Most countries have committed to the 2030 Agenda and have thus expressed the intention to drive change in this direction. This involves many organizations, but the role of public local organizations is often emphasized as especially important (Florida 2017). One particular type of organizations in this context are municipally owned corporations (MOCs), which in Sweden provide services where the corporations compete on the open market, such as central heating, electricity, and broadband (Thomasson 2023). The number of MOCs in Sweden has increased radically the last three decades, and those with a municipality as the majority owner represent a turnover of approximately five percent of the Swedish GDP (Bergh and Erlingsson 2023). What these corporations do (or not) has the potential make a large impact on the work towards the goals of Agenda 2030 due to the fact that these corporations are increasing in number and due to the impact that the services these corporations produce and deliver have on the economy, society, and the environment.

However, the transformation towards the goals of Agenda 2030 has shown to be demanding, and mainstream local level activities have been carried out as usual (Krantz and Gustafsson 2021; Taylor et. al. 2021). Many reasons have been given for the lack of action. One is ambiguity regarding responsibility. In Sweden the national government points to municipalities for action, but since they are self-governing authorities working with the agenda is to a great extent voluntary and the level of ambition varies greatly between different municipalities (Statskontoret, 2020). Still, many municipalities are committed to the Agenda 2030 and even make their MOCs formally responsible for work in this direction by explicitly stating tasks and obligations in their owner directives. This way of making the work an obligation is interesting, not the least since the voluntary character of engagement to the agenda has been identified as one of the main reasons for action not being taken (Tamvada 2020), regardless of if it concerns private or public organizations.

Another reason suggested for transformation not taking place is that efforts to respond to such complex transformation, while maintaining high levels of service delivery, are impeded by the way public organizations, and MOCs in particular, are organized and managed (Head and Alford 2015; Olsen et al. 2017; Maine et al. 2023). Central to these forms of organizing is the idea of dividing and limiting responsibility between different organizations and individuals. This demarcation of responsibilities has been questioned since it tends to cause actors to disassociate themselves from the wider consequences of their actions (Jensen and Sandstrom 2019). Instead, what has been suggested for complex problems, such meeting the goals of Agenda 2030, is a broader understanding of responsibility that includes meeting the needs of the many, now and in the future (WCED 1987), including all dimensions of sustainability (Elkington 1998).

Public management research explores different ways to handle broad responsibility on an organizational level (Head and Alford 2015). Collective acting is seen as especially important (Koschmann et al. 2012; Head and Alford 2015), indicating some form of shared responsibility between, as well as within organizations.

Less attention has been paid to the mundane work carried out in the organization and the effect this work has on the accomplishment of broad responsibility. In particular, little is known about how those who are supposed to share this broad responsibility work together in practice, not least top management teams (TMT), despite the important role they play in shaping the long-term development of organizations (Hambrick and Mason 1984).

Whereas TMTs work in many different ways, TMT meetings are one of the main occasions in which they work together. Team meetings have been widely studied in the last 20 years (Lehmann-Willenbrock et al. 2017) and have been shown to be consequential for outcomes at the team level and organizational level; however, less attention has been paid to how the enactment of TMT meetings affects the accomplishment of broad responsibility.

Therefore, the aim of this article is to develop knowledge on how the meetings of a TMT affect the accomplishment of broad responsibility. To achieve this, the paper builds on the communicative constitution of organizing (CCO) stream of research, where communication is the means by which organization is constituted and sustained (Taylor and Van Every 2000; Schoeneborn and Vasques 2017). Moreover, the paper focuses on the empirical material produced by closely following the TMT of a MOC over a period of two years, where the owner of the corporation has formally requested the corporation to contribute to achieving the goals of Agenda 2030.

What emerges from the analysis is how certain communicative practices in meetings keep limiting responsibility. A discussion of ways to organize these practices differently for broad responsibility to be accomplished is then presented. This article thus contributes knowledge to the literature in the field of public management on the role of communicative practices in TMT meetings for accomplishing broad responsibility.

The article is structured as follows. First, the concept of responsibility is introduced, followed by an explanation of why it is important to study how the meetings of a TMT affect the accomplishment of broad responsibility. After that, the theoretical framework, the research method, and the results from the case studied are presented. Finally, the analysis is presented in relation to prior literature, followed by a conclusion detailing the contributions made to the field of public management and suggested directions for future studies on responsibility and the goals of Agenda 2030.

MOCs differ from other service-providing units within municipalities and private corporations in various ways (Thomasson 2023). In Sweden, MOCs are subject to public as well as private law. According to the Swedish Municipal Act (SFS 2017:725), the municipal assembly is obliged to determine the public purpose of each corporation through the Article of Association, and goals and objectives through an owner directive, as well as to secure transparency and accountability by appointing board members and auditors who oversee and control the operation of the corporation. This is not something that the assembly is required to do for other service-providing units within the municipalities. Moreover, according to the Swedish Company Act (SFS 2005: 551), MOCs need to have charted accountants responsible for auditing the financial status. This applies to any corporation, but private corporations do not have to handle the ambiguity that the dual set of laws and auditors necessary for MOCs creates (Thomasson 2023).

Other than the board, the CEO of a MOC is the only one with formal responsibility for developing and implementing the corporation´s strategy, including the risk of liability for damages toward the corporation, the owners, and other stakeholders affected by the organization (Granberg and Wallenholm 2017; Thomasson 2023). Since a CEO cannot lead or control the operation of the whole organization alone, it is common, if not a requirement, to form a TMT to share the overall responsibility for the organization. The purpose of the TMT and what guides its work depends on what the CEO and the team members have agreed upon, but it generally refers to the content of the owner directive and pre-supposes a long-term and organization-wide perspective on operations (Hambrick and Mason 1984; Hiller and Beauchesne 2017; Granberg and Wallenholm 2017).

In MOCs, it is common to organize and manage work based on the idea of limited responsibility (Head and Alford 2015; Olsen et al. 2017), which materializes in different ways. On the one hand, MOCs may be influenced by the logics of bureaucracy prevailing in local governments. In this case, corporations tend to demarcate responsibilities between functional areas and steer employees towards different specialisations. On the other hand, MOCs may be influenced by the result-oriented logic of markets, highlighting the performance of the organization itself rather than meeting the public purpose of the corporation for the benefit of the local society (ibid). This implies that responsibility is considered as a promise one commits to in return for something else and is limited to the one (or the group) to whom the promise is made and the content of the promise, until the promise is fulfilled (Kittay 1999).

These ways of limiting responsibility are, however, questioned in relation to the goals of the Agenda 2030 due to the risk that actors will resign from responsibility for the broader consequences of their actions (Jensen and Sandström 2019). For instance, organizations may comply with environmental laws, labour laws, and codes of conduct but still contribute to pollution and the suffering of humans.

Instead, a broader view on responsibility has been suggested that, rather than being restricted to a promise to the few, meets the needs of current and future generations (WCED, 1987), addresses the whole system (Jay et al. 2017), and includes the simultaneous pursuit of economic prosperity, environmental quality, and social equity (Elkington 1998). Taking on such broad responsibility obviously presents a number of challenges and implies a multiplicity of tensions for a TMT to handle (Hahn et al. 2015; Jay et al. 2017). For example, while the importance of integrating all three dimensions of sustainability (economic, environmental, and social) into organizational practices seems to be widely accepted, many still adhere to a view where economic prosperity is prioritized when making decisions (Hahn et al. 2015; Hengst et al. 2020). Also, organizations have a tendency to ignore the timescale of their practices and outcomes (Ortiz de Mandojana and Bansal 2016), which may actually contribute to the prioritization of short-term operational matters at the expense of long-term strategic matters (Wodak 2013). Finally, TMT members, who are expected to consider issues from their unit´s perspective but also from that of the organization as a whole, may neglect to look beyond their own domains and act for the benefit of the organization as a whole (Jarzabkowski et al. 2013; Hambrick 1995), thus putting the team at risk of fragmentation of responsibility.

Addressing tensions is especially challenging for TMTs, because as the team tries to handle different needs and perspectives in parallel, it faces ongoing pressure to make clear and consistent decisions between alternative strategies in order to allocate resources and provide guidance for the rest of the organization (Smith 2014). At the same time, TMTs also have the authority and resources to change the established organizational practices to support the accomplishment of broad responsibility, something that leaders on lower levels only rarely have.

Hence, while challenging, the TMT plays an important role in developing ways of organizing and managing work that may support the accomplishment of the broad responsibility, which is required to pursue the goals of Agenda 2030. Therefore, the focus of this paper is on the work of a specific TMT, particularly how the meetings of a TMT affect the accomplishment of broad responsibility.

Broad responsibility requires collaboration (Koschmann et al. 2012; Head and Alford 2015), and while top management teams work together in various ways, their work is mostly performed in meetings.

Meetings are often defined as planned, co-located (physically or virtually), and episodic gatherings of people, where the participants interact for a purpose (Schwartzman 1989; Sandler and Thedvall 2017). Meetings are one of the most prevalent features in the day-to-day routines in workplaces (Sandler and Thedvall 2017). Meetings may be seen as occasions in which teams facing difficult tasks and challenges can interact and discuss problems and ideas, make decisions, and initiate change processes (Kauffeld and Lehmann-Willenbrock 2012). Meetings may also be considered to be connected to each other as part of an ongoing process that contributes to organizing the work of teams and the organization as a whole (Duffy and O´Rourke 2015). The connection of meetings may be made when written text, such as minutes of meetings or power point presentations, travels across place and time. The connection may also be created through participants acting as communicative bridges or brokers, making sure that what was talked about in one meeting influences other meetings that they also attend. Moreover, a collection of texts, such as a written policy on how to conduct general meetings available in the meeting rooms together with guidelines regarding the duties of the chair and participants of a particular meeting series, may connect the meeting to each other if it is invoked in meeting after meeting. Understanding meetings in this way may support organizations working together to accomplish their shared responsibilities, through the ways meetings are organized and performed (ibid.).

While research on meetings is an emerging field of research, important contributions have been made over the last 20 years that help us better understand issues related to preparing and conducting meetings and the related consequences (Lehmann-Willenbrock et al. 2017). One contribution concern how different types of organizations (public vs. private, for-profit vs. non-profit) use meetings differently (Allen et al. 2014). For public governments it is, for instance, most common to discuss quality, policy, and compliance while it for private firms is to discuss ongoing projects and clients’ needs or wants. Moreover, the level of organization matters. For instance, it is more common to discuss clients’ needs and the state of the overall business at the top-level compared to at other levels (ibid.).

Other contributions refer to how certain micro practices are used to frame the purpose and situation of meetings and thereby affect their performance (Alvehus 2021). Kauffeld and Lehmann-Willenbrock (2012) show that certain ways of interacting during meetings, for example, focusing either on problem solving, action, interaction, or procedures, impact the team and organization in both positive and negative ways. One particular area that has been studied is action-oriented communication in meetings, namely, the willingness to take on responsibility and to make changes. One study illustrates that open-ended discussion, as opposed to limited timeslots, impacts the change of strategy (Jarzabkowski and Seidl 2008). Another study shows that certain ways of visualizing metrics create accountability for sustainability (Bentia 2021). Still, action-oriented communication seems to be rare in many team meetings (Kauffeld and Lehmann-Willenbrock 2012). Instead, a great deal of the time in meetings is spent on analysing problems, on what has been done in the past, on details, and on why change is not necessary. Furthermore, Laapotti and Mikkola (2016) show that many management team meetings in public non-profit organizations are used as sites for information sharing with only a limited amount of group interaction.

In order to be able to change the form of a meeting, which has often become entrenched through repetition over time (Yates and Orlikowski 1992), Lehmann-Willenbrock et al. (2013) advocate for the use of procedural communicative practices, facilitating the meeting interactions themselves so that the meeting can become more action-oriented. For example, spoken statements (e.g. clarifying goals, giving directions, or summarizing) or critical reminders (e.g. asking the team to slow down, move on, reconsider issues, or to get back to the topic) tend to change the way participants act in meetings (Lehmann-Willenbrock et al. 2013). Also, written text, for example, a written agenda (Seidl and Guérard 2015) or minutes of meetings (Duffy and O´Rourke 2015), can be used to impact the way meetings are enacted. However, procedural practices may also have negative consequences. For example, a management team meeting agenda that contains a large number of issues and limited timeslots has been shown to have a restricting impact on discussion, as it does not allow enough time for problem solving and action (Laapotti and Mikkola 2019).

Whereas the research on team meetings has made important contributions, illustrating that meeting practices are by no means trivial but quite consequential for how shared efforts may be accomplished and to what effect, the question of how TMT meetings affect the accomplishment of broad responsibility (involving the organization as a whole, a long-term perspective, and all dimensions of sustainability) has not been explored in detail.

To better understand how the meetings of a TMT affect the accomplishment of broad responsibility, this paper builds on a processual-relational perspective, viewing organizations as processes constituted in interaction (Putnam and Fairhust 2015), and practice-based theorizing (Nicolini 2012) with a particular focus on communicative practices, a form of social and situated practice. This allows for understanding how the communicative practices (text and talk) are reproduced and adapted in situ and what is thereby accomplished (ibid.). Combining the practice-based approach with the Montreal School of CCO approach (Taylor and Van Every 2000; Schoeneborn and Vasques 2017) means that communication is both what is studied (the communicative practices) and the theoretical framework used (Cooren 2015). This allows for understanding communication as the means by which organizing is constituted and sustained (Taylor and van Ever 2000). This implies that the accomplishment of broad responsibility depends on what is made present in various acts of communications in the meetings where the TMT works together. Thus, studying communicative practices in meetings, and what is made present through these practices, allows for understanding which aspects of the TMT meetings might affect the accomplishment of broad responsibility.

CCO states that communication has an inherently relational and performative character. Relationality means that communication unfolds interactively in conversations where people continuously take turns interpreting and making sense of what is being said and the situation, before being animated by their own matters of concern to voice a response, that in turn is left open for others to interpret, make sense of, and respond to. In this way, people collectively produce an overflow of matters of concern and interpretations that must be collectively negotiated before eventually producing a more or less agreed-upon account of the situation and what matters, which then becomes a tentative common ground, though always subject to future revision (Taylor et al, 1996; Vasques et al 2017).

The performative characteristics of communication, in turn, mean that text and talk have agency (Castor and Cooren 2006), meaning that they make a difference. When people do something with words, they can usually explain what makes them do what they do (Cooren 2016). If these reasons are considered important, they become co-contributors and will express themselves through people´s actions. For example, a manager´s order or a contract may be made present through an employee´s utterances and thereby have implications for what happens.

In CCO, the metaphor of ventriloquism is used to capture the idea of shared agency (Cooren 2010) and to illustrate how people in conversations act both as the ventriloquist, animating other agents, and as the puppet, being animated, and how they can position themselves as more one or the other (Cooren 2015). When positioned as the former, a TMT member may, for example, enable herself to embody the voice of the owner and thereby add authority to what is being said by calling on the owner directive. Therefore, as a fundamental feature of collaboration, authority not only stems from a person's position of power, it can also be coproduced in interaction by making sources of authority present (Benoit-Barné and Cooren 2009).

When positioned as the puppet, a team member may instead argue that, even though the goals of Agenda 2030 are important, the owner´s request for financial return on investment makes it impossible for them to be achieved, that is, the request animates the team member. This does not mean that the idea of shared agency implies that people lose their own status as agent or can evade responsibility. Instead, as Cooren (2016) argues, it highlights the importance of viewing responsibility as an object of decision, based on careful evaluation of what matters in every situation. However, due to the complexity of many situations and the different value people may assign to them, this is never an easy task. Therefore, for different voices to be heard and negotiated, and decisions to be made, meetings are all the more important.

In order to make a difference beyond the situation at hand, matters of concern need to be provided with endurance (Vasquez et al. 2017). For example, by inscribing them into written texts, such as minutes of meetings, PowerPoint presentations, or written agreements, they will be able to be transported in time and place and thereby continue to work outside of the meetings or from one situation to another by, for example, specifying the criteria for success, defining objectives, and obliging employees to take certain actions (Cooren 2004; Cooren et al. 2007). Recognizing what textual agents accomplish is thus tied to the micro-level communicative practices in top management team meetings with the macro-level dimensions of organizing (Cooren 2004).

In order to accurately represent work being done in practice, the author has followed the work of a TMT by observing their monthly meetings and reading relevant documentation over a period of two years (May 2019 to April 2021), including a follow-up workshop to discuss the emerging results.

Building on a CCO approach, this study shows how the enactment of the meeting of a TMT may affect the accomplishment of broad responsibility. In the following section, the significant communicative practices that have been identified are presented and illustrated with a representative example.

The aim of this article is to develop knowledge on how the meetings of a TMT affect the accomplishment of broad responsibility. By building on the CCO perspective, the analysis reveals that certain ways of enacting common communicative practices within meetings (following an agenda, keeping minutes, using limited time frames for conversations, using restricted turn-taking in conversation, and presenting stakeholder voices) keeps reproducing separation and limitation of the broad responsibility. It is not the communicative practices themselves, but rather the way they are enacted that enables or hinders the accomplishment accomplishment of broad responsibility. In order for the team to accomplish broad responsibility, which is necessary for addressing complex challenges (e.g. moving toward the goals of Agenda 2030), other ways of organizing and managing meetings may thus be necessary.

The study contributes to existing literature in the field of public management, which mainly focuses on the systemic and organizational level in relation to accomplishing broad responsibility (Head and Alford 2015), by bringing attention to how the mundane work carried out by a TMT in a MOC plays a role in such accomplishment. More specifically, this paper opens the “black box” of TMT meetings to understand the significance of micro-level communicative practices within. This has implications for which aspects of meetings can be altered in pursuit of broad responsibility required for reaching the goals of Agenda 2030.

First, the practice of following a standardized agenda is a common way to frame the purpose of a meeting in order to render the meeting as meaningful for its participants (Seidl and Guérard 2015). Moreover, the use of a standardized agenda allows a series of meetings to be connected to each another as part of a process that contributes to the organization as a whole (Duffy and O´Rourke 2015). Since an agenda includes certain issues and excludes others, it affects what will be animated in the meetings and what will not. In this case, the agenda favours discussions on parts of the organization, the present, and profit at the expense of discussions on the overall organization, the future, and the social and ecological dimensions of sustainability. This practice thus stands in the way of accomplishing broad responsibility.

The reproduction of limited responsibility is further reinforced when the team repeatedly uses restricted turn-taking and limited timeslots in relation to the agenda. The practice of restricted turn-taking has also been found in other studies of management team meetings in public organizations (Laapotti and Mikkola 2016) where the chair also has a central role and much of the discussion takes place between the chair and one member at a time. This phenomenon may have a lot to do with the team’s duty to support the CEO, who is also the chair, and this may be more common in public organizations. The use of limited timeslots, which in this case leads to the processing of the agenda itself rather than the issues, resonates with the findings of Laapotti and Mikkola (2019). Such procedural communicative practices may admittedly compel the group to use the precious meeting time efficiently, but at the same time, they may stand in the way of quality in the handling of issues (Lehmann-Willenbrock et al. 2013). Negotiations and the ability to move an issue forward to a consensual decision instead require discussions that are not subject to strict time constraints (Wodak 2013).

Second, in order to allow discussions in one meeting to carry over to other meetings, the practice of keeping minutes of meetings is commonly used in most organizations. In this case, however, the minutes of meetings are never used as a source of authority in the meeting discussions (Benoit-Barné and Cooren 2009), nor do the minutes support the transfer of issues from one meeting to another or outside of meetings where they can continue to make a difference for the organization (Cooren 2004; Cooren et al. 2007). Thus, efforts to accomplish broad responsibility in the TMT are impeded. Without taking the time to co-author the outcome of conversations (Vasquez et al. 2017) in a document that can travel across time and space there is a risk that conversations in the TMT meetings will lack significance outside specific meetings.

Considering the practice of keeping meeting minutes through a ventriloqual perspective, any of the TMT members may at any time ventriloquize the meeting minutes in order to remind the team of previous decision made and what actions they require. It is therefore not only the TMT member who may say what needs to be done, but also the minutes, which strengthens the speaker´s arguments. In case the arguments meet opposition, the speaker may turn to act as the puppet, using the meeting minutes to speak for itself. By understanding that the result of an interaction always depends on what issues are being made present and what puppets end up being ventriloquized in a conversation, the TMT members may use the communicative practices in a way that better support the accomplishment of broad responsibility.

Third, the TMT in this case enacts the practice of giving voice to absent stakeholder groups, thus promoting the broad responsibility for sustainable development. However, these voices are silenced by other voices in the meeting. Benoit-Barné and Cooren (2009) argue that for the voices of absent stakeholders to be heard, authority needs to be given to those who speak for them. The speaker may, for instance, act as a ventriloquist (Cooren 2015; 2016), animating documents (i.e. owner directives or client contracts) as sources of authority. It is also possible for the TMT members, not least the CEO, to use authority based on their position to enhance the status of those invited to speak for absent stakeholders by introducing them and offering other support. The practice of silencing the voices of absent stakeholders in the case TMT may therefore be something the team may need to reconsider by examining who is given a voice, who speaks for them, and how their status can be made present.

In conclusion, to better understand how the meetings of a TMT affect the accomplishment of broad responsibility by studying the mundane work of a TMT in a MOC and using the theoretical framework of CCO, the article provides insight into how the way communicative practices in meetings are enacted makes certain issues present and others absent, and therefore contributes to create the conditions for accomplishing broad responsibility. Through these practices, the TMT meeting becomes an authoritative agent in the pursuit of the goals of Agenda 2030 and can actually have a significant impact, enough to enable the TMT to disregard the owner´s directive. It appears that the TMT meetings in this case are, at least to some extent, more about processing of the meetings themselves, rather than being occasions in which the team interacts and discusses problems and ideas, makes decisions, and initiates change processes (Kauffeld and Lehmann-Willenbrock 2012) or an ongoing process that contributes to organizing the work the organization (Duffy and O´Rourke 2015). This illustrates how the repetition and frequency of meetings allow relationships, norms, and roles to form and evolve over time (Yates and Orlikowski 1992) and, in this case, that the way TMT meetings are expected to be enacted has become fixed to such a degree that the communicative practices within nearly have become means of their own. Therefore, the author argues, when transforming the way of organizing and managing work to accomplish broad responsibility, the TMT can benefit from reflecting on how the TMT meetings, and the communicative practices constituting them, may be enacted differently.

The value of this study lies in the particular unpacking of how communicative practices are enacted in the context of a specific site. Despite the fact that the way practices are enacted by the TMT in this this MOC is specific to this organization and that the results cannot be generalized to a population, it is still likely that similar practices are used in other MOCs and that the results therefore can be relevant also to them. The practices enacted in the corporation studied correspond to what Laapotti and Mikkola (2016; 2019) show, i.e. that management team meetings in public corporations mainly are used as sites for information sharing and that the agenda contains a large number of issues, something that allows only limited time for problem solving and action planning. Moreover, it is known that the way such organizations enact meetings are similar and that this way differs from the way meetings are enacted in private corporations and public governments (Allen et al. 2014).

Studying a MOC is of interest due to the significance such corporations may have for the realisation of the goals of Agenda 2030. Not the least, access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (SDG # 6), as well as the transformation to more affordable and clean energy (SDG # 7) mainly depend on MOCs. In Sweden, particularly, those corporations are important because of the increase in the number of such corporations over the last 30 years and the significance they have on the economy (Bergh and Erlingsson 2023). Studying a MOC obliged to work towards the goals of Agenda 2030, specifically, is also of interest since this work is for most corporations voluntary and this voluntariness has been identified as a main impeding factor for accomplishing such broad responsibility. Therefore, being able to illustrate how a MOC, for which working towards Agenda 2030 is not a question of voluntariness, still encounters challenges, allows for a contribution to the research field of public management. More generally, how MOCs work is still limited area of research, and more studies are therefore recommended.

Moreover, it is of interest to understand what top managers do and to what end. First, while TMTs have frequently been studied with a particular focus on how the characteristics of the team members shape performance, less attention has been paid to the team´s work practices, that is, how they actually work together (Denis et al. 2017; Jarzabkowski et al. 2022). Secondly, most leadership research concerns the relationship between leaders and their followers, rather than the leader´s responsibility towards their many other stakeholders (Kempster and Jackson 2021). This, however, does not mean that top management teams are the only members of an organization that impact the accomplishment of broad responsibility. Responsibility is taken throughout the organization (Denis et al. 2017). Therefore, research on the accomplishment of responsibility among employees on other levels of the organization may be warranted.

Karin Ahlström was part time (40 %) employed as an Industrial doctoral student by the case corporation of this study and financially supported by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation (kks.se) under grant nr 20190129.