Meetings and their documents

Meetings and documents have a very close relationship. Meetings are often about producing documents, and the formulation of documents usually requires meetings. Organisational capacity for action is largely built around these meetings and document-interactions, which is shown in the chapter. Our perspective on the relation between meetings and documents is not the common one where meetings produce results in the form of documents which are supposed to be implemented. We offer a more realist and nuanced understanding of how meetings and documents instead produce organisation. We discern the social functions of documents for meetings that we have found in our empirical data; documents may assemble participants, be used as evidence of work done, remove complexities, be used as temporary solutions, be objects of struggles, and be expressions of organisational hope.