Making Sense of Bad News: The Media, Sensemaking, and Organizational Crisis

Abstract

This paper explores the construction of organizational crisis through the discourse of media. Using a critical sensemaking framework, the authors conclude that the media serve as a disproportionate influence in the creation of plausible organizational narrative after crisis. They implicate the practices of journalistic work and the relationships between news workers and those holding power in organizations. They use the 1992 explosion at the Westray coal mine in Nova Scotia, Canada, where 26 men died, to illustrate these contentions. They find that among available and plausible early narratives of this event, enactment of a discourse of natural disaster and tragedy has prevailed over those that incorporated human agency and organizational culpability.