Collective Sensemaking Process Research Articles

Distributed imagining processes in organizational change sensemaking

PurposeThe role of imagination (Gioia et al., 2002; Weick, 1995, 2005, 2006) and the potential of distributed sensemaking (Weick et al., 2005) are highlighted in existing sensemaking studies in a distinct manner. The purpose of this paper is to articulate these two perspectives by observing a specific sensemaking process defined as “distributed imagining process (DIP)” in this paper.Design/methodology/approachFrom an observation conducted in 2016 within a French public organization regarding an operation that invited all organizational actors to imagine the future of their work life, this study analyzed 777 collected texts, through an inductive and qualitative approach, for understanding DIP’s functioning and results.FindingsThis study identified that what actors imagine about the future is a self-contextualized observation and an interpretation of the present incorporated into an imagined future. With a distributed modality, individual imagining processes might interact with collective processes for contributing organizational change sensemaking.Originality/valueAdopting a temporality that positions the future as an imagined interpretative prolongation of the present and the past (Gioia et al., 2002), this study suggests that the combination of self-contextualized imagining process and distributed modality might be inspiring for exploring more inductive and enriched organizational sensemaking through, on the one hand, the reduction of cognitive constraints implicitly imposed by organizational and temporal contexts and, on the other hand, the incitation of interactions in and between individual and collective sensemaking processes.

Social Positions and Collective Sense-Making in Crisis Communication

ABSTRACT This article addresses how uncertainties during crisis situations evolve over time and how social positions dynamically affect the collective sense-making process in social media crisis communication. We carried out two case studies on Twitter: (1) the Brussels attacks (2016) with 4,390,784 tweets and (2) the Munich rampage (2016) with 1,258,227 tweets. By applying computed regression-based time-series analyses, we revealed the underlying tweet behavior. As next steps, we trained a machine learning algorithm to identify tweets that express uncertainty and we conducted social network analyses to determine the most influential actors and their social positions. The results reveal that tweet behavior in early crisis stages is dominated by information distribution and guided by content that is characterized by a high percentage of tweets expressing uncertainty. Based on our results, we identified two forms of collective sense-making: (1) acute and guided collective sense-making and (2) evaluative and retrospective collective sense-making.

From boat to bags: The role of material chronotopes in adaptive sensemaking

In following a turn in communications, this paper explores how adaptive sensemaking in an extreme context is materially framed and reframed through both time and space. By drawing upon an ethnographic study of the Darwin Expedition, the paper examines in fine-grained detail what Weick (1993) would call a cosmology episode: during Days 9 and 10 of this expedition, climbers felt that their universe was no longer rational or ordered. A discursive analysis reveals that the boat and bags had become two central material chronotopes, through which meaning-making was being collectively reframed once the sense had collapsed. This work assesses the accounts surrounding both objects and moreover explains their roles in prompting the expedition team to reframe core meanings and enact a radical shift in sensemaking. The conclusion discusses the contribution of chronotopes in frame-shifting and the importance of focusing on the central objects structuring the collective sensemaking process in order to yield a better understanding of the role of materiality in an extreme context.

Tweeting and Retweeting for FF$15: Are Unions Transforming Themselves?

Unions are exploring innovative strategies to counteract their decline. The possibility to transform themselves into broader society-based organizations achieved much support. We shed light about the extent of union transformation in this direction, analyzing union participation in the collective sense-making process on social media around Fight for $15. Drawing on big data, primarily collected through Twitter, and a synergy of mixed methods, combining documentary, content analysis, and advanced regression models, we highlight union actions in comparison to other social actors on three dimensions: online activism; prevalence of tweeting over re-tweeting; and endorsement. Results suggest that unions strongly prefer to insert their own ideas instead of supporting others and, most importantly, their messages are endorsed more than those of other actors in Twitter universe. This provides unions with an important leadership position. Implications for union transformation into broader society-based organizations are discussed.

Supporting Sensemaking to Promote a Systemic View of Organizational Change – Contributions from Activity Theory

ABSTRACTIn this case study, the potential of intentional arenas and tools to promote collective sensemaking during major structural and technical transformations in a specialist organization in the Finnish forestry sector is examined. The results suggest that sensemaking processes in complex change situations are intimately linked to the temporal development of tensions concerning new ways and structures of working. The article demonstrates how Change Workshops, based on activity theoretical methods and tools, shaped sensemaking by offering means to collectively investigate developmental tensions and their potential resolutions and promoted the creation of a systemic view of changing work. This research thus provides an insight into ways in which to foster systemic and future-orientated perspectives in collective sensemaking processes, which in turn improve the management of organizational change.

Storytelling in organisations: supporting or subverting corporate strategy?

PurposeStorytelling is claimed to be an effective way of communicating corporate strategy within organisations. However, previous studies have tended to focus holistically on storytelling in organisations rather than investigating how different groups may use and be influenced by stories. The purpose of this paper is to address these gaps in the literature by investigating how storytelling in internal communication can either support or subvert corporate strategy.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative study was conducted into storytelling in two large companies in the UK energy industry. Data were collected through 70 semi-structured interviews, documentary research, and observation research. Impression management theory was used to analyse how stories supported or subverted corporate strategy.FindingsStorytelling by employees in the corporate and customer service areas of the organisations showed the greatest support for corporate strategy. There was more subversive storytelling in the operational areas, particularly by lower level employees. Stories subverted corporate strategy by recounting incidents and encouraging behaviour that contradicted the organisation’s vision/goals and values.Originality/valueThe study shows the important contribution of employees to the collective sensemaking process in organisations, by narrating supportive or subversive stories. Engaging employees in storytelling can enhance support for corporate strategy, however, managers should also see subversive stories as an opportunity to identify and address problems in the organisation.

Users’ Encounter With Normative Discourses on Facebook: A Three-Pronged Analysis of User Agency as Power Structure, Nexus, and Reception

This study asks whether users’ encounter with normative discourses of lifestyle, consumption, and health on social media such as Facebook gives rise to agency. The theoretical framework draws on reception analysis, for its implied, but central interest in agency that lies at the intersection of texts and audiences. Based on a critique of the “participatory paradigm,” a paradigm that situates the locus of agency in the structural opposition between senders and users, in the norms of rational deliberation or in the figure of the activist, gaps are identified which can be filled by adopting an explicit focus on the socio-cultural practices of ordinary audiences in their encounters with media discourses. The study investigates user agency on seven Facebook groups and pages with the help of a three-pronged perspective based on the notion of the media–audience relationship as (1) power structure, (2) nexus, and (3) reception. The analysis reveals that the structure at play on these Facebook groups and pages does not encourage user agency. However, user agency manifests itself through user interactions and expressive sense-making processes associated with reception. The benefits of such audience agency are a public, collective, and communicative sense-making process and an expansion of the professionally controlled text.

Expert tool use: a phenomenological analysis of processes of incorporation in the case of elite rope skipping

According to some phenomenologists, a tool can be experienced as incorporated when, as a result of habitual use or deliberate practice, someone is able to manipulate it without conscious effort. In this article, we specifically focus on the experience of expertise tool use in elite sport. Based on a case study of elite rope skipping, we argue that the phenomenological concept of incorporation does not suffice to adequately describe how expert tool users feel when interacting with their tools. By analyzing a combination of insights gained from participant observation of 11 elite rope skippers and autoethnographic material from one former elite skipper, we take some initial steps toward the development of a more nuanced understanding of the concept of incorporation; one that is able to accommodate the experiences of expert tool users. In sum, our analyses indicate that the possibility for experiencing a tool as incorporated depends on the existence of an extraordinary kind of relationship between the tool and the expert tool user. This relation, that can persist even when successful manipulation of the tool fails, is not only cultivated through deliberate practice of physical skills, but also through the collective sense-making process going on within a particular community of practice. Therefore, expert tool users may experience a more profound kind of incorporation that can persist even when normal motor incorporation fails.

Coordination under uncertainty

PurposeThis paper aims to examine how managers use planning meetings to coordinate their actions in light of an uncertain future. Existing literature suggests that coordination under uncertainty requires a “dynamic” approach to planning, which is often realized in the form of rolling forecasts and frequent cross-functional exchange. Not so much is known, however, about the micro-level process through which coordination is achieved. This paper suggests that a sensemaking perspective and a focus on “planning talk” are particularly helpful to understand how actors come to a shared understanding of an uncertain future, based upon which they can coordinate their actions.Design/methodology/approachThis paper builds upon a qualitative case study in the Austrian production site of an international manufacturing company. Drawing on a sensemaking perspective, the paper analyses monthly held “planning meetings” in which sales and production managers discuss sales forecasts for the coming months and talk about how to align demand and supply.FindingsThe authors show how collective sensemaking unfolds in planning meetings and highlight the role that “plausibilization” of expectations, “calculative reasoning” and “filtering” of information play in this process. This case analysis also sheds light on the challenges that such a sensemaking process may be subject to. In particular, this paper finds that competing hierarchical accountabilities may influence the collective sensemaking process and render coordination more challenging.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the hitherto limited management accounting and control literature on operational planning, especially its coordination function. It also extends the management accounting and control literature that draws on the concept of sensemaking. The study shows how actors involved in planning meetings create a common understanding of the current and future situation and what sensemaking mechanisms facilitate this process. In this respect, this paper is particularly interested in the role that accounting and other types of numbers can play in this context. Furthermore, it theorizes on the conditions that allow managers to overcome concerns with hierarchical accountabilities and enact socializing forms of accountability, which is often necessary to come to agreements on actions to be taken.

The Challenge of Integration: A Review of the M&A Integration Literature

AbstractThe integration of acquired or merging firms is a key driver of the success or failure of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Over the last 30 years, a substantial body of research has addressed M&A integration, offering rich but widely dispersed insights into this phenomenon. This paper takes stock of the current knowledge, based on a review of articles published in scholarly journals. The review advances the conceptual understanding of the phenomenon by inductively developing an overarching framework for the M&A integration literature, where integration success is a function of context, structural and communication‐based interventions, which interact with collective sensemaking processes and negotiations among integration stakeholders. Based on this framework, a research agenda is suggested. I proposes that, in particular, the interaction between structural interventions and leadership warrants further study. Also, little is known about integration project management and integration team composition or the interaction between integration context and collective sensemaking processes. Finally, there is a shortage of research on temporal dynamics within integration projects. The review demonstrates that M&A scholars made substantial progress regarding our understanding of the M&A integration process, yet much remains to be done.

Engaging cultural resources to promote mental health in Dutch LSES neighborhoods: study of a community-based participatory media project.

Community-based participatory media projects form a promising new strategy for mental health promotion that can help address the mental health-gap identified by the World Health Organization. (2008b) mhGAP, Mental Health Gap Action Programme: Scaling Up Care for Mental, Neurological and Substance Use Disorders. World Health Organization, Geneva. In this article we present an ethnographic study about a participatory media project that was developed to promote mental health in selected Dutch low socio-economic status neighborhoods. Through narrowcastings (group film viewings), participant observation and interviews we mapped the ways in which the media project effected and facilitated the collective sense-making process of the audience with regard to sources of stress impacting mental health and opportunities for action. These determinants of mental health are shaped by cultural dimensions, since the cultural context shapes everyday experiences of stress as well as the resources and skills to manage them. Our analysis shows that the media project engaged cultural resources to challenge stressful social scripts. We conclude that more attention should be paid to cultural narratives in a community to understand how health promotion strategies can support social resilience.

The Internet Imaginary: Between Technology and Technique

The Internet Imaginary: Between Technology and Technique

Who Holds the Power? Teachers’ Perceptions of Principals in School Reform

In the school reform process, much research has been conducted on the role of the principal. Almost all the leadership research concludes that the principal is an important policy actor in setting the tone for reform and in providing support. Many authors argue that, without such strong leadership, there can be no lasting reforms. The results presented in this article look at the role of principals, although the study is situated in a broader context of making sense of how teachers prioritize reform using the new Common Core State Standards in mathematics. Such reform, according to Coburn (2001) and other researchers, requires a collective sense-making process, and most of that process occurs among teachers. Building on this, we explore how the teacher perceives or makes sense of the principal in the school reform process. Using a mixed methods approach that encompasses three Midwestern states that are current implementers of the Common Core State Standards movement, we conclude that teachers do not perceive the principal as playing a major role in this curricular policy implementation and reform—a view contrary to that presented in the literature.

Making sense of partnering: discourses, governance and institutional change

Coordination in construction projects has traditionally been based on contractually defined relations involving high degrees of surveillance. In recent decades, partnering has been advocated as a project-specific, communicative alternative to this contractual mode of project governance. Taking a perspective of institutional theory, however, the development of partnering can also be understood as a strategic intervention that has destabilized the established regulative context in which the traditional contractual mode of project governance takes place. Drawing on a historical document study and data from an ethnographic case study of a public partnering project, it is shown that rather than providing a well-defined alternative to the traditional form of project governance, the institutional destabilization has cultivated an organization field offering a legitimate frame for local sense making. Thus, as a project governance mechanism, partnering emerges as a collective sense-making process directed at (re-)...

Ambiguity and Uncertainty in the “Last Mile”: Using Sense-making to Explore How Rural Broadband Networks Are Created

Broadband technology has captured the attention of many stakeholders, nations, and governments throughout the world as a “nation building” infrastructure enabling the future economic prosperity and improved living standards for many communities. Broadband networks are an important means by which rural communities around the world can gain access to global networks of knowledge and communication. They are also a means by which nation-states and regions seek to increase their economic and cultural sovereignty. Rural broadband can therefore be seen as a critical nexus between global and local flows of both capital and ideas.In 2005, the provincial government of Alberta in Canada completed a significant investment into the construction of a unique high-speed, high-capacity fiber-optic network connecting rural communities throughout the province. The network was the first of its kind in the world in terms of the advantages it represented for rural individuals to benefit from easy access to broadband. Paradoxically, as of 2008 Alberta was ranked last among Canadian provinces for rural broadband access. This article examines how ambiguity and uncertainty faced by industry decision-makers and broadband stakeholders contribute to the adoption of broadband by rural communities. Interviews were conducted with industry decision-makers. Through the application of Weick’s sensemaking framework, several areas of ambiguity and uncertainty are identified related to rural broadband adoption. A primary finding is that self-fulfilling prophecies about the broadband network's construction and use developed through collective sensemaking processes, resulting in an immobilizing effect on the development of rural broadband's "effective use" by communities.

Facing the future: Scanning, synthesizing and sense-making in horizon scanning

In this paper, we discuss key issues in harnessing horizon scanning to shape systemic policies, particularly in the light of the foresight exercise ‘Facing the future: Time for the EU to meet global challenges’ which was carried out for the Bureau of European Policy Advisors. This exercise illustrates how horizon scanning can enable collective sense-making processes which assist in the identification of emerging signals and policy issues; the synthesis of such issues into encompassing clusters; and the interpretation of resulting clusters as an important step towards the coordinated development of joint policy measures. In order to achieve such objectives, horizon scanning can benefit from methods of multi-criteria decision-making and network analysis for prioritizing, clustering and combining issues. Furthermore, these methods provide support for traceability, which in turn contributes to the enhanced transparency and legitimacy of foresight.

Out of tune: The rise and fall of modernistic music in Brussels, 1919–1939

Genre emergence is a collective sense-making process that goes together with the classification of cultural objects. New genres achieve a taken-for-granted status and obtain legitimacy when audiences reach consensus about the labels and attributes that apply to nascent categories. However, the development of shared understandings constitutes a non-trivial task, as often substantial fuzziness and contestation exist about these labels and attributes. Unfortunately, research on new genres often focuses on successful genres—although most proposals to establish new categories do not succeed. To fill this void, studies of nascent genres that fail to become institutionalized are needed. We study modernistic music in Brussels in the inter-war period—a genre that did not become taken-for-granted among a broader audience despite massive means and energy invested by cultural entrepreneurs. We argue that genres characterized by fragmentation—resulting in high category fuzziness or low contrast—lose appeal. Furthermore, we propose that ideological contention resulting from the rise of nationalism exacerbates the effect of genre fragmentation. When sub-genres resonate with different political ideologies, nationalist mobilization is expected to spur contestation about the meaning of the nascent genre—increasing its fuzziness and blocking the development of shared understandings. Our findings support both arguments.

Organizing Ambiguity: A Grounded Theory of Leadership and Sensemaking Within Dangerous Contexts

Leaders in high-reliability organizational contexts such as firefighting, emergency medicine, and law enforcement often face the challenge of making sense of environments that are dangerous, highly ambiguous, and rapidly changing. Most leadership research, however, has focused on more stable conditions. This study analyzed 100 reports of “near-miss” situations in which firefighters narrowly escaped injury or death, drawing upon sensemaking and high-reliability organizational theories to provide a grounded theory of leadership processes within extreme events. Themes related to direction setting, knowledge, talk, role acting, role modeling, trust, situational awareness, and agility were key categories. Further abstraction of the data revealed the higher-order categories of framing, heedful interrelating, and adjusting as key characteristics of the overall social process of leadership within dangerous contexts, labeled organizing ambiguity. These findings highlight leadership as a collective sensemaking process in which ambiguity is reduced and resilience promoted in the face of danger via interaction among and between leaders and followers.

Epistemes and Structures of Sensemaking in Organizational Life

The issue of organizational sense-making has been much researched and written about in recent years. Yet, how structurally such sense-making attempts are facilitated remains relatively unexamined. In this article, the authors explore the underlying processes to be accomplished, sustained, and extended. `Episteme,' the underlying code of a culture or epoch that governs its language, its logic, its schemas of perception, its values and its techniques, etc., is what makes individual and collective meaning and sense-making possible. In this article, the authors identify three epistemes of organizational sense-making for legitimizing and justifying managerial actions and decision-making within the context of a family-owned newspaper called the Courier. This is done through a study of the justifying narratives employed in the collective sense-making process.

Sensemaking, safety, and cooperative work in the intensive care unit

Making sense of circumstances and situations is critical to coordinate cooperative work. Especially in process control domains, we may expect that effective and reliable organizations will possess processes that develop, maintain, distribute, and, when necessary, repair this social understanding (sensemaking). Our research has focused on collective sensemaking process in an intensive care unit (ICU). Thus, sensemaking is most likely to be visible to researchers in high tempo, high uncertainty work settings such as hospital ICU, where complexity, criticality, and uncertainty are the main characteristics of the working activities and making sense of what is happening is one of the most important challenge of the team of physicians working in this context. The research demonstrates how workers create and distribute sense within small work groups and also how they use the results of these efforts to coordinate ongoing work activities. Practitioners tradeoff the opportunity costs of formal, collective sensemaking (sensemaking at intervals) against the value that this preparation provides to sensemaking during high tempo work (sensemaking on-the-fly). Further study of this dynamic balance will provide insight about how practitioners construct platforms for action during future, uncertain, high stakes work.