Gossip as evaluative sensemaking and the concealment of confidential gossip in the everyday life of organizations

Ziyun Fan,Patrick Dawson

doi:10.1177/1350507620979366

Abstract

Gossip is pervasive at the workplace, yet receives scant attention in the sensemaking literature and stands on the periphery of organization studies. We seek to reveal the non-triviality of gossip in processes of sensemaking. In drawing on empirical data from an observational study of a British Media firm, we adopt a processual perspective in showing how people produce, understand, and enact their sense of what is occurring through gossip as an evaluative and distinct form of informal communication. Our research draws attention to the importance of gossip in the routines of daily practice and the need to differentiate general from confidential gossip. We discuss how gossip continuously informs learning as evaluative sensemaking processes that encourages critiques and evaluation to shape future action and behavior. Within this, we argue how confidential gossip can challenge power relations while remaining part of formal authority structures, constituting forms of pragmatic and micro-resistance. This shadowland resistance provides terrain for learning that both criticizes and preserves espoused values and cultural norms. We conclude that confidential gossip as an evaluative and secretive process provokes a learning paradox that both enables and constrains forms of resistance in reinforcing and simultaneously questioning power relations at work.

Highlights

The process of sensemaking occurs through verbal and non-verbal means involving social practices and conversations (Balogun and Johnson, 2005: 1576)
Our discussion section draws out four important insights from our research and in our conclusion, we argue that gossip and confidential gossip as an evaluative sensemaking process continuously and subtly reveals, educates, informs, and in some instances challenges organizational rules and workplace practices
We argue that gossip and confidential gossip generate forms of pragmatic (McCabe et al, 2020: 956–960) and micro-resistance (Merry, 1995: 15) that does not target revolutionary behavior but enables subordinates to form counter-spheres within forms of domination that subtly shape the trajectory of control and quietly challenges power relations without radically changing them (Fleming and Spicer, 2007)

Summary

Introduction

The process of sensemaking occurs through verbal and non-verbal means involving social practices and conversations (Balogun and Johnson, 2005: 1576). There are “only a few sensemaking studies that focus on communication” and “in a way that allows the interaction between different forms of communication to be examined” (Mills, 2010: 217). Gossip is one such area in providing a communicative space for employees to evaluate dominant narratives that legitimize workplace practices in developing alternative sensemaking perspectives. It is central to processes of sensemaking in our everyday life of organizations and yet, remains an area that receives little research attention

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion