For the analyst, meetings can seem at first glance to be a messy combination of the recurrent and the dynamic. For example, the meeting may progress through recognizable stages, but the participants may discuss topics that seem to have no relation to the agenda, or may return to topics that had been discussed at length some time earlier. Yet no matter how messy the unfolding discourse may appear, participants seem to know that they are in a meeting and what that means in terms of appropriacy, constraint and predictability. While the particular manifestations of what is acceptable and expected will depend on factors such as national, professional and organizational culture, the relative status and relationship of the speakers, and the goals of the communication, meetings nevertheless have structural features that are repeated over different contexts and companies. As with any living genre, however, attempting to tie meetings down to a purely formal or deterministic description will be flawed. This is because participants constantly test the boundaries of the activity they are involved in, both within and across meetings: their goals change, the corporate goals change, the practices employed to address the goals change, and all these factors, over time, can lead to inevitable variations and possible transformations in the genre (Bhatia, 2004) and the wider Discourse (that is, the collections of intertwined practices that various social groups perform – Gee, 1992, and see Chapter 2 of this volume) which it partly constitutes.