Collective Sensemaking Research Articles

Networks, Translation, and Collective Sensemaking as the Sources of Institutional Compromise

We examine the role of translation in institutional maintenance. Although recent work on institutional maintenance often highlights a simplistic role of individual incumbents in protecting old institutional logics, less is known about whether and how the incumbents proactively embrace new institutional logics to enhance institutional stability. Through an in-depth, qualitative study of legal profession in Moldova after the collapse of Soviet Union, we explore how social actors taking different network positions engage in diverging translation of new institutional logics associated with Western capitalism. We find that while old institutional logics associated with communism gave way to new logics, operative institutions for the legal profession have a mixture of components from old and new logics. Our analysis also suggests that such compromised institutional arrangements are driven not only by incumbents, who more proactively engage in translation of new logics than passively resist institutional change, but also by challengers and intermediary agents who take diverse network positions. Our study therefore indicates a more nuanced image of institutional maintenance than has been suggested in prior work and highlights the value of studying how translation is collectively constructed by complex interactions between multiple actors. We conclude by discussing theoretical contributions to a broader research domain of institutional change and stability in emerging fields.

Temporal Structuring in Sensemaking – How an Entrepreneurial Team Deals with Radical Uncertainty

Understanding ways in which teams and organizations manage, negotiate and navigate uncertain futures is paramount, as high uncertainty can significantly harm employee and volunteer engagement. Recently, scholars have taken a keen interest in exploring collective sensemaking in uncertain contexts. Previous studies have examined how teams restore action after disruptive events and retrospectively make sense of the disruptions. However, the strategies teams utilize to deal with dynamic uncertainty “on the ground” have been largely missing. In this study, we examined team-level sensemaking during high uncertainty. We identified three strategies of temporal structuring that helped the team cope with and tame the uncertainty that could cripple their organizing efforts: (1) freezing the future (2) bracketing the future and (3) abstracting the future. Our study contributes to the literature on sensemaking and uncertainty by demonstrating the significance of temporal structuring as a way of moving forward and dealing with uncertainty as well as mitigating the potentially paralyzing effect of radical uncertainty. In addition, our study contributes to the literature on prospective and temporal sensemaking by focusing on the present-future connection and showing how a team constructs sensemaking anchors in the future rather than retrospectively in the past.

Sensemaking in a Networked World: COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Turkey

ABSTRACT This study aims to understand the collective sensemaking efforts and emotional reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine in Turkey between January 13, and January 22, 2021, as this time frame captured the initial days of vaccine rollouts and was characterized by high information ambiguity regarding COVID-19 vaccinations in Turkey. 45,759 tweets (written in Turkish) related to COVID-19 vaccine were analyzed. To analyze the tweet corpus, we used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling with a total of 30 topics based on the coherence scores, which were grouped into 6 distinct themes. The findings showed that Twitter users in Turkey made sense of the initial uncertainty regarding vaccinations by 1) discussing their vaccine hesitancy and rejection, 2) critiquing vaccine availability and priority groups, 3) critiquing the politicians getting vaccinated under the disguise of “incentivizing” the society 4) mocking photo sharing during vaccinations, 5) sharing unverified information about vaccination status and side effects 6) telling jokes about the vaccinations and vaccine side effects. Additionally, the sentiment analysis showed that the dominant emotions around the COVID-19 vaccine were negative. Theoretical implications are advanced for collective sensemaking framework, and practical implications are outlined to improve global communication efforts to eradicate vaccine hesitancy.

Identity work of academic teachers in an entrepreneurship training camp: a sensemaking approach

PurposeThis paper investigates how academic teachers engage in identity work and make sense of entrepreneurship and academia in an entrepreneurship training programme.Design/methodology/approachBy employing a sensemaking approach, the paper inductively analyses materials from a business idea development camp organised for academic teachers.FindingsIn collective sensemaking during the camp, non-academic facilitators strongly influenced the reflection-in-experience via normative ideas of entrepreneurship and their othering of entrepreneurship from academic work. In their post-camp individual essays, the academic teachers reflect-on-experience and draw parallels between entrepreneurship and academic work constructing sameness.Research limitations/implicationsLongitudinal research is needed in identity work and sensemaking among academic teachers in relation to entrepreneurship.Practical implicationsUniversities need to offer arenas for teachers and other faculty to support identity work and sensemaking.Originality/valueThis study generates new understanding of how academic teachers engage in identity work and make sense of entrepreneurship in training when interacting with others. It underscores the importance of time needed for reflection-on-action.

Team Disseminative Capacity: Exploring the Role of Collaborative Processes in Creating, Implementing, and Embedding New Knowledge

Organizations strongly rely on their teams’ abilities to absorb and disseminate knowledge to remain innovative. Prior research has focused primarily on knowledge absorption and the few studies investigating disseminative capacity (DCAP) identified disseminator and recipient characteristics as contributing factors toward effective organizational knowledge transfer. This study investigates the concept of team DCAP by shifting the focus to the role of disseminator–recipient interactions and collaborations during the dissemination process. Adopting a process perspective, we examine five technology transfer initiatives within a large multinational firm in Australia by collecting narratives from 34 members of both disseminating and recipient teams on the emergent processes through which each technology is created, transferred, and embedded at the recipient site. Findings reveal that in instances when knowledge is initially co-created through perspective taking and collective sensemaking among disseminators and recipients, such collaborations have a spill-over effect and continue throughout subsequent implementation and embedding processes, resulting in more effective transfer initiatives. This study contributes new and important insights for transforming the role of recipients from passive receivers of knowledge at the end of the transfer process as often depicted in previous studies, to active collaborators from the very beginning of the transfer process, starting with knowledge co-creation.

From ambiguity to action: integrating collective sensemaking and rational decision making in management pedagogy and practice

PurposeManagers are increasingly presented with complex, ambiguous decision problems that affect multiple stakeholder groups. Such problems cannot be tackled solely by classical approaches that prescribe rational methods to weigh evidence and select an optimal course of action. Yet most courses on decision making still focus on these methods. This paper draws attention to the complementary nature of rational decision making and sensemaking techniques in management decision making, and describes a practical pedagogy that demonstrates how the two can be integrated into management curricula.Design/methodology/approachBased on an in-depth review of relevant research, the authors propose a conceptual model that highlights the complementary nature of rational and sensemaking methods for making decisions relating to complex and ambiguous problems. They then describe a course on decision making as an illustration of how the model can inform decision making pedagogy.FindingsDecision makers need to think of their decision problems in terms of two distinct types of uncertainty: those for which uncertainty can be quantified and those for which it cannot. When faced with the latter, decisions are best made by working with relevant stakeholders to collectively frame the problem using practical sensemaking tools prior to applying rational decision making techniques to address it. Decision making under ambiguity is an iterative, social process requiring a combination of rational decision making methods and sensemaking techniques.Practical implicationsThe paper seeks to increase awareness about the complementary nature of sensemaking and rational decision making. It emphasizes the need to integrate the two in management curricula and provides details on how this can be done via an example of a course implemented at an Australian Business School. The techniques described will also be of interest to practitioners.Originality/valueThe paper describes a practical pedagogy that blends rational decision making and collective sensemaking techniques in a way that fosters managers’ decision making skills in contexts characterized by ambiguity.

Crises Narratives Defining the COVID-19 Pandemic: Expert Uncertainties and Conspiratorial Sensemaking

Experts, news media, and social media commentators struggled to make sense of SARS-CoV-2 January–May 2020 as disease caused by this virus, COVID-19, circulated the globe. This paper represents a longitudinal analysis of the primary narratives produced across expert, media, and social media sources to describe the virus, its phylogenetic origins, and biological effects. High expert uncertainty coupled with amplifying representations of risk across time drove collective sensemaking and conspiratorial narratives.

Sense and sensibility: How CEOs construct meaning through symbols in organizational change

AbstractThis paper investigates the rational and emotional functions of symbols in organizational change and how collective sensemaking and acceptance of organizational changes are facilitated by the emotional functioning of executive symbolism. Evidence from archived data, news reports, reviews, and case studies are used to support our theoretical analysis. Our opinion is that the CEO can incorporate symbols into not only the rational calculation process to convey the benefits and losses of organizational changes but also the emotional identification process to create new emotional connections and reduce the resistance of the members to organizational changes. We describe why and when the implementation of symbolism will gain the acceptance of members toward organizational change and explain the scenarios that apply for the two functions.

Big Data Health Care Innovations: Performance Dashboarding as a Process of Collective Sensemaking.

Big data is poised to revolutionize health care, and performance dashboards can be an important tool to manage big data innovations. Dashboards show the progress being made and provide critical management information about effectiveness and efficiency. However, performance dashboards are more than just a clear and straightforward representation of performance in the health care context. Instead, the development and maintenance of informative dashboards can be more productively viewed as an interactive and iterative process involving all stakeholders. We refer to this process as dashboarding and reflect on our learnings within a large European Union–funded project. Within this project, multiple big data applications in health care are being developed, piloted, and scaled up. In this paper, we discuss the ways in which we cope with the inherent sensitivities and tensions surrounding dashboarding in such a dynamic environment.International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)RR2-10.2196/16779

Sensemaking unraveled: how teachers process school performance feedback data

The present study investigates how Flemish middle school mathematics teachers make sense of schoolperformanfeedback data from low-stakes, external standardised tests. We take an in-depth look into the interpretive steps they take, based on a conceptual model that integrates intuitive and rational aspects of individual and collective sensemaking and empirical data collected in semi-structured interviews. We describe the nature of these sensemaking processes and consider the impact of influencing factors. Our findings demonstrate that the mere availability of school performance feedback data does not spontaneously spark sensemaking, nor does it necessarily lead to improvements in instructionalpractice. Teachers' sensemaking of schoolperformancefeedback data appears to be a largely intuitive process, grounded in external attributions and absent of triangulation. Challenges regarding expertise and lack of inquiry-based attitude and commitment result in superficial and often incorrect interpretations of the data that tend to remain uncorrected as teachers barely engage in collaborative professional dialogue about the data.

Chinese environmental activism and the environmental politics of rumors

Rumors are an important yet poorly understood dynamic in environmental politics, particularly regarding their role in environmental activism. Drawing on theories of rumors, environmental information governance, and environmental activism, we analyzed the eco-politics of rumors in a Chinese village that experienced rumor-fueled protests against the construction and operation of a limestone quarry. We make three arguments regarding the condition, control, and content of rumors. First, poor environmental information governance, driven by a development-first and prejudice-rich official narrative and the strategic behaviors of blame and accountability avoidance, provides an important condition for rumor formulation and circulation. Second, the generation and circulation of rumors can be understood as a collective sense-making process driven by the informal communication between external and internal sources of information. The ephemeral nature of communication and group sanctions on government supporters make it difficult for authorities to control rumors. Third, by conceptualizing rumors as information warfare against official narratives, we show that rumors can foster a sense of collective urgency, reframe a land-right protest into an environmental protest that is politically more likely to succeed, and undermine public trust in local authorities. The findings suggest that rumors are an important part of environmental politics in China because of their role in environmental activism.

Cluster Analysis in Online Learning Communities: A Text Mining Approach

This paper presents a theory-informed blueprint for mining unstructured text data using mixed- and multi-methods to improve understanding of collaboration in asynchronous online discussions (AOD). Grounded in a community of inquiry theoretical framework to systematically combine established research techniques, we investigated how AOD topics and individual reflections on those topics affect the formation of clusters or groups in a community. The data for the investigation came from 54 participants and 470 messages. Data analysis combined the analytical efficiency and scalability of topic modeling, social network analysis, and cluster analysis with qualitative content analysis. The cluster analysis found three clusters and that members of the intermediate cluster (i.e., middle of three clusters) played a pivotal role in this community by expressing uncertainty statements, which facilitated a collective sense-making process to resolve misunderstandings. Furthermore, we found that participants’ selected discussion topics and how they discussed those topics influenced cluster formations. Theoretical, practical, and methodological implications are discussed in depth.

Growing donkey ears: the animal politics of music education

ABSTRACT This article problematizes the view that music education is primarily justified on account of its uniquely humanizing influence. Not only does this general humanist argument clearly fail to convince policy-makers to actually revalidate public music education, but moreover it often seems to rest on highly questionable premises. Without contesting the idea itself that music education can be a humanizing agency, we will try to show that such humanization cannot be achieved without acknowledging music’s inhuman, animal forces. While first this paradox is elaborated through a philosophical reading of the Ancient myth of Midas’s donkey ears, a second part will expand on its implications for the political bearing of music’s contemporary public-educational (ir)relevance. Ultimately, we claim that by paying closer attention to the ways in which music allows animal ‘nonsense’ to disrupt processes of collective human sense-making, we can start thinking of practices of music education that might truly engender a renewed sense of humanity.

Approaching Collectivity Collectively: A Multi-Disciplinary Account of Collective Action.

There has been considerable progress in investigating collective actions in the last decades. However, the real progress is different from what many scholars take it to be. It lies in the fact that there is by now a wealth of different approaches from a variety of fields. Each approach has carved out fruitful mechanisms for explaining collective action, but is also faced with limitations. Given that situation, we submit that the next step in investigating collective action is to acknowledge the plurality of approaches and bring them into dialogue. With this aim in mind, the present article discusses the strengths and weaknesses of some of the to our mind most relevant approaches to collective action in current debates. We begin with the collective intentionality framework, the team reasoning approach, and social identity theory. Then, we move to ecological social psychology, participatory sense-making, and, through the lenses of those frameworks, dynamical systems theory. Finally, we discuss practice theory. Against this background, we provide a proposal for a synthesis of the successful explanatory mechanisms as they have been carved out by the different research programs. The suggestion is, roughly, to understand collective action as dynamical interaction of a self-organizing system with its environment, shaped by a process of collective sense-making.

Systems Sensing and Systemic Constellation for Organizational Transformation

This paper examines how a systems sensing—or felt-sense—approach and orientation to inquiry and systemic constellation practice might help social change organizations cultivate capacities to better navigate complexity, both in their outer-facing work and internal dynamics as teams and as individuals. We present a pilot study of systemic constellation practice, sharing the experience of participants during and after the practice, as well as our own reflexive process. Currently an undertheorized and underutilized approach within systems thinking work, systems sensing and systemic constellation, can reveal less visible but nevertheless foundational dynamics at play in an organizational body, and can help create more awareness through widening ways of knowing in the organizational playground. We explore how the facilitated collective sense-making process of systemic constellation engages subtle ways of knowing specifically energetic, relational, and embodied knowing, building on what Heron and Reason (2008) have called an “extended epistemology.” As we suggest, these more subtle ways of knowing warrant further study, particularly as they may contribute to action research methods and foster a more participatory culture of transformation at both an organizational and societal level.

Sensemaking of University and District Stakeholders in Implementing a Teacher Residency Policy in Louisiana

A growing body of research has identified teacher residency’s potentials for improving and sustaining preservice teacher learning through a stronger district–university partnership. Drawing on sensemaking perspectives on education policy implementation, this qualitative case study examines how a variety of university and district stakeholders make sense of and implement a state-mandated teacher residency in Louisiana. Findings reveal that stakeholders are primarily making sense of the residency in isolation, leading to incoherent understandings and varied implementation practices. Opportunities to improve stakeholders’ collective sensemaking and collaborative implementation and to optimize the benefits and potentials of teacher residency partnerships are discussed. This study has implications for teacher education policy implementation and continuous inquiry into the complexities of teacher preparation.

Remote Portals: Enacting Black Feminisms and Humanization to Disrupt Isolation in Teacher Education

As two Black women teacher educators who contend with the neoliberal expectations of the westernized academy and the material realities of preparing teachers for P-12 contexts, we face the pressures of performing productivity while attempting to ameliorate injustices for multiply-marginalized students (e.g., Black students with disabilities facing economic hardships). Working within predominantly white spaces, we were already socially and intellectually isolated prior to the 2020 pandemic. In this collaborative essay, we articulate how COVID-19 exasperated existing educational and social inequities, yet served as a portal to collective sense-making of our heightened intersectional consciousness, sense of duty to community, and enactments of humanizing pedagogy.

Design thinking implementation for innovation: An organization's journey to ambidexterity

AbstractImplementing design thinking for innovation (DTI) is seen as a way to balance exploration and exploitation, and thus attain an ambidextrous innovation portfolio. Yet, transitioning to ambidexterity is challenging, and is often met with inertia. So how can managers implement DTI as a path toward ambidextrous innovation? In this article, based on an in‐depth longitudinal case study of a leading Australian property development firm and drawing on rich primary and secondary data collected over four years, we examine how middle managers leveraged DTI to respond to inertia generatively, and how this process helped shift the cognitive frame of the organization toward ambidexterity. In our case, the middle manager implemented three DTI practices—(1) creative problem‐solving, (2) sprint execution, and (3) creative confidence— to transition the organization's cognitive frame from an explorative to exploitative, to ultimately an ambidextrous innovation frame. Our argument is that these DTI practices trigger three generative mechanisms—frame flexibility, co‐optation, and collective sensemaking—to support this transition. Drawing on these insights, we develop a process framework of how different DT practices and related generative mechanisms can be deployed flexibly to adapt to the interim (explorative and exploitative) innovation objectives over time. We argue that freezing the innovation frame in each phase can trigger a generative response to inertia, which enables the organization to transition more radically to an ambidextrous innovation portfolio. We thus contribute to the limited design thinking research on the role of cognition in DTI implementation, and more generally to innovation management and ambidexterity research on how leveraging DTI to achieve an ambidextrous innovation portfolio is an emergent and adaptive process.

Rooting out the weeds that bind: Disemboweling the devil after 2020

AbstractYear‐end rituals give arbitrary transitions meaning, facilitate collective mourning or sensemaking, enable closure or catharsis, or, alternatively, their refusal. Through a blend of creative fiction and feminist auto‐ethnography, this essay observes the end of 2020 with a both/and offer: a medium for processing the collective trauma of 2020, the Year of the Bindweed, and an invitation to whimsically imagine the otherwise in the insurgent thallopower of 2021, the Year of the Mushroom. As I strive to uproot its endless twists and turns through 2020, I follow the bindweed's path from Minneapolis to Mars and back as it courses through countless crises named and unnamed only to wind up back in my garden. There I find that this Convolvulus arvensis is deeply rooted in an entangled system of White supremacy, heteropatriarchy, imperialism, and capitalism, regenerating itself with no clear beginning or end to weed out or unravel. Theorizing in “ex‐centric sites” (Harrison 2016), this essay is the compost pile of my ethnographic work on anti‐feminism and right‐wing populism. Drawing allegories from the garden as another way of knowing (Jones 2000), it “centers an embodied feminist ethos” (Berry et al. 2017) in a form fugitive to the conventional modalities of academic theory‐making. [Corrections added on 25 October 2021 after first online publication: The abstract was added to the article.]

Sensemaking and the Chemtrail Conspiracy on the Internet: Insights from Believers and Ex-believers

How do people come to believe conspiracy theories, and what role does the internet play in this process as a socio-technical system? We explore these questions by examining online participants in the "chemtrails" conspiracy, the idea that visible condensation trails behind airliners are deliberately sprayed for nefarious purposes. We apply Weick's theory of sensemaking to examine the role of people's frames (beliefs and worldviews), as well as the socio-technical contexts (social interactions and technological affordances) for processing informational cues about the conspiracy. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with thirteen believers and seven ex-believers, we find that many people become curious about chemtrails after consuming rich online media, and they later find welcoming online communities to support shared beliefs and worldviews. We discuss how the socio-technical context of the internet may inadvertently trap people in a perpetual state of ambiguity that becomes reinforced through a collective sensemaking process. In addition, we show how the conspiracy offers a way for believers to express their dissatisfaction with authority, enjoy a sense of community, and find some entertainment along the way. Finally, we discuss how people's frames and the various socio-technical contexts of the internet are important in the sensemaking of debunking evidence, and how such factors may function in the rejection of conspiratorial beliefs.