Art of seduction:- Who are we representing when we attend a conference: the company we are employed by and are loyal to, or ourselves? Patrik Hall, a professor in political science at Malmö University, has been investigating the nature of work meetings, from the subtle and diplomatic, to the seductive and flirtatious.

The findings have been published in Why Meetings Matter, in which Hall, and his academic colleagues, dive into the inner machinations of work meetings, arguing that they are an integral feature of organisations and contrary to popular belief, are what define, represent and maintain organisations.

Researchers looked into the event industry, and have investigated how corporate events are portrayed:

”I started to watch YouTube films made by event organisers, there are a lot of similar films from around the world, and every film looked almost identical; they were all around two minutes with pretty much the same music, showing people together; the interesting thing was that there was little focus on the actual speakers, the researchers or the entrepreneurs speaking, the focus was on the mingles.

Hall describes the mingle as a kind of meeting but not in the classical sense in that they have a concept of networking and sociality and require social competence skills. Skills that are not the same as those required for traditional meetings, such as being punctual and sticking to an agenda. At mingles, it is a bit more about being able, as Hall says, to be a bit of a flirt during brief encounters.

“It’s the ‘side activities’ which are the really important. In the first few seconds of one of the videos promoting an event, you see a man with a glass of wine, a woman passes, and they exchanged a look. Why would they start with that? It suggests something about loose liaisons.

“I think it shows something important about these more relaxed meetings, that you have to be there, show your personality.”
One important thing Hall looked at is that in such situations the delegates don’t really appear as a representative of their organisation, but a representative of themself.

“So the promotional material for these events is often about personality, and how you ‘perform’ – that goes beyond the mingle. This can lead to problems with responsibility and accountability,” adds Hall. AlphaGalileo/SP