution of mandates and roles at meetings are built upon existing hierarchical relations between and within bureaucracies, authority is also dispersed across a network of organizations. This is evident in the development of the Region Traffic Supply Program, a strategic document guiding public transport planning in the region. During the production of this strategic document, all municipalities are supposed to be involved and feel responsible for the planning and development of public transport. One planner at the PTA explained that ‘we invite to meetings to discuss issues related to the analysis of needs for development, and this has been very important, because it has been a way of engaging the municipalities in the development of public transport’. He also added that they have designed these meetings to be as collaborative and dialogically oriented as possible, involving the municipalities in the development, rather than only informing them what they, at the PTA, is planning to do henceforth. This is to ensure that no municipality felt left out, or overrun, by the PTA, he explained.

Meetings, collaboration, and a modified theory of deliberative bureaucracy

In the narrative above, meetings emerged as a social form, crucial for designing collaborative processes in and between bureaucracies, as well as between different professional groups. Although this has been highlighted in previous studies (e.g. Abram, 2017; Haug, 2013; Huq et al., 2016), few of these have related these collaborative processes to the broader socio-political discussions about deliberation and theories of deliberative democracy. For many of the planners, this connection was obvious, as the meetings were part of longer processes of collaborative planning, whose overarching aims sought to transform the transport systems and subsequently the urban agglomeration.

Because my interlocutors in the PTA referred to the deliberative ideals that are informing collaborative planning, it is necessary to say a few words about the theory of deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy emerged as a novel political model in the 1990s and was in many respects positioned as a solution to the widely recognized problems associated with the lack of public involvement in democratic decision-making, the weakening of local communities vis-à-vis supranational institutions and the hollowing-out of public authority. While much of the theoretical reasoning on deliberative democracy earlier focused on how to incorporate citizens into the planning and decision-making processes (Cooke, 2000; Forester, 1999; Miller, 1992), a third wave of deliberative thinking, which arose 10–15 years ago, emphasized both the theoretical foundation in communicative rationality and the practices of institutionalizing dialogically oriented meetings (see, for example, Elstub, 2010).

In the case of Stockholm, the collaborative processes designed by the PTA were dialogically oriented and the meetings were ostensibly inspired by ideals of deliberative democracy. Unlike models of deliberative democracy, which generally focus on the inclusion of citizens (cf. Kornberger et al., 2017) or civil society organizations (Öberg and Svensson, 2012), these dialogically oriented meetings were targeting other public bureaucracies, namely, the municipalities in the county and the professional planners working there. Since the deliberative ideal was translated and, in fact, taking place in meetings between planning professionals from different public bureaucracies, this suggests that these meetings were an expression of, what I would term, a modified theory of deliberative bureaucracy. To clarify the contours around this conceptualization and to show how this empirically derived term contributes to the literature on meetings, I will now analyze how the meetings, designed by the staff and the political leadership at the PTA, sought to enhance collaborative processes between bureaucracies.

First, by designing the sectoral meetings in cycles, a communicative rationality could be expected to emerge from the institutionalized, continuous dialogues. The PTA and the municipalities in the region mutually engaged in speech acts, such as promising and guaranteeing future actions and counter-actions in line with the agreed-upon visions or even formally decided plans for development. Again, those collaborative processes did not involve citizens directly, as it was planners and other professional officials who got together (cf. Allmendinger and Tewdwr-Jones, 2002). So, unlike a strong theory of deliberative democracy, where citizens (and politicians) are directly involved in the decision-making processes, the modified theory of deliberative bureaucracy emerging here denotes processes where planning and decision-making hinges on a group of planners, who are working in, but primarily engaged with, relationship-building with other bureaucracies.

Second, just as multiplicity is the starting point in the inclusive and collaborative processes in a strong theory of deliberative democracy, so did the meetings here involve assumptions about multiplicity. According to the logic of communicative rationality, the most superior argument is believed to gain support and lead to consensus. Standpoints or interests are supposed to be shaped and formulated, or at least reformulated, at the meetings (Forester, 1999; Habermas, 1998). From this follows that the stronger the consensus is, the greater likelihood that the decision reached is the ‘right’ one. This view also emerged in the planned meetings between the PTA and the municipalities. Because if only everyone at these meetings looked beyond their own self-interest and decided to agree with the best planning proposal, then these collaborative processes would arrive at the ‘right’ decision. The problem with these meetings, however, was that the participants were there with the purpose of defending or advancing their own municipality’s agenda.

Third, the deliberative ideals have been criticized for being too optimistic when it comes to establishing consensus. It is also overlooking, or outright avoiding, power-relations, or even idealizing the relations between consensus and objectivity (or ‘a view from nowhere’). Yet, the proponents of the deliberative ideals tend to argue that it leads to conditions of impartiality, rationality and true knowledge (for classical statements, see Cooke, 2000; Miller, 1992). This article does not add directly to these theoretical debates, but it does show that a modified theory of deliberative bureaucracy emulates some of the characteristics of deliberative democracy. Like deliberative democracy, deliberative bureaucracy operates through meetings, whose purpose is to allow the participants to deduce what is the ‘right’ decision through dialogue. However, these dialogues are in practice boxed-in because of the way these follow standardized protocols and agendas, as well as because they are structured around the limited communicative capacity of PowerPoint visualizations.

In sum, deliberative bureaucracy has here been introduced as a concept to describe how ‘the meeting’ emerges as a unique social form designed to foster deliberative dialogues between bureaucracies engaged in collaborative planning. By delineating the boundaries around this concept and by showing how ‘the meeting’ is invoking ideals of deliberation, this article has contributed to the current literature on meetings and their wider socio-political implications.

Conclusion

This article has investigated ideas related to ‘the meeting’ as a social form designed to foster collaboration between professionals working in different bureaucracies. Based on a review of how meetings have been studied previously, it was surmised that ‘the meeting’ has primarily been seen as a method for studying other phenomena, for example, decision-making, strategy-making, power relations, and so on. In this article, I tapped on to an emerging stream of research, spanning both ethnographic and conceptual explorations, which has sought to theorize ‘the meeting’ on its own terms (e.g. Haug, 2013). By drawing upon a case study of public transport planning in Stockholm, this article zoomed in on the question what ‘the meeting’ is for, and how it is designed to enhance collaboration via dialogue – in this case between the PTA and the municipalities in the region of Stockholm. Two main conclusions derived from the analysis.

First, meetings are part and parcel of collaborative dialogue and often center on the production of a document, or a set of documents (e.g. Riles, 2017). Due to the legislation on public transport in Sweden, a strategic document, the Regional Traffic Supply Program, must be developed in collaboration with the municipalities and other stakeholders. While certain cross-departmental meetings in the PTA were arranged to inform the employees of past developments (financial performance and budget appraisals), the meetings designed as collaborative dialogues were generally tilted toward discussions of future developments. But instead of being a straightforward solution to problems associated with collaboration, these meetings had their own sets of challenges related to the meeting as a social form. Officials attending these meetings came from different professional and bureaucratic backgrounds, had different expectations, and occasionally also differentiated mandates. Yet, the meetings were designed to foster collaboration through dialogue. Earlier studies have also pointed out that the multiplicity that characterizes (and is sometimes also the cause of) meetings tend to get lost when dialogue is structured, or even boxed-in, which tends to be the case when the ambition is to produce formal documents.

Second, deliberation emerged as a common trope in the conversations about meetings. While discussing the social form of meetings, and how this social form was designed to foster collaborative dialogues, I introduced the concept of deliberative bureaucracy. Unlike many of the earlier theoretizations of deliberative democracy as a model for collective decision-making, deliberative bureaucracy is building upon the practices of the planners. It is derived from their experiences, not by some political philosopher. Taken together, I have explored how collaborative planning is expressed through dialogue-oriented meetings and how meetings as a social form could be understood as a modified theory of deliberative bureaucracy. Since I have only managed to open the door to this topic, more research is necessary to explore meetings as a social form and their wider socio-political implications.