Openings in technology-mediated business meetings

The prerequisites for opening a meeting, or beginning any kind of interaction for that matter, are participants’ presence and shared orientation towards the situation at hand. This paper analyses how the initial moments of technology-mediated business meetings involving distributed work groups are organized sequentially and multimodally. Drawing on video-recorded meetings in an international company, it documents the multimodal practices used in the process of establishing coorientation to the shared meeting space and achieving entry into the meeting. The analysis shows that the stepwise unfolding of the opening phase requires the coordination of verbal and bodily conducts as well as the affordances of the technological artifacts utilized. The study contributes to a growing body of research investigating the emergent, collective and multimodal accomplishment of activities in workplace meetings.


INTRODUCTION
The work of organizations today involves the use of technologies to enable communication over distances. To understand how the use of communication technologies impacts practices of communication and changes organizational culture, there is a need to study how participants organize their activities utilizing available linguistic and interactional resources and the affordances of the technological artefacts used. This study analyses the opening sequences of technology-mediated business meetings between co-located and distant participants in an international company. The opening phases are a key locus for investigating the organization of meetings, since they reveal both the prospective course of the whole encounter and the social organization of the participants (see e.g. Boden 1994). Earlier studies highlight common patterns in the opening phases of meeting interactions in diverse cultural and organisational contexts (e.g. Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris, 1997;Chan, 2008;Nielsen, 2013). However, detailed studies of the emergent accomplishment of the transition into openings in technology-mediated meetings are still scarce. In a study of quasi-synchronous chat-based meetings Markman (2009) shows that additional interactional work is required to establish co-presence and achieve shared orientation in the virtual space where the activities of the meeting take place. Focusing on synchronous meetings conducted via technology, this paper describes how geographically distributed participants establish co-presence and negotiate a stepwise transition into the meeting proper.
The data for this study come from technology-mediated business meetings in an international company that uses English as a lingua franca. The meetings involve at least two groups of participants, typically two or more teams located in offices in different European countries, who are engaged in communicating in a 'live meeting' format. The meetings were carried out using live audio-connection and simultaneous viewing of shared documents. The data were collected in one of the company's offices, which enables detailed analysis of the audible verbal practices of all participants and a rich array of multimodal practices in one physical location. While the analysts' perspective on the situations is unavoidably restricted, it is close to that of the local participants, who are faced with the challenge of establishing and maintaining co-presence with distant participants across a visual barrier (Wasson 2006) and without access to the full range of communicative resources used. The meetings can be characterized as formal in that they are goal-oriented, have been arranged beforehand, follow a written agenda and involve invited participants who have some perceived organisational role (see e.g. Boden, 1994;Clifton, 2008;Asmuss & Svennevig, 2009;Nielsen, 2009Nielsen, , 2013. They take place in a room containing technology for video conferencing as well as other physical structures typical of meeting rooms. The analysis shows how the transition into business talk is achieved multimodally through coordination of verbal and bodily conducts as well as the affordances of the technological artifacts utilized. The participants draw on the communicative affordances and multiple modalities available in the setting to achieve the transition from activities in the physical (i.e. local) space to the shared meeting space as a prerequisite for initiating the meeting. The procedures for establishing co-orientation and accomplishing activity shifts are contingent to contextual features of the technology mediated setting, in particular the need to manage and coordinate participation across parallel interactional spaces. In the local space, visual monitoring and bodily as well as verbal orientation to written documents displayed on the screen emerge as key resources for establishing coorientation to the shared meeting space and achieving entry into the business of the meeting. The study contributes to earlier research by shedding light on the interactional ecology of distributed meetings.

SOCIAL INTERACTION IN MEETINGS
Within the broader context of institutional and organizational discourse, meetings have been studied from pragmatic, discourse analytic and interactional perspectives.
The organizational features of technology-mediated meetings involving distributed teams have not yet been extensively studied. Halbe (2012) observed that more interruptions and overlaps occur in face-to-face meetings than teleconferences and that meeting openings and closings seemed more abrupt in the latter. Markman (2009) found that openings in quasi-synchronous chat meetings between virtual teams are less straightforward than they often are in face-to-face settings: achieving co-orientation required additional interactional work as participants were not able to monitor the ongoing progress of turns. The opening process could also be easily "derailed" due to interruptions. Other studies of technology-mediated work environments demonstrate how the affordances of technologies impact the organisation of participation and communicative activity (e.g. Heath & Luff, 2000;Hutchby, 2001Hutchby, , 2014. A fundamental feature of technology-mediated meetings is that they involve multiple interactional spaces which all have separate participant structures (Wasson, 2006: 108). Participants display their orientation to the local physical space as well as the virtual meeting space and additional spaces through details of their conduct.
Multimodal conversation analysis (see e.g. Deppermann et al., 2010;Markaki & Mondada, 2012;Mondada, 2011;Mondada, 2009) enables detailed description of the ways in which participants in distributed locations orient to multiple spaces, accomplish transitions from one space to another and achieve co-orientation to the shared, technologically mediated meeting space as a prerequisite for engaging with the organizational tasks. It also provides a framework for examining how the participants' techniques for achieving and maintaining shared orientation are sensitive to contextual affordances, for instance whether the participants can rely on both visual and auditory contact for mutual monitoring or not.
Although opening sequences have been studied widely in Conversation Analysis (e.g. Schegloff, 1968Schegloff, , 1979Schegloff & Sacks, 1973;Button, 1987), openings of business meetings have not yet been extensively studied. Following Boden (1994: 90), meeting openings can be characterized as structured sequences during which participants gain a local meeting membership and concurrently orient themselves to a "meeting mode". Nielsen (2013) describes how the opening constitutes a shift from the interaction format of multiparty conversation, based on local negotiation of turntaking, into the speech exchange system of the meeting, where the chair has a pivotal role. Studies of face-to-face meetings show how the shift from informal talk to the meeting proper is accomplished in a stepwise manner through a number of verbal and nonverbal techniques. The opening of a meeting is frequently preceded by a spate of multiparty talk (Boden, 1994;Bargiela-Chappini & Harris, 1997;Chan, 2008;Nielsen, 2013). This may involve different types of pre-meeting sequences which have different functions (Mirivel & Tracy, 2005). During this phase the participants may display readiness to open the meeting and verbalise that the conditions for initiating the opening are met. Other key steps in the opening process include the chairman's opening techniques (e.g. boundary marker, summons), a pause during which the floor is open, and another possible chair's technique for opening (e.g. explicit meeting opener; proposal or declaration to get started), after which the first speaker is selected (self-selection or other-selection by the chair) and the first topic is introduced (Nielsen, 2013: 56-57).
A recent study of chat-based virtual team meetings (Markman, 2009) describes a two-stage process for opening meetings. In the asynchronous chat meetings an opening move, typically a so-prefaced turn which referenced prior communication by the team, was followed by an agenda-setting turn which focused talk on a specific topic. While implementing the two-stage process of opening, the participants were found to orient to interactional practices found in face-to-face meetings. For example, it was found that reaching a critical mass of participants was a precondition for beginning the opening process (Markman, 2009: 155-156). Similarly, the first turn in the meeting shared features with meeting openers identified in earlier studies (e.g. Boden, 1994;Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris, 1997). Significant differences were also found. While turns commenting on the critical mass of participants in face-to-face meetings create a space for the opening in the next turn, in the quasi-synchronous meetings of virtual teams, "stage 1 turns marked only the transition into a possible opening sequence and further work was needed to focus the team's attention" (Markman, 2009: 156). Also the role of silence was different. In the chat environment silences can be due to a number of factors, including features of the technology and the participants' engagement in other activities. Silences were therefore often ambiguous and additional work was required from the participants to disambiguate situations involving nonresponses (Markman, 2009: 159). The findings highlight the way that constraints of the chat environment impact the development of the opening process. This study adds to earlier work by describing how the opening process is shaped by contextual features of synchronous technology mediated meetings in which the participants have shared access to the meeting agenda, but do not have visual access to each other.
Recently increasing attention has been paid to the way that transitions between different phases of meeting talk are accomplished through different modalities. For example, Nielsen (2013) describes how gaze is used to signal withdrawal from premeeting talk and display readiness for meeting talk. Svennevig (2012) shows how topic introductions are accomplished multimodally through verbal references, gaze, gestures and embodied orientation to the written agenda (see also Mirivel & Tracy, 2005). Mikkola & Lehtinen's (2014) study of performance appraisal demonstrates how written documents as material objects are used in a step-by-step embodied negotiation of activity shifts. A case study by Deppermann, Mondada & Schmitt (2010) describes the detailed procedures through which participants manage a timeout from meeting-talk and back to work talk. Recent studies of other types of institutional settings further highlight the role that written documents have in establishing a shared focus of attention and securing participation in the task at hand (Svinhufvud & Vehviläinen, 2013;Mikkola & Lehtinen, 2014). In the analysis that follows, we describe how the transition from a pre-meeting phase to the meeting proper is achieved in meetings between co-located and distant colleagues and teams conducted via live-technology.
The data for the current study come from interactions of a large international corporation, where English is used as a lingua franca and modern communication technologies are applied to meet with the demands and deadlines of the fast-paced global working environment. Within the target company, traditional face-to-face meetings have become a scarcity whereas distant meetings are promoted as the new format. The data collection took place in two phases in 2012 and 2013 in one the company's offices in Central Europe. Participant observation on site was carried out to get to know to the company's meeting practices in their natural surroundings, and thus set the basis for conducting a more detailed analysis based on videorecorded meetings. The video data were collected using either one or two videocameras as well as audio recording devices. Additional information that might not be captured by the cameras was written down manually in field notes. The participants come from different linguistic backgrounds and for all of them English was a second language. All participants gave their consent to being recorded. Their identities and the name of the corporation are protected by using pseudonyms in the transcribed extracts.
The data for this article consists of ten distant meetings which are formal in a sense that they all had a specific time, place and agenda, and only specific people were invited to attend them. The number of participants ranged from two to over twenty, and the largest meeting involved four teams distributed in four geographical locations. The software used was Microsoft Live, which enables live audio and video connection and sharing the agenda or outline of the meeting for all parties. It was the participants' choice to conduct the meetings via audioconnection and to use the software to enable simultaneous viewing of documents that are open on the participants' computers. The technology allows regulating sound and thereby controlling the distant participants' access to talk outside the meeting proper, but this function was not used. In spite of the visual barrier between the interactional spaces (Wasson 2006), the participants were thus potentially present for each other via audio connection throughout the meeting. In most of the meetings a written agenda was displayed on the participants' own computer screens and in meetings involving a large number of participants, it was projected on a wide screen on the wall.
The analysis builds on the growing body of studies applying Conversation Analysis to the study of organising properties of meetings (see e.g. Asmuss & Svennevig, 2009;Cooren & Taylor, 1997;Clifton, 2006;Deppermann et al., 2010;Nielsen, 2009Nielsen, , 2013Svennevig, 2012) and technology-mediated interaction (see e.g. Hutchby, 2001, Arminen, 2005. Interaction in any setting is viewed as a sequentially organized multimodal process, which relies on resources of the body and the communicative affordances of the material setting, including written materials and technological artifacts located and used in the interactional setting (Hutchby, 2014).
The analysis shows how the participants draw on different modalities and the affordances of the technology utilized in managing stepwise entry in to the shared meeting space and initiating the meeting proper. Section 5.1 describes how the participants establish co-presence and organise the distributed participation framework. In section 5.2 we show how the entry into the business of the meeting is achieved.

Organizing distributed participation framework
The achievement of mutual orientation and co-presence within an interactional space depends on indicators by means of which participants perceive and know about each other's presence (cf. Goffman, 1967;Kendon, 1990;Hausendorf, 2012) and it has to be interactively achieved. For the participants in distant meetings, establishing coorientation presents a practical problem: the distributed participation framework must be organized both technically and verbally at the beginning of each encounter. Even though the attendees can see in the participant list on the screen when someone enters the meeting, they still need to assemble in a technology-mediated meeting space and jointly "talk the workgroup into being". This involves interactional efforts to establish co-orientation, i.e. mutual orientation to an interactional space (Mondada, 2009) where the participants are in one another's immediate presence. Establishing, managing and maintaining co-orientation is a condition for accomplishment of local tasks such as those required to open the meeting. How this is done and what kind of interactional work is required is contingent on contextual factors: the number of attendees, the organisation of the participants in physical and/or virtual spaces and the affordances of the technology.
Meetings typically start after a critical mass of participants has been determined to have been reached (Boden, 1994;Markman, 2009) After some initial remarks by the two local participants, Hans fixes his gaze on the large screen and clicks the list of participants to check who has joined the meeting (line 1). While he is monitoring the screen, Marja closes the cover of her laptop, places a water bottle that she is holding on the table and shifts her focus towards the meeting space by adjusting her body position and directing her gaze towards the screen (Fig. 1). In lines 4-7 four distant participants make their presence known with short greetings which serve as "check-ins" or displays of mutual surveillance (Goffman, 1967). These do not get a response from Hans, who keeps his gaze focused on the screen. After the silence during which both the co-located participants attend to the screen, Hans initiates a meeting preparatory sequence to  Only after this he leans forward and confirms verbally that the audio-connection works speaking on behalf of the group (line 12). With his actions Hannu establishes himself as a lead actor in the local group. Concurrently with his turn and immediately after, several participants turn their gaze to the agenda displayed on the screen and thereby show orientation to entry into the meeting (Fig. 11). After briefly addressing his local team (line 15) Dietmar requests confirmation that the remaining two teams are also present by referring to the countries where the teams are located (line 17).
In this way he makes relevant those specific offices and groups for the business of opening the meeting and invites representatives of these groups to speak up.  Moments before the episode begins, Joonas is seen to type something on his laptop.
Prior to the extract the three male participants have been engaged in pre-meeting small talk while waiting for Vilma, having a good laugh about being filmed and teasing each with comments related to physical appearance. Joonas [he he (.) hey I was asking Vilma Lane that where is she and 4 u::h she started to reply to me but uh then she went away so ( abrupt shift from pre-meeting talk to meeting-preparatory talk (Mirivel & Tracy, 2005), which is also signaled by the use of 'hey' to mark a topically disjunctive turn. By topicalising the absent participant Joonas makes visible that he has been monitoring the screen for visual signals of her presence. He also assumes his institutional role by reporting his own prior interaction with Vilma (lines 3-4) and requesting that the others wait for her to join before proceeding (lines 5 and 8). In lines 5-6 the two local participants compete for a turn as Walter intervenes and offers his own, slightly more specific report of Vilma's prior communication. Walter monitors his screen throughout, while Joonas monitors both his own and Walter's screen ( Fig.13 and 14).
As soon as Vilma becomes visible as participant, Walter announces it verbally (line 11 Joonas, who turns his gaze to Walter (Fig. 16). This action treats Fred's turn as problematic, possibly both because of its content and its placement: it seeks to expand a pre-meeting sequence at a juncture where the other participants have shown orientation to proceed with the opening process. At this point Vilma finally checks in with a short greeting (line 25). During Vilma's greeting, Joonas turns his head, leans slightly towards Walter and directs gaze to Walter's screen (Fig. 17), possibly to seek visual confirmation of her presence 2 . Fred and Walter both respond with reciprocal greetings, followed by Walter's laughter. Joonas greets Vilma in Spanish, which further contributes to a jocular and informal tone. The greetings are followed by a silence, which marks a boundary before the next step in the opening process.
As in the preceding examples, the participants in this excerpt treat establishing the presence of all participants as a precondition for opening the meeting and engage in interactional work to accomplish this. This involves multiple, partly overlapping activities taking place in different interactional spaces: verbal references to the absent participant and prior engagement with them, visual monitoring of not just one's own, but also a co-participant's screen, and verbal turns that make the new participant's presence public in the meeting space. Unlike Excerpts 1 and 2, the opening phase of this meeting is characterized by more equal participation and joint activity through which both local participants take an active role in making sure that the step of achieving the critical mass is established publicly before any further action can be taken.
Establishing the distributed participation framework in distant meetings is constrained by the affordances of the technology and involves interactional procedures to establish shared orientation to the virtual meeting space and achieve co-presence. These procedures are contingent to specifics of the situation: the number of participants, their positioning in the physical space, the roles that they adopt and perform in the initial moments of the encounter and the affordances of the technology (e.g. the lack of visual access to distant participants). Achieving the critical mass is accomplished by monitoring the screen and verbal turns including check-ins, turns referring to absent participants and announcements making some party's presence public to the others. The next section examines how participants proceed to the formal opening phase.

Achieving mutual orientation to agenda
Once co-presence of the relevant participants is established and the distributed participation framework is in place, the next step is to move to the meeting proper and shift from one turn-taking system to another (Nielsen, 2013: 40). Thus, what is required of meeting participants is co-orientation and shared focus on the meeting at hand (Goffman, 1963;Wasson, 2006;Goodwin, 2007) while the chair is commonly expected to make verbal entry into agenda-related talk. This section analyses how the shift into agenda-related talk is accomplished.
The simplest instances of moving into agenda-related talk include silence from the participants' side and verbal initiation performed by the chair, e.g. use of a topic boundary marker (e.g. 'uhm', 'okay', 'then'). Extract 4 begins at the final stages of a pre-meeting exchange. The chair, Hans, has received affirmative answers to his request for permission to record the meeting, but has asked for confirmation. In line 1 he gives the participants an opportunity to respond. When no one replies Hans initiates a shift to the formal opening of the meeting. large screen (Fig. 18). The silence is taken as confirmation that all participants agree to being recorded and after 2 seconds Hans marks the pre-beginning sequence closed with 'good' (line 4). After a short pause Hans continues with a clear boundary marker 'alright good' with a rising intonation. He also concomitantly corrects his posture, and thereby shows embodied orientation to the topic transition and prepares himself for agenda-related talk (i.e. getting to business). The pause that follows is not exploited by other participants, and Hans moves into meeting talk with a turn initial topic marker ('uhm', line 7) followed by a rhetorical question -answer sequence which announces the topic (lines 7-10). With this he secures himself a multiunit turn.
At this point the other local participant, Marja, shifts her gaze from the screen towards Hans (Fig. 19) and signals her role as recipient of his talk. Hans's turn continues with a reference to materials that he sent to the others prior to the meeting (lines 11-12). This way he implicitly makes relevant the retrospective-prospective aspect of the situation: i.e. "how we got here/where we are going" (Boden, 1994: 95).
Example 4 represents a transition type that is simple and unproblematic. The interactional space has been stabilized in the pre-beginning phase prior to the extract (cf. Mondada, 2009): the participants have established their engagement in the meeting at hand and Hans has adopted his role as the chair by taking control of the turn-taking (see Ex. 1). Hence, at this point it is expected of him to mark the beginning of the next section and move on with the agenda. The transition from premeeting talk to the meeting proper is achieved through bodily action as well as verbal utterances. Gaze and a shift in body posture display orientation to the meeting space and readiness to entry into the business of the meeting. Distant participants contribute to the opening phase by "passing the opportunity to talk" 3 (Nielsen, 2013) and Marja makes an additional display of attendance by looking at Hans. The entry into the meeting is accomplished smoothly and no extra work is needed to create or sustain mutual orientation.
However, even though the chair's verbal initiation of agenda-related talk is a  from the co-participants as dispreferred. Nevertheless, the silence creates a space for initiating talk related to the minutes. As no response is offered, Dietmar creates another opportunity with an increment which asks for suggestions for 'changes'. The utterance is produced with rising intonation, but again no response is offered. have been used to secure participation and draw attention (e.g. Nielsen, 2012Nielsen, , 2013Mirivel & Tracy, 2005;Mikkola & Lehtinen, 2014;Mondada, 2006;Svennevig, 2012).
Here the chair's visible scrolling on the agenda mediated through the screen works to secure participation of the distant participants specifically, as the focus shifts visibly to the business of the meeting.  Dietmar's utterance, Minna puts the phone away (Fig. 27) and at least four people turn their gaze towards the screen (Fig. 28). However, a side episode within the local space emerges during the opening turn due to problems with the audio connection.
This is first reacted to by Bruno who is about to have a sip of his beverage, yet  Bruno leans over to check the table microphone and then smiles meaningfully to the people sitting opposite (Fig. 29 & 30). Then also Minna can be seen to orient to the problem by frowning (Fig. 31). Soon Bruno, Hannu and Minna who are sitting next to each other begin to whisper and Hannu makes a pointing circular gesture towards the microphone (Fig. 32). However, the main activity (i.e. the opening) is not disturbed or further action taken to solve the problem. All three shift their attention quickly back to the meeting space, as they lean back and stop whispering ( Fig. 33 & 34). Bruno briefly gazes at Marja (Fig. 34 Similar to face-to-face meetings, opening phases of meetings conducted via communication technology progress in a stepwise manner (see Nielsen, 2013;Markman, 2009) and involve the use of multiple modalities. Achieving a critical mass is a prerequisite for opening the meeting (cf. Boden, 1994) and involves verbal and embodied procedures as well as bodily orientation to and use of technological artifacts. Participants in the local space monitor the screen for visual signs of distant participants joining in and verbally address the presence of other participants. In these meetings where the distributed participants did not have visual access to each other, verbal check-ins, references to absent participants and announcements that make some party's presence public were key resources for establishing the critical mass prior to beginning the meeting proper.
Even though meetings are predesigned and thus, routinely predictable events, shifts between formal and informal talk and from one agenda item to another have to be accomplished with locally constructed means of interaction (cf. Deppermann et al., 2010). The analysis highlights how such shifts were managed by coordinating action in both the meeting space and local space. The techniques used to accomplish entry into the meeting proper were similar to those identified in earlier studies of face-to- However, they are generally not made public to the distant participants. The participants oriented to the primacy of the meeting space (cf. Boden, 1994) by conducting other activities quietly (e.g. whispering) and relying on embodied resources rather than verbal activity.
A significant difference between technologically mediated and face-to-face meetings is firstly, the way that people utilize and orient to the material surroundings, and secondly, the resources they use to show their focus to the meeting at hand. In Such activities generally do not interfere with the shared meeting space, but they crucially shape the organisation of the local interactional space and may have bearing on the temporal organisation of the opening, e.g. cause accountable delays in responding. In fact especially in larger meetings, the participants rarely get visibly organized for the business of the meeting (e.g. via ceasing other activities or turning gaze to screen) at the same time or in a similar manner. However, entry into the meeting proper is achieved in a coordinated way generally during the chair's opening turn.
With this study we have shown how the affordances of the technology used figure in the opening process in distant meetings. Unlike face-to-face meetings, openings of distant meetings require additional interactional work from both the chair and participants. Central in this is the ability to manage and to coordinate multiple overlapping activities taking place in several parallel interactional spaces. unrecognizable or confidential item (.) micro pause, less than 0.2 seconds (0.5) silences timed in tenths of a second ((gazes)) transcriber's comments * ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ > gesture or action described continue across subsequent lines * ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ >> gesture or action described continue until and after excerpt's end ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ >* gesture or action described continue until the same symbol is reached >> ̵ ̵ gesture or action described begins before the excerpts beginning