Getting Critical About Sensemaking

Abstract

It has been just over ten years since the publication of Karl Weick’s Sensemaking in Organizations (Weick, 1995). Reaction has been mixed, to say the least. Those who are drawn to Weick’s work – and there are many – are often glowing in their support, while others – particularly critical management scholars – simply ignore it. So what’s the big problem? There really is no problem if we don’t want to understand how structuration is structured; discourse is discursive; postcolonialism is posted; isomorphism morphs; techniques of the self are technically possible; gendering is gendered; local is localized; or praxis is practised. That is not to suggest that these foci lack theoretical robustness or that Weick’s sensemaking is the answer to all known problems. It is to suggest that if we are to go some way to understanding the process of agency then Weick’s sensemaking heuristic merits attention. What can we learn from sensemaking and how can we overcome some of its apparent deficiencies? To begin with, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of everyday life in organizations by focusing attention on the social psychological processes through which organizing occurs and is made possible. In short, it provides an ethnomethodology of organizing. However, for critical scholars, this is problematic in its apparent focus on the reproduction of existing senses of organization rather than a way of understanding social change. Feminists, for example, could see this as yet another methodological reproduction of the gendered aspects of organizing through the normalization of the effects of sensemaking. Two things. First, this critique, although reasonable, underplays Weick’s own attempts to argue for a revisiting of the concept and outcomes of organization as a sensemaking frame (Weick et al., 2005); he attempts to refocus us on organizing and, in the process, change the way we construct organizational life. Second, there is an important tradition within critical scholarship – from the work of the Frankfurt School through to Clegg’s (1975) work on phenomenology – that has attempted to fuse psychologistic with critical theories: arguably, sensemaking, offers much as part of a more critical approach. Here are a few thoughts on the type of insights that a more critical approach to sensemaking may provide. With its grounding in identity construction, critical sensemaking has much to offer research into identity-work by fusion, say, with poststructuralist notions of discursive practice. The fusion could allow us not only to understand the way that identity is embedded in and arises out of selected discourses but the hitherto underplayed (or ignored) socio-psychological processes through which those discourses operate. This may also contribute to issues of agency by allowing us to grasp the processes whereby people make sense of their realities by extracting cues, dealing with plausibility, meshing their sense of reality with their ongoing identity construction, before making retrospective sense that enacts the environment and thus alters it. This has enormous potential for feminists who seek to trace – in order to change – the psychological processes through which gendered sub-structures are made possible. Here Weick’s notion of plausibility is rich in potential by focusing on the processes