The prerequisites for opening a meeting, or beginning any kind of interaction for that matter, are participants' presence and shared orientation towards the situation at hand. This paper analyses how the initial moments of technology-mediated business meetings involving distributed work groups are organized sequentially and multimodally. Drawing on video-recorded meetings in an international company, it documents the multimodal practices used in the process of establishing co-orientation to the shared meeting space and achieving entry into the meeting. The analysis shows that the stepwise unfolding of the opening phase requires the coordination of verbal and bodily conducts as well as the affordances of the technological artefacts utilized. The study contributes to a growing body of research investigating the emergent, collective and multimodal accomplishment of activities in workplace meetings.

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Technology-mediated (i.e. distant) meetings are complex settings that involve distributed participation frameworks and the coordination of actions in multiple interactional spaces (cf. Mondada 2013). This paper examines how problems with hearing, speaking, or understanding in the overall meeting space enable the negotiation of alignment and affiliation by co-present participants in the same local meeting space. Conversation Analysis (CA) is used to investigate the local accomplishment of alignment and affiliation achieved through the sequential and temporal organization of verbal, embodied, and material resources of interaction in three types of situations: during technological trouble, silences, and disagreements. The analysis shows that the local participants draw on their physical setting and the material environment to make interactional problems relevant amongst themselves. During these parallel interactions, the co-construction of alignment and affiliation enhances the sense of local community and enables the building of alliances that are not made public in the overall meeting space.

Drawing on conversation analysis and authentic data from a video-mediated multiparty meeting, this study investigates the sequential and temporal organisation of recoveries of the interactional space. It focuses on moments in which either an auditory or a visual barrier emerges, and the participants orient to these troubles through intensified bodily-visual displays: embodied noticings. The analysis illustrates noticing-prefaced recoveries of the interactional space as procedural and multimodal accomplishments that require close attentiveness to the co-participants’ verbal and visual conduct and to the contingencies of the meeting. The study highlights not only the affordances of video-mediated settings, but also the consequences that asymmetric access to the distributed environments can have for the organization of actions.

In any focused social interaction, people come together, move, and position their bodies with respect to each other, and maintain and change such formations while they interact. Establishing and sustaining such formations makes it possible for them to see and hear others, to show and share objects, and to orient to same features in the environment. Forming copresence and a shared space is core and a precondition to any social interaction. Since the influential work by Adam Kendon (F-formations) and Erving Goffman (participation frameworks, focused encounters, withs) an accumulating body of research has explored -in different interactional settings -the pragmatics of how humans organize themselves spatially for interacting with each other. More recently, Lorenza Mondada (2009) has introduced the term "interactional space" to refer to the dynamic ways in which people not only initiate and establish copresent formations but also continuously (re)organize them with respect to each other, the unfolding activity and material environment. In this chapter, we offer an overview of pragmatics research on spatial arrangements in interaction. We illustrate how people organize their copresence in order to interact with each other in stable, mobile, video-mediated (i. e., distributed) and virtual settings. We explore "interactional space" as a visual phenomenon and thereby focus on situations where participants can (at least partly) see each other.