In any organization, formal and informal face-to-face meetings make up a profound part in the daily life of its members. Meetings are played out continuously, some formal, such as a management board meeting, an information meeting, or a project meeting. The formal meetings people “attend to”, “participate in”, or “are in charge of” depending on a person’s position within them. Other meetings are less formal, such as a desk-side discussion, a chat in the hallway, or a private conversation between two colleagues. The latter often just appear, seemingly by chance. This dissertation examines meetings, as a way of observing the organizing process of complex product development projects. More specifically, organizations engaging in complex product development can be viewed as tension systems, where the dominant tension is between innovation and control. From this perspective, a critical challenge for a product development project becomes one of managing a balancing act between individual action and creativity, on one hand, and collaboration and control, on the other, ensuring that ideas and knowledge retrieved by their parts can be pooled into an integrated whole. By studying the interplay between different types of face-to-face meetings that took place in two projects developing telecommunication systems, this thesis engages in an inquiry of how this balancing act was played out in practice. The findings of the study suggest that the informal meetings comprised occasions that facilitated the perception of complex and ambiguous issues and gave rise to innovative interpretations of how to deal with them. When issues have been defined and interpreted, formal meetings were used to “elevate” and “enter” them into a formal existence. Then, formal claims for action could be established in which people in the projects were organized around the task of solving a specific and recognized problem.  Thus, formal meetings served as a controlling and structuring function. / <p>Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2002</p>

Social networks have been used to understand how information flows through an organization as well as identifying individuals that appear to have control over this information flow. Such individuals are identified as being central nodes in a graph representation of the social network and have high "betweenness" values. Rather than looking at graphs derived from email, on-line forums, or telephone connections, we consider sequences of bipartite graphs that represent face-to-face meetings between individuals, and define a new metric to identify the information elite individuals. We show that, in our simulations, individuals that attend many meetings with many different people do not always have high betweenness values, even though they seem to be the ones that control the information flow. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Frågeställning: Hur arbetar CreActive för att främja det sociala kapitalet? Hur kan CreActive främja det sociala kapitalet i en kreativ miljö? Hur underlättas mötet mellan människor på CreActive? Finns det förbättringsmöjligheter för att ytterligare främja det sociala kapitalet på CreActive? Syfte: Syftet med studien är att beskriva hur CreActive skapar nytta för sin omgivning. Det kommer även att undersökas kring hur mötet uppstår mellan människor på CreActive som ska främja det sociala kapitalet. Metod: Studien genomfördes med den kvalitativa metoden, eftersom den fångar upp detaljer och information av intervjupersonernas tolkning av verkligheten, det vill säga deras uppfattning, tankar och känslor. Det medför en inblick kring hur CreActive arbetar med mötet mellan människor, för att främja det sociala kapitalet. Empirin består av intervjuer med studenter och anställda. Slutsats: Det framgår att studenter inte känner till CreActive i den utsträckning som CreActive vill. Det finns ett glapp mellan studenter och företagare som uppehåller sig på CreActive. Det syns att platsen CreActive inte utnyttjas på det sätt som det är tänkt. Brist på rätt utrustning, marknadsföring, studieutrymme samt aktiviteter medför att mötet över gränserna mellan studenter och företag saknas. Det leder till att socialt kapital uteblir. Vi har sett att det finns möjligheter till förbättring och det vi har kommit fram till är sex stycken bidrag som består av nya aktiviteter, annan marknadsföring och utveckling av befintliga idéer. / Research questions: How do CreActive work to improve the social capital? How does CreActive work to improve the social capital in a creative environment? How is the (face-to-face) meeting between people made easier by CreActive? Are there any possibilities for further improving the social capital at CreActive? Purpose: The study’s purpose is to describe how CreActive creates advantages for its environment. The study will also examine how (face-to-face) meeting occur between people in CreActive to promote the social capital. Method: The study was executed with the qualitative method, because it captures the details and information of the interviewee’s interpretation of the reality, namely their perception, thoughts and the feelings. It results in an insight on how CreActive work with the (face-to-face) meetings between people, to promote the social capital. The empirical data is consisting of interviews with students and employees.          Conclusion: In the study it appears that the students don’t know about CreActive in the extents they want. There is a gap between students and business people who visit CreActive. It appears that CreActive is not used in the extent that it was intended. The lack of proper equipment, marketing, place of study and activities contributes to (face-to face) meeting between students and business people are missing. These things lead to the failing of social capital. There are opportunities for improvement and what was developed were six contributions which consists of new activities, marketing and development of existing ideas.

The study is intended to show how the social workers and their clients are experiencing the new meeting structure, its problems and opportunities, as well as thoughts and feelings that arose during 2020-2021 in connection with Covid -19 pandemic. The study is qualitative, with a hermeneutic interpretive approach and has been conducted via semi-structured interviews with eight social workers. The theoretical starting point is Aaron Antonovsky's theory of KASAM, Berger &amp; Luckmann's theory of reality as a social construction, George Herbert Mead´'s of Symbolic Interaction Theory, Johan Asplund's theory of social responsiveness and Grissi &amp; Jeding's highlighting that man's most important stress management strategy is to seek social support from others. Conclusions that can be drawn from this study are that the restructuring of work and meeting structure during the pandemic has highlighted a lack of technology and lack of staff knowledge regarding digital platforms where the employer would have gained efficiency and trust among social workers if they had put a little more resources and time to secure up staff in the area. At the same time, social workers express a curiosity about working more digitally in the future. There is a consensus about which clients do not feel good about having meetings digitally and then a great desire is expressed to maintain the meeting structure face to face. Obstacles to digitalisation appear in the form of the client's lack of resources in the form of financial vulnerability, which also becomes an economic issue for the municipality. Difficulties are expressed in creating secure and trusting relationships at a distance, but there is a curiosity to try to meet the client based on his predictions in a new way. In the event of more difficult assessments, however, it is still considered that there is a need for physical meetings. The study highlights a concern that the employer should take the opportunity to, according to an efficiency thinking, remove self-determination in how and when to meet their clients. At the same time, the study points out that the social services can gain both financial and environmental resources by ensuring that social workers no longer travel many hours by car for follow-up or care planning.