Deep Received Cosmologies, Enacted Extreme Environments, and Strategic Preoccupation with Failure

Abstract

International experts recently posed insightful questions on fourteen topics that will guide the next generation of sensemaking theory, research, and practice: cognition, complexity, process, enactment, levels of analysis, loose coupling, emotions, requisite variety, theorizing, sensemaking, paradox, temporality, self-organizing, and morality (Tsoukas, Patriotta, Sutcliffe, & Maitlis, 2017). In order to inform past, current, and future studies of sensemaking episodes (e.g. the 12 May 2008 Sichuan Earthquake and the 2014 Shooting in Ferguson, Missouri), this study replicates an earlier qualitative meta-analysis of 80 industrial accidents that occurred around the world between 1903 and 1999 (e.g. 1912 Titanic naval accident, 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident, 1984 Bhopal chemical leak; see Lin, Zhao, Ismail, & Carley, 2006). The data set is updated from 80 industrial accidents to 120 sensemaking episodes through the addition of sensemaking episodes not included in the original data set (e.g. the 1977 Tenerife air disaster, Weick, 1990) and sensemaking episodes that occurred after the original data set was closed (e.g. the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disintegration, Beck & Plowman, 2009). The resulting qualitative meta-analysis helps respond to sensemaking research questions on cognition, complexity, and process through the elaboration of three components of anticipation resiilience processes in sensemaking episodes: deep received cosmologies, enacted extreme environments, and strategic preoccupation with failure.