Collaborating at Work: A Multimodal Analysis of Hybrid Meetings in New Zealand
Authors:   , Sanderson Reuben 
Published: January 2025

<p><strong>Collaboration is a defining feature of group interaction. A prime site for this collaboration is meetings (Allen & Lehmann-Willenbrock 2022; Angouri & Bargiela-Chiappini 2011). In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a rapid increase in the adoption of hybrid meetings i.e., attendees are both remote and co-located. The presence of multiple interactional spaces in this setting (Oittinen 2018; Wasson 2006) creates a “fractured ecology” (Luff et al. 2003) in which there is asymmetrical access to interactional resources (Büyükgüzel & Balaman 2023; Oittinen 2018). While some have suggested that workers avoid hybrid meetings (Reed & Allen 2022), this study recognises that hybrid meetings are the “new reality” (Ancona, Bresman, & Mortensen 2021). Examining interaction in this setting has the potential to offer greater understanding of how social actors draw on a variety of embodied resources to negotiate this asymmetry and achieve transactional and relational goals within a workplace team. The study brings together the traditions of Workplace Discourse Analysis (WDA) and Multimodal Interaction Analysis (MIA; Norris 2011a, 2020) to investigate collaboration in hybrid meetings. This combined approach allows for systematic examination of the multimodal resources that social actors draw on to collaborate, while also including the theoretical advancements of WDA, particularly in the areas of identity construction and context. Each analysis chapter explores a different aspect of collaboration that emerged as salient in the data and which matches the priorities described in workplace discourse literature (see e.g., Holmes et al. 2011). The first focuses on participants’ transactional goals realised via attention to how they make decisions; the second chapter addresses the participants’ accomplishment of relational goals through the concept of Relational Practice (Fletcher 1999; Holmes & Marra 2004); and the final analysis chapter brings these areas together to explore how my participants enact leadership to guide collaboration within the team. The dataset consists of audio-video recordings of six, fortnightly meetings of the Senior Leadership Team of a large, education-focused, New Zealand organisation with aspirations to become bicultural (i.e., orienting to Pākehā and Māori ways of doing things). These recordings are supplemented with ethnographic observations and post-hoc interviews, in line with the procedures developed by the Language in the Workplace Project team and accepted best practice in MIA (Holmes & Stubbe 2003[2015]; Norris 2019). This methodology provides access to both the multimodal negotiation of practices in the hybrid setting and the emic, community perspective that supports my analytical interpretations (Marra & Lazzaro-Salazar 2018). The findings of this thesis highlight the relevance of the contextual environment in which this collaboration takes place. The social realist stance I adopt encourages examination of the ways in which overarching layers of social structures intersect and overlap with local, interactional contexts, facilitating analysis of how collaboration is impacted by these contextual constraints (Holmes et al. 2011; Holmes & Marra 2023; Dawson 2019). At the local, micro-interactional level, the ‘multiple built environments’ (Jones 2004, 2005) of the hybrid setting trouble assumptions of co-presence in workplace meetings. This is evidenced in asymmetrical access to interactional resources between remote and co-located participants, impacting how practices like turn taking and constructing humour are enacted. Findings also point to how social and institutional norms play a role in how my participants collaborate. The analysis of leadership in particular draws attention to how the chair’s enactment of meeting opening practices indexes the Community of Practice’s ‘joint enterprise’ and reflect wider social Discourses of biculturalism in New Zealand (Vine et al. 2022). Based on these findings, I argue that collaboration is an interactional process that takes place at a site of engagement (Jones 2004, 2005; Norris 2011a; Norris & Jones 2005; Scollon 1997, 1998[2014]), a concept that addresses this complex contextual relationship by grounding the analysis at the locus of meaning making, the mediated action, while also attending to the intersection of practices and social Discourses that impact collaboration. This research has furthered the dialogue between MIA and WDA that was first opened by Kuśmierczyk (2013) by combining theoretical and analytical tools and concepts from each field. As a result of the data-driven analysis, I have developed a definition of collaboration that addresses both the different levels of abstraction at which collaboration takes place (collaboration1) and how normative ways of collaborating emerge from social actors’ repeated actions (collaboration2). Overall, this research advances our theoretic and analytic understanding of collaboration in contemporary workplaces.</strong></p>