Week 2: Week 2 lecture: Invitation is not decision right
A taxonomy for reading who a meeting actually includes, and the full debrief of the Steering Committee's invite list.
1 March 2027
Outline#
- why “who was invited” is the quietest decision in any process — it is usually made before anyone realises a decision is being made at all
- a working taxonomy that keeps three separate questions separate, not two questions folded into one. Participation status is its own axis: was this seat invited, and did it actually attend? Decision right is a second, fully independent axis: decide or approve (can determine or ratify the outcome directly), vote (one recorded voice in a multi-party ballot), advise (can speak, cannot determine it), observe (present, with no formal say over the outcome at all), or none (no formal right, whether present or not). Information timing is a third, independent axis: before, during (learns the outcome as it happens — including simply by being in the room for it), or after. Because the three axes are independent, they can combine in ways a single mixed category would hide: a seat can be invited, attend, hold no decision right at all, and still be informed during the decision rather than after it, purely by being present while it’s made. “Informed after” names a timing, never a decision right — the invite list below shows exactly why collapsing the two together is a mistake
- the debrief: the full invite list, with a legitimate reading and a costly reading for every excluded or limited-right seat
- what this week is not arguing: that every exclusion is a cover-up, or that every committee should include everyone it affects — a committee that invited every affected party to every meeting would rarely decide anything; the question this course asks is narrower and harder — which exclusions are defensible on their own stated terms, and which aren’t, and how you’d tell the difference from the record alone
- reading before Week 3: bring one meeting invitation, real or the provided fictional substitute — see “Before Week 3” below for what that means and why it matters
The debrief: the invite list, both readings#
| Seat | Legitimate reading | Costly reading |
|---|---|---|
| Nandakumar — vote, chairs | Chairing a committee overseeing a project you sponsor is a normal structure, not evidence of anything | The person who owns the go-live date also runs the meeting that confirms it — no independent chair checks that overlap |
| Herrera — vote | Delivery leads routinely vote on their own project’s status in most governance structures | No stated conflict-of-interest process applies when a delivery lead votes on their own timeline |
| Oyelaran — vote | Budget holders sit on committees spending their budget as a matter of course | None distinctive — this seat is close to uncontroversial either way |
| Okoro — advise, no vote, informed during | Staff Association seats are commonly advisory across the university, not singled out here | A representative seat with no vote can raise a concern on the record without being able to stop anything on it |
| Castellano — attends, observe (can be present to observe, but cannot decide, approve, vote, or advise), informed during (present in the room, not told afterward) | Comms leads typically join to prepare the announcement, not to decide its content | Present in the room without a vote is a specific, if common, kind of inclusion — worth naming rather than assuming, and distinct from a seat that is genuinely only informed once the outcome is announced |
| Adisa — not invited, no decision right, informed after | Terms of reference name only directorate-level roles; a structural rule, not a decision about this pilot | The unit leading the pilot’s first cohort has no seat at the meeting confirming that rollout’s timeline |
| LSS staff — not invited, no decision right, informed after | No committee this size can seat every affected group; some level of aggregation through a rep seat is normal | Okoro’s seat represents professional staff university-wide, not LSS specifically — whether that substitutes for direct representation is a judgement call, not a given |
Two things to notice across the whole table: almost every seat has a “legitimate reading” available, and almost every seat also has a “costly reading” available. That is not a contradiction to resolve by picking a side — it is what most real committee memberships look like, and the analytic question is which specific costs, if any, are big enough or specific enough to argue the structure should change for a decision like this one.
A little further reading#
Arnstein’s 1969 ladder is the classic single-axis model this week’s taxonomy deliberately avoids: her eight rungs, from manipulation to citizen control, are ordered along one dimension from least to most power — exactly the kind of single mixed category this week’s three independent axes exist to stop collapsing into. Read it for one purpose: pick any two of her rungs and check whether they can be told apart using only this week’s three axes (participation status, decision right, information timing), without reaching for Arnstein’s own ordering. If two of her rungs turn out to differ only in decision right, or only in timing, that’s exactly the kind of hidden combination this week’s taxonomy is built to expose instead of just rank.
Before Week 3#
Bring one meeting invitation you have personally received in the last month — from any part of your life, not necessarily paid work: a club committee, a group assignment, a share-house decision. We will read who it went to, and who it didn’t.
If nothing suitable turns up, or what you have isn’t something you can ethically bring into a classroom, use this fictional substitute instead — it carries a real taxonomy of invited and excluded seats to read, without asking you to source one from your own life:
Invitation: Reading Room space review — planning meeting To: Facilities Manager, Space Committee Chair, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Operations) Cc: Assistant Facilities Manager (informed, not attending) Not addressed: Reading Room staff, Library student representative
Purpose: agree a recommendation on desk allocation before it goes to the Space Committee for sign-off.
Either way: before you bring a real invitation to class, remove or blank out anyone’s email address, phone number, or any content in the meeting’s subject or body you wouldn’t want read aloud to a room of your classmates. The exercise needs the structure of who was invited, not the private content of what the meeting was actually about.
Teaching team
- Idris Fenn — tutor