Jean D. Wineman1

The meeting room is one of the places where the staff meets and exchanges viewpoints and thereby develops a shared identity through unanimous decisions. Therefor it has a very important function in a company's striving towards a common aim2. When we go to a meeting, we want to contribute, to be part of the progress, to be progress! This we fight for, and meetings become power struggles.

What is a business meeting?

In order to try to understand what a meeting is and aims at, we have to investigate what a commercial company is. This, because it will help us to see what can and cannot take place in a meeting/room which then defines it. To do that, I want to try to define what paradigm the business world is in. The two Danish marketing theoreticians Stig Ingebrigtsen and Michael Petterson have defined their view of the marketing paradigm. As marketing covers a big part of what a business in general is3 I think Ingebrigtsen and Petterson's definition gives a good picture of the understanding we are looking for.

To Ingebrigtsen and Petterson4 the marketing paradigm consists of the following:

The world picture is (social) liberalistic i.e. a market run society with the social in brackets as it is seen as a restriction. Optimising is done from the aim of the owner/manager and in the belief that what is good for the individual owner/manager is good for society5. The world picture is relatively static as it focuses on short-term consumer satisfaction. The image of man is mechanistic and one-dimensional. The individual is only a consumer and the connection between stimulus (marketing) and response (buying) is unequivocal and can be generalised.

Furthermore, but what is left out in Ingebrigtsen and Petterson's definition, part of this paradigm should be 'progress'. There is always an underlying idea of progress in all business decisions (although it is more outspoken then the goal definition i.e. more ideological than paradigmatic). The reason I think this is important too is because the examples mentioned above cannot be a goal as long as it leads to a step backwards for the company i.e. an economic step backwards. Even if it is obvious to everybody that takes part in the decision making process that 'the concern' will benefit humanity, i.e. us, our families and friends. It is unthinkable to include such a discussion, let alone make decision about it because the paradigm is that we earn money for the company owners. This is also why social is in brackets in the definition above as the societal concern is seen as a restriction to marketing. Another issue that could equally well be brought in is the emphasize on competition instead of co-operation6.

Would there be a meeting room if the business paradigm were taken away or changed? If yes, then what kind of meeting room would that be? As we have seen in Mark Wigley's deconstruction of architecture7 and its relation to gender, to insert a discussion about e.g. goals in the design of meeting rooms would be to take away the historical foundation of a practice and discourse such as architecture or meeting room design. It is such a profound action that it is impossible. The whole field has to start from scratch and redefine itself. Lets say for example the idea of bringing ethics as a goal in itself (instead of a means) into a meeting room. Doing that would lead to increased expenses without the prospect of increased earnings. This would be a paradigmatic shift that would question the whole purpose of the company, the employees, their education and experience, the office design, etc.

How can it be that so many people live their lives according to the business paradigm and fuel it? This is a paradigm that fulfils the aims of an owner and not society, even if the latter is 'damaged' from it. Is a paradigm so encircling that you cannot see anything outside of it? A reason for this 'great capitalistic self-deceit' could be found in Nietzsche's 'will to power'. Because the 'will to power' cannot be legitimised as an end in itself, we need hypocrisy or self-deceit to cover it up and find other aims to legitimise it8. This self-deceit can be what businesses (e.g. via architects) tap into to create cover-up desires for our 'will to power'. A little simply put, we think we are working for an extrovert cause, to create better products, faster transport, healthier food, etc. but its all about ourselves. A meeting room can be an engine for this fulfillment of desire of the 'will to power'.

Kim Dovey9

There are two main categories of power10, one is 'power to' do something and the other is 'power over' someone. If we think about the latter in the built environment and in particularly meeting rooms there is a frame of 'programmed action' set up. This framing closes down other possibilities and we tend to avoid those behaviours. When you enter a meeting room you have already entered the business paradigm (see elsewhere) and the parameters that has set up. This paradigm demands a certain set of 'programmed actions'. But let us have a closer look on different forms of 'power over' and its connection to meeting rooms.

One type of 'power over' is coercion11, which operates as a "threat of force to secure compliance". It operates under the cover of voluntarism and is only implied which often prevents the subject from ever forming a resistance. This is relevant to meeting rooms in three ways: the staff of an organisation is directed towards fulfillment of another's plan as the space is built for programmed action. Only if they do not fulfil the plan they will be 'punished'. Another way it operates is by manipulation by keeping people ignorant e.g. by keeping information away. This form is usually hidden, but can also be visible by you knowing that you do not know about something. E.g. if you are excluded from certain meetings. Also the management of space and time in the way that makes other in the organisation visible or invisible to you. You can consciously be excluded from 'where things happen' e.g. if you are seated 'badly' at a meeting.

Another form is seduction12, which operates by shaping perception, cognition and preference in a way that makes you accept the existing order of things. The built form and structure of a meeting room and whatever this form instrumentalises is taken for granted, seen as natural and unchangeable. It is seductive in that we indulge in a desire against our real interest.

The most pressing form of 'power over' is authority13. This form is marked by an absence of argument and connected to socially acknowledged rights and obligations. It needs legitimation and has that through seemingly serving a larger interest. It could be rituals, norms and structures in meetings that are institutionalised. No one really knows why meetings operate in certain ways that is just the way it is. These "symbolic ritual[s] enables the collapsing of disparate meanings into a form of political solidarity in the absence of consensus". Part of the legitimisation is also for the power holder to prove its legitimacy: "This is precisely why monarchies, dictatorships and military states are so full of monuments, parades and ritual strutting14." From this, one could draw a line between a highly stately decorated meeting room and its relation to legitimization! What is it that needs to be legitimised here?

Taken from these types of mediation of power through meeting rooms lets have a look at how the desire of the staff plays in as a manipulative material. Seen from the point of view of the company who houses a meeting room "The capacity to stimulate desire and to enlarge the public imagination can be crucial to the discourses of power"15. If you consciously use the stimulation of desire, e.g. to make great decisions or come up with new ideas (within the business paradigm i.e. 'programmed action'), you on the one hand exercise 'power over' your staff in directing them and on the other can construct that desire: The Greatest, The Most Innovative, The Fastest Growing, etc. No ideological or paradigmatic questions asked, just 'full throttle' and fast forward. One way of looking at is that there is a self-deceit going on. The 'will to power'16 is covered or kept unconscious and projected onto the company's aim. We totally indulge in the company's aim and the reason for not asking questions about the power that is exercised over us is that a consciousness about this self-deceit is quite scary: "Subjection to unjust authority is inherently distasteful and there is some comfort in the belief that such authority is legitimate"17.

Where one sits in a meeting is an indicator of power relations. Fritz Steele18 identifies three ways in which this manifests: "where one chooses to sit, where one is allowed or instructed to sit, and group norms about who sits where in a given event." The indicator of power is where the boss sits and how near to the boss others sit. The boss sits at the end of a rectangular or oval table, or with a good overview of the room and entrance at a round table. A person equal to the boss can sit at the other end to counter the power position of the boss.

As an example of this, a picture of the founder "carry a very high message value about continuity, permanence, stability and traditional values of the organisation"19.

A guest is automatically less secure in a new setting20. This applies both if the guest is external or from another department of the company, that does not normally use this meeting room. Does the account department visit the marketing department or vice versa?

11. Ibid, p. 10-11

12. Ibid, p. 11-12

13. Ibid, p. 12-15

14. Ibid, p. 14

15. Ibid. p. 13

17. Kim Dovey p. 14

19. Ibid, p. 51

20. Ibid, pp. 49 and 51

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The second example is about how challenging the design should be for the staff. As Walter H. Moleski and Jon T. Land21 expresses the following about office design in general:

This statement relies on the general possibilities in architecture. Here expressed by Kim Dovey22:

Lets counter these ideas with how Henri Lefebvre23 sees it:

What we meet here is perhaps the clash between the business paradigm24, with its mechanistic image of man, and a philosophical view, where man is multidimensional and where the connection between stimulus (design) and response (behaviour) is complicated, if not incomprehensible. Not that design necessarily shares the business paradigm - this would have to be investigated further - but there seems to be a clear overlap in their image of man.

The idea is that designers have full access to understanding office space, can analyse how its players operate and make a design that forms and manipulate space to the satisfaction of the owner/managers and their outlined strategy. This is an 'illusion of transparency'25: the illusion that there are no obstacles to understanding space (in the Lefebvren understanding of the word) and that this gives "action free rein" and that thought incarnate into design. "I see an office...".

Mark Wigley26

21. Ibid. p. 17,

22. Kim Dovey p. 15

24. See the entry about this elsewhere.

25. Henri Lefebvre, pp. 27-28

26. Deconstructivist Architecture, p. 19, Mark Wigley and Philip Johnson, Exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988

27. Kim Dovey p. 37

To start deconstructing a field such as the design of meeting rooms you can start by asking the following question: "What specific forms of resistance to this inquiry does the discourse employ? And to what extent was it established as precisely such a resistance?"28. In asking these questions, Mark Wigley looks into what is being protected in this space and for whom? Deconstruction is a tool to understand and unveil the underlying structures that informs a practice such as meeting room design or meetings. Wigley29 says that "The promise of deconstruction in architecture lies in the challenge to spatial ideologies, to social ideas about the use of space".

Deconstruction would deal with e.g. the 'business paradigm' and 'power' merciless30. It could e.g. bring a purely ethical issue into a meeting room or make it impossible to maintain the power of the manager in the way s/he sits. Therefor Mark Wigley31 says the following about deconstructive architecture in general:

I do however have an ethical problem with a radical deconstructive approach in working with meeting rooms. To disquiet and unsettle existing structures and make the space more 'writerly'32 will act as a challenging intervention. An intervention that takes stability and fixed purpose away but without offering a new. It could potentially shatter the business paradigm with profound consequences without replacing it with a new one or even offering a pathway to build a new one up. A more subtle use of deconstruction is however useful if not necessary to understand and change the ethical content of a meeting room.

29. Kim Dovey page 32