Collective Sensemaking Research Articles

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.

The lessons of `Enron'

While the novelty of Enron and WorldCom as corporate scandals should not be overstated, these events are distinguished by the sheer volume of media coverage that followed in their wake. Drawing from an analysis of over 300 newspaper and magazine articles, this article argues that while this media coverage varies in its diagnosis of the scandals, it is rooted in a common set of taken-for-granted assumptions as to the nature, form, and operation of financial markets. These various points of complementarity suggest that the coverage of the scandals is less significant as an exercise in collective sense-making than as a re-investment in a particular market discourse, a form of financial intelligibility germane to the scandals themselves and instructive vis-à-vis the future study of corporate and white-collar crime.

Co-evolution, Knowledge and Education: Adding Value to Learners’ Options

The paper adopts the co-evolutionary perspective on the human society/natural environment relationship developed, particularly, by the economist Richard Norgaard. This implies that human environmental knowledge is necessarily dynamic and incomplete. By extension, it is also fragmentary, in the sense that what may hold true when considering particular spatial and/or temporal scales may otherwise be false. The paper briefly explores the implications for rationality and belief, focusing particularly on the powerful role of metaphor in our collective and individual sense-making. The implications of one particular metaphor—that of natural capital—are explored. Tentative conclusions about useful educational design are proposed, drawing on recent research.

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.

Designing and Testing an OD Intervention

This article presents a design-based research study on the reporting of intellectual capital in firms. It combines the designing of an organization development (OD) intervention with the testing of the intervention using an action research methodology. A growing gap between theory-based research and practice has been identified in the literature as one of the reasons for a lack of renewal in the field of OD. Design-based research (DBR) has been proposed as a methodology that can help bridge the gap between theory-based research and practice. The purpose of this article is to illustrate what a comprehensive methodology for design-based research might look like and to demonstrate the type of OD knowledge this research can produce. The DBR approach is used to design and test a tool for the reporting of intellectual capital within firms as an OD intervention aimed toward influencing the individual and collective sensemaking of managers.

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.

Sense and sensitivity: the roles of organisation and stakeholders in managing corporate social responsibility

While companies are increasingly convinced of the relevance of CSR, many are still struggling to define their responsibility. Part of the answer to this question can be found in the dual approach towards CSR. The authors unravel the concept of CSR into two components: responsibility and responsiveness. Regarding the firm's responsiveness towards society, companies can adopt two positions. They might adopt an inside‐out approach towards CSR and emphasise their own ambitions. Alternatively, they can approach stakeholders from an outside‐in perspective, wherein stakeholder claims dominate. The authors argue that both perspectives are inadequate with regard to complex societal issues. Therefore, a third approach towards societal interaction is proposed. This is characterised by a process of collective sensemaking, aimed at understanding the issue and defining responsibilities.

In the democracies of DNA: ontological uncertainty and political order in three states

This paper compares the regulation of biotechnology in Britain, Germany and the United States and shows that systematic differences have developed around four issues: abortion, assisted reproduction, stem cells, and genetically modified crops and foods. Policy choices with respect to these issues reflect the capacity of each nation's regulatory institutions to deal with the scientific, social and ethical uncertainties around biotechnology. National regulatory frameworks constitute an apparatus of collective sense-making through which governments and publics interpret biotechnology's risks and promises. Specifically, regulatory choices position the novel ontologies created by biotechnology either on the side of the familiar and manageable or on the side of the unknown and insupportably risky. The comparison shows that public responses to biotechnology are embedded within robust and coherent political cultures and are not ad hoc expressions of concern that vary unpredictably from issue to issue.

Deploying Common Systems Globally: The Dynamics of Control

In today's competitive environment, an increasing number of firms are building common information systems, which will be deployed globally, to support their strategic globalization initiatives. These systems are designed to meet the requirements of a diverse set of stakeholders with different business needs, priorities, and objectives. One managerial tool for addressing and reconciling such differences is control, which encompasses all attempts to motivate individuals to act in a manner that is consistent with organizational objectives. This paper examines two research questions. How do stakeholders exercise control during different phases of large IS projects? Why do control choices change across project phases? Results of two case studies suggest control is exercised differently for each phase. During the initial phase of a project, control is exercised as “collective sensemaking,” in which both IS and business stakeholders utilize mostly informal mechanisms of control. During development, “technical winnowing” of mechanisms occurs such that control is vested primarily in IS managers, who structure hierarchical relationships with subordinates and who rely extensively on formal control mechanisms. Both IS and business stakeholders employ formal and informal mechanisms during implementation to exercise control as “collaborative coordinating.” The results also suggest that changes in control choices from one project phase to another are triggered by factors in the project, stakeholder, and global contexts. As factors change across phases, so too do control choices. Further, problems that surface in one project phase trigger changes to controls in subsequent phases. These findings are integrated into a model of the dynamics of control. Implications of these results are drawn, and directions for future research are suggested.

Maybe Bacon Had a Point: The Politics of Interpretation in Collective Sensemaking1

Despite major contributions to theories of organizational knowledge from socially situated, practice‐based approaches, there remains a blind‐spot in this literature concerning power and politics. This paper makes some initial attempts to address this absence by thinking about how far alternative theories of power/knowledge can strengthen and extend practice‐based approaches to knowledge. The need for a detailed analytic of the multiple techniques, strategies, and expressions of power/knowledge in concrete social situations and the different ways in which they come together through specific episodes of enactment is highlighted. To illustrate this, we draw on an ethnographic study of an inter‐organizational collaboration in the telecommunications sector. This illustration focuses on struggles over meaning during a problem‐solving encounter during the later stages of a project for developing and implementing new software for telephone exchanges.

A Narratological Approach to Understanding Processes of Organizing in a UK Hospital

This article outlines a narratological approach to understanding how middle managers and senior managers in a UK National Health Service (NHS) hospital made sense of the introduction of a series of interventions, led by senior managers. The research contribution this article makes is fourfold. First, it illustrates the role of individual and group narratives in processes of collective sensemaking. Second, it discusses the importance of work narratives in the efforts of individuals and groups to define their shared identities. Third, it outlines a view of organizations as storytelling milieux in which group narratives play important hegemonic and legitimatory roles. Finally, our focus on narratives, and the plurivocal understandings of actions and events they often encompass, is, we maintain, one useful means by which polysemy can be read back into case study research.

Sensemaking, safety, and situated communities in (con)temporary networks

This paper discusses the difficulties involved in managing knowledge-intensive, multinational, multiorganisational, and multifunctional project networks. The study is based on a 2-year quasi-ethnography of one such network engaged in the design and development of a complex new process control system for an existing pharmaceutical plant in Ireland. The case describes how, drawing upon the organisational heritage of the corporations involved and the logic implicit within their global partnership arrangements, the project was initially structured in an aspatial manner that underestimated the complexity of the development process and the social relations required to support it. Following dissatisfaction with initial progress, a number of critical management interventions were made, which appeared to contribute to a recasting of the network ontology that facilitated the cultivation and protection of more appropriate communicative spaces. The case emphasises the need to move away from rationalistic assumptions about communication processes within projects of this nature, towards a richer conceptualisation of such enterprises as involving collective sensemaking activities within and between situated ‘communities’ of actors. Contrary to much contemporary writing, the paper argues that space and location are of crucial importance to our understanding of network forms of organising.

Collective Sensemaking about Reading: How Teachers Mediate Reading Policy in Their Professional Communities

Recent research on the relationship between instructional policy and classroom practice suggests that teachers interpret, adapt, and even transform policies as they put them into place. This paper extends this line of research, using an in-depth case study of one California elementary school to examine the processes by which teachers construct and reconstruct multiple policy messages about reading instruction in the context of their professional communities. Drawing primarily on institutional and sensemaking theory, this paper puts forth a model of collective sensemaking that focuses on the ways teachers co-construct understandings of policy messages, make decisions about which messages to pursue in their classrooms, and negotiate the technical and practical details of implementation in conversations with their colleagues. It also argues that the nature and structure of formal networks and informal alliances among teachers shape the process, with implications for ways in which messages from the policy environment influence classroom practice. Finally, the paper explores the role school leaders play in shaping the sensemaking process.

Organizational Silence: A Barrier to Change and Development in a Pluralistic World

We argue that there are powerful forces in many organizations that cause widespread withholding of information about potential problems or issues by employees. We refer to this collective-level phenomenon as “organizational silence.” In our model we identify contextual variables that create conditions conducive to silence and explore the collective sensemaking dynamics that can create the shared perception that speaking up is unwise. We also discuss some of the negative consequences of systemic silence, especially for organizations' ability to change and develop in the context of pluralism.

Towards A Culturally Sensitive Approach To Organization Structuring: Where Organization Design Meets Organization Development

This article describes an holistic model of intervention geared to achieving transformational change by interweaving culture and structure through the warp and weft of leadership processes. That is, it brings together organization design and organization development by advocating a culturally sensitive approach to organization structuring. Our emphasis is on process throughout and our thesis is based on empirical evidence. We undertook a lengthy action research project (which we prefer to call “action ethnography”) at a large hospital trust in England. In the process of elaborating this field study, we move from an organization which was seen to be “gridlocked” and to have “lost its steering capacity”, through one which was bringing development and design together by way of pilot projects and transitional structures, to one where collective dialogue and debate finally led to some collective and sensible sensemaking. Exploring this relationship between culture and structure enables us to put people back into design and with them, their meanings, aspirations and assumptions. It also means that we are careful to avoid detailing specific design choices or offering organizational archetypes: this article is primarily about the process issues that surround redesign rather than organization design per se, as indeed any redesign is ultimately highly specific and context-driven. Instead, however, we articulate a four-phase change model, focusing on the delicate processes by which to reframe the culture-structure relationship, enabling an organization to move towards fundamental change.

Focus group methodology: a review

This paper introduces and reviews the use of focus group methodology across the social sciences, identifying three different research traditions within which it has been used. It examines some key considerations affecting the use of focus groups, and highlights three central features of focus group research: providing access to participants' own language, concepts and concerns; encouraging the production of more fully articulated accounts; and offering an opportunity to observe the process of collective sense-making in action. Finally, the paper outlines some of the issues in the analysis of focus group data-an area with considerable potential for future development.

Collective Centring and Collective Sense-making in the Stories and Storytelling of One Organization

A vivid illustration of shared storytelling, collective centring, and collective sense-making appears in this study of one non-profit organization. Organiza tional members identify two stories that express the collective sense and allow centring on the shared meaning. Sense-making in a structurally closed organ ization is demonstrated. Organizational dynamics and root metaphors are examined and several approaches to the analysis of organizational myth and story are utilized. Dissonance between organizational members and the presid ent is apparent even though the organization is rooted in a unitary reality.

Qualitative research in information management: ed. by Jack D. Glazier and R.R. Powell. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1992. 238p. $35 ISBN 0-87287-806-6. LC 91-43579

Projects are increasingly cross-cultural and complex, both technically and relationally. The diversity of participants enhances differences in perceptions and understanding of meaning of the variety of signals (such as drawings and messages); often, the consequence is reduced performance and conflictual situations. Appreciation of such differences and of how people make sense of their worlds enables participants to appreciate the views of others and so, mitigate potential problems. Hence, a review of sensemaking literature is undertaken regarding individual and collective sensemaking, cultural schemas and the impact of cultural sensemaking on cross-culture international alliances, together with examination of application to contexts of construction, such as project realisation process and construction innovation. Conclusions advocate practical changes to secure heedful sensemaking towards improving relationships on projects and both process and product performance.

PHD Defence: “Communication and Interprofessional Collaborative Practice: Collective Sensemaking Work” By Stephanie Fox

Our dear colleague, Stephanie Fox, successfully defended her PHD dissertation on December 8, 2014. Here is the abstract of her dissertation “Communication and Interprofessional Collaborative Practice: Collective Sensemaking Work”.