The Ecological Sensegiving of Human-Natural Organization in an Alaskan Commercial Fishery

Abstract

This exploratory study contributes to the ongoing effort to build a body of organizational research and theory that focuses on relationships among organizations and natural phenomena. The question guiding this study is, how does organization that is mutually constituted by both humans and nature form in a natural resource extraction context? The logic of this study is that if it is through sensemaking that organization emerges, it is through ecological sensemaking that organization at the frontline of natural resource extraction industries emerges. Yet, no research has been conducted on the ecological sensemaking through which frontline managers in natural resource extraction industries, here commercial fishing captains, make sense of the natural systems upon which they depend for their livelihood, from which human-natural organization emerges. To answer the research question, this study examines the ecological sensemaking of frontline managers in a resource extraction industry. The findings are threefold: First, they provide an analytical framework of the human-natural organization that forms in the natural resource extraction industry analyzed in this study; Second, the findings demonstrate that ecological sensemaking is the assembling process through which human-natural organization continually forms at the frontline of a resource extraction industry; Third, the findings suggest that natural phenomena engage in a sort of sensegiving to the sensemaking of human phenomena, and that it is out of this intra-play of natural sensegiving and human sensemaking that human-natural organization emerges.