Subversive linguistic conventions in funding panel decision-making: A team level study

This paper considers the negotiated performance of business funding panels. The panels are the decision-making unit for each stage of a competition that distributes millions of pounds in startup funding to UK businesses every year. Environments such as that studied in this paper are peripheral, interstitial spaces that sit beyond the bounds of conventional organisational attention, yet they also represent concentrations of prevailing behaviours and attitudes in the instrumental and relational practices they espouse. In observing them, we not only strengthen our understanding of the specific context, but we are able to see organisational practice more generally reflected back at us. Analogous to this study is the study of conventional work meetings, which, as Scott et al. (2012, p.128) state, “are most commonly analyzed merely as a context for the exploration of other variables”, as opposed to being considered discretely as units of analysis for understanding and improving how such small group formats are conducted.