Meetings. Ethnographies of Organizational Process, Bureaucracy, and Assembly

Meetings, socially and institutionally prescribe spaces for coming together, are important an ubiquitous organizational forms in various political, religious, and economic settings. They feature prominently in classic anthropological accounts, and in more contemporary ethnography, particularly in relation to studies o documents, organizations, policy, development, politics, and science and technology.
But perhaps because of a capacity to condense a broader set of concerns and interests, they have often been approached as contexts for other substantive and theoretical issues and rarely as objects of description in their own right. Actions and procedures intrinsic to bureaucratic meetings for example, have not drawn the sustained o comparative attention of anthropologists. This special issue aims to throw the spotlight on the epistemological and ontological basis of coming together through formal meetings of different kinds.
Collectively, the essays strive to describe how this remarkably efficient and familiar form of gathering operates, in different times and places, and how it comes to be recognized by those who experience or deploy it.