In recent years, social movement scholars have shown increasing interest in the internal lives of social movements, but this turn from "social movements as actors" to "social movements as spaces" has not yet led to a conceptual apparatus that addresses the key role of face-to-face meetings, especially in the interorganizational domain of mesomobilization. Building on the concept of "partial organization", the paper develops the concept of "meeting arena" as a hybrid of three forms of social order: organization, institution, and network. It is argued that the complex figuration of meeting arenas in a social movement or protest mobilization constitutes an infrastructure that synchronizes the dispersed activities of movement actors in time and space. This infrastructure is not an entirely emergent phenomenon but is also the result of conscious decisions by organizers. Heuristic, methodological, and theoretical implications of this novel perspective on social movements are discussed, highlighting especially the potential of the distinction between organizing and mobilizing as two intertwined but essentially different types of social movement activity.

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Contemporary social movements can serve as a critical case for the empirical study of deliberation. In countless face-to-face meetings activists often discuss long hours before a decision is reached. In this context, we try to analyse the conditions under which deliberation is successfully employed as a method of discursive conflict resolution. As we develop participant observation in a comparative approach we encounter three methodological challenges which this paper addresses. First, we look at some characteristics of the global justice movements, briefly addressing the different settings in which controversial discussions occur. Second, we give a rationale for applying a semi-standardised multi-level participant observation in order to allow the collection of comparable data by various researchers in several countries. Focusing on participant observation on the level of controversial discussions we thirdly conceptualise competitiveness, power, and asymmetry as three theoretical dimensions to identify eight different practices of discourse, one of them being deliberation. We are currently implementing this model for regular observations of group meetings on a local, national and European level. First results should be available in the near future.

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A meeting is a gathering of three or more participants who maintain a single focus of cognitive and visual attention while engaging in multiparty talk that is ostensibly related to some common business of the participants (cf. Schwartzman 1989: 7, 61, 274–275); it has clearly marked boundaries in time (beginning and end are officially announced) and space (a spatial environment of mutual monitoring possibilities). These boundaries partially suspend the social structures of the meeting's environment, thus creating a relatively autonomous unit of social life. The meeting develops its own structures which both enable and constrain the interactions of the participants. These structures include the sequential organization of meeting talk (turn‐taking) and topics (agenda), the need to be relevant with regard to the current topic, procedural rules, as well as a number of functional roles related to the maintenance of the meeting itself, usually including the role of a facilitator. These structures are culturally contingent and social movements often develop their own specific meeting culture which—consciously or unconsciously—reflects much of the movement's identity and the goals for which it strives.