Meeting in Brackets - Devising Belgian Mental Health Policies through Inter-organisational Meetings

Object: this paper analyses inter-organisational meetings held in response to a reform of the Belgian mental health care system. It proposes to shift the researcher’s attention from the instrumental function attributed to meetings to the role they actually play in this reform. Aims: based on the observation that meetings frequently failed to reach their instrumental outcome, this paper first asks which other roles meetings might play and how. Second, it suggests that the concept of bracketing might be helpful in perceiving, describing and analysing the roles played by meetings. Methods: this paper relies on empirical material collected through semi-structured interviews, direct observation and documentary analyse. Excerpts from interviews and field notes of observation are used as a basis for analysing 4 specific meetings. These meetings have been selected according to their relevance to the research question of the role played by meetings and a set of criteria relating to the meeting type, participants, topic and context. Results: this paper demonstrates that, next to their instrumental function, meetings play at least three complementary roles, which are defined as expressive, representative and performative. It argues that these three roles of meetings are better understood by using the concept of bracketing in three ways: as a methodological, descriptive and analytical tool