MEETINGS IN THE STRATEGY PROCESS: TOWARD AN INTEGRATIVE FRAMEWORK KATHARINA DITTRICH University of Zurich Institute of Business Administration Universitätsstrasse 84, CH-8006 Zurich, Switzerland STÉPHANE GUÉRARD University of Zurich DAVID SEIDL University of Zurich ABSTRACT Scholars from different academic disciplines have studied the characteristics and dynamics of meetings, resulting in a large, though very fragmented, body of knowledge. The purpose of this review is to organize the different literatures by identifying meeting functions and practices and outlining the impact of meetings on the strategy process. This results in an integrative framework serving as a guide for future research. INTRODUCTION The recent turn of strategy research towards practice-based theorizing (Jarzabkowksi et al., 2007; Johnson et al., 2003, 2007; Whittington, 1996, 2006) has led to an increasing focus on the micro-level practices and processes which constitute the day-to-day activities influencing strategy formation. Strategy, it is argued, is better conceptualized as something people do rather than something that firms in their markets have (Jarzabkowski et al., 2007). One particular practice that has received increasing attention in recent years is the meeting (Jarzabkowski and Seidl, 2008; Hodgkinson et al., 2006; Johnson et al., 2010; Seidl et al., 2010). According to Schwartzman (1989: 7), a meeting can be defined as “a communicative event involving three or more people who agree to assemble for a purpose ostensibly related to the functioning of an organization or group”. Whether scheduled or unscheduled, singular or recurring, on-site or off- site, meetings are a pervasive phenomenon in organizational life. Indeed, in his classical study, Mintzberg (1973) found that managers spent on average 59% of their time in scheduled meetings and 10% in unscheduled ones. These findings were corroborated by subsequent studies (Lewis and Dahl, 1975; Ives and Olsen, 1981; Kurke and Aldrich, 1983; Moswick and Nelson, 1987; Tobia and Becker, 1990). Moreover, it was estimated that organizations like 3M spent between seven and fifteen percent of their personnel budget on meetings (Monge et al., 1989). Until very recently, the strategic management literature has not explicitly been concerned with the particular role of meetings in the strategy process, apart from providing a ‘neutral’ frame within which the coordination of organizational activities takes place (Schwartzman, 1989). Hence, despite the large amount of time and resources devoted to meetings, researchers have so far predominantly studied topics that occur within them instead of investigating meetings per se. Contemporary work, however, suggests that meetings do not just provide empty shells for