How Meetings Affect the Accomplishment of Broad Responsibility in a Municipally Owned Corporation

Abstract

Municipally owned corporations are important actors in the pursuit of the Agenda 2030 goals and are often formally obliged by their owners to work in this direction. This has however shown to be quite challenging, and managers lack knowledge about how to develop new ways of organizing to meet such responsibilities. The aim of this article is therefore to understand how the work of a top management team in meetings affects the accomplishment of broad responsibility. The analysis, which is underpinned by a communicative constitution of organizing (CCO) perspective, shows how the way specific communicative practices (agendas, minutes, timeslots, turn-taking, and stakeholder voicing) are enacted leads to the re-production of parts of the organization at the expense of the whole, the present at the expense of the future, and profit at the expense of the other dimensions of sustainability. This study contributes to the literature on public management by showing how communicative practices enacted in meetings make certain concerns present and others absent, thereby creating the conditions for the accomplishment of broad responsibility.