1 Empowering and disempowering meeting styles: understanding the cultural logics of meetings and assemblies Christoph Haug University of Gothenburg Abstract: This paper identifies six elementary interactional constraints in face-to-face meetings: frames, sequential relevance, face, status, physical boundaries, and temporal boundaries. It argues that these constraints are not absolute but subject to cultural interpretation and modification in practice, thus giving rise to numerous meeting styles. Each of these meeting styles can be analytically understood as a set of regimes which determine to what degree and in what way the elementary constraints will be effective in the actual meeting as it takes place. These meeting styles are then examined with regard to the question of empowerment: How can we understand that some meetings are experienced as energizing and empowering while others seem to be fruitless and disempowering? Based on the inherent logic of the different meeting regimes, the paper identifies three contrasting styles: disempowerment, inclusive empowerment, and exclusive empowerment and exposes the mechanisms that account for these effects.