Critical Sensemaking Research Articles

Towards Critical Justice: Exploring Intersectionality in Community-based STEM-rich Making with Youth from Non-dominant Communities

ABSTRACTWe investigated how community ethnography as a pedagogy approach to STEM-rich making supported youth makers from two low-income urban communities engaged in sustained STEM-rich making towards making a difference in their communities. Data is drawn from two-year long ethnographic data across two community-based, youth making programs. We highlight two cases. Case # 1 focuses on one African American girl's making endeavors across one school year. Case # 2 looks at how two youth engaged in critical sense-making with regards to the currently available how-to making resources they could locate online. We discuss how these pedagogical moves supported the youth in making towards a more just future in ways that addressed intersecting scales of injustice.

Making sense from the in-between state

PurposeThis paper sets out to understand how immigrants to Canada (specifically Hong Kong immigrants) deal with competing senses of their situation in deciding how or whether to adjust to their new environment. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the “in-between state” of mind where individuals try to manage competing senses of their experiences in Canada.Design/methodology/approachThe authors draw on critical sensemaking (CSM) in the study of the micro-processes of identity work at play among a group of 19 Hong Kong Chinese skilled immigrants to Canada.FindingsThe study’s findings indicate that immigrant experiences are often filtered through the competing sensemaking of the immigrants themselves and those of the so-called “host” community. As the study of Hong Kong immigrants suggests, this can lead to confused and compromised experiences of being an immigrant in the Canadian context.Research limitations/implicationsThe study was confined to immigrants to Canada from Hong Kong. Further study of different immigrant groups may throw light on the extent to which competing sensemaking is related to cultural differences that affect not only the distance in understanding but the management of that distance.Practical implicationsThe paper contributes to the diversity management literature and practice through understanding immigrants’ identity construction and its oscillations, influences, and restrictions as agency in context.Social implicationsThe paper helps diversity managers, policy makers, and social activists to understand the role of sensemaking when providing social and structural support in workplace contexts.Originality/valueThe study reveals the importance of sensemaking in the experiences of immigrants to Canada. In particular, it broadens knowledge of the problems of adjusting to a new (national) environment from structural constraints to micro-processes of making sense. In the process, the study of the management of competing senses of an environment contributes to the development of CSM with the focus on, what we call, the state of in-betweeness.

Writing out praise: Air Canada employees and the 1968 CEO change

AbstractIn 1968, the Air Canada CEO was an individual from outside the airline industry, when previously all CEOs had been former airline pilots for the organization. In investigating why, the union writings of Air Canada, a large Crown corporation, make no reference to this 1968 CEO change. I examine how the values, beliefs, and ideas of employees affect the development of an organization's written histories. I apply actor network theory, sensemaking, critical sensemaking, and theories of “writing out” to expose and develop the concept of the noncorporeal actant as a critical influence within a network and in the writing of histories. Copyright © 2016 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The institutionalisation of restorative justice in schools: a critical sensemaking account

ABSTRACTIn this paper we use a case study to describe how one school successfully implemented restorative justice (RJ). We ask: how do teachers and administrators make sense of a shift from traditional discipline to RJ? How might their sensemaking process affect whether a shift toward RJ is sustainable? We answer these questions by drawing on critical sensemaking—a set of heuristics designed to map social-psychological processes underlying organisational change. Our findings affirm that RJ in schools cannot be mandated as a policy change or implemented through training in practices isolated from changes in organisational rules and formative context. In the language of critical sensemaking, implementing RJ as a programme or set of tools will not ‘make sense’ to teachers. In contrast, the approach at St Catherine’s school leveraged specific sensemaking properties in a way that allowed the change process to become empowering, develop from the ground up and generate radical change in the school.

Stimulating tensions in special education teachers' figured world: an approach toward inclusive education

ABSTRACTI examine special educators’ professional identity emergence and tensions within a researcher-facilitated teacher learning community. I introduced tools to evoke and challenge inequities in educational systems and via which participants examined and planned general education instruction for students with dis/abilities. Initially, professional identity, or figured world, emerged as performance of pathologising and relatedly, remediating students. Over time, participants expressed tensions as they engaged tools to examine structural limitations and design more universally accessible instruction; figured worlds shifted to critical sense-making about their positioning by general education colleagues and school structural barriers, and procedural identity performance tied to investigating student assets. Findings suggest potential for purposefully designed artefacts to mediate special educators’ development as (more) inclusive educators.

Making critical sense of discriminatory practices in the Canadian workplace

Purpose – This paper aims to report on a preliminary study of how professionally qualified immigrants from Hong Kong to Canada make sense of their experiences, particularly workplace opportunities. Design/methodology/approach – The study is framed by a Critical Sensemaking approach, involving in-depth interviews with 12 informants from the Hong Kong Chinese community and discursive analysis (Foucault, 1979) of the local and formative contexts in which they are making sense of workplace opportunities. Findings – The findings suggest that a dominant discourse of “integration” strongly influences the way that professionally qualified immigrants come to accept the unchallenged assumptions that the government is providing help for them to “get in”; and that ethnic service organizations are offering positive guidance to the immigrants’ workplace goals and opportunities. Immigrants’ identity and self-worth are measured by whether they “get in” – integrate – into so-called mainstream society. The effect of this hidden discourse has been to marginalize some immigrants in relation to workplace opportunities. Research limitations/implications – The interplay of structural (i.e. formative contexts and organizational rules), socio-psychological (i.e. sensemaking properties) and discursive contexts (e.g. discourses of immigration) are difficult to detail over time. The interplay – although important – is difficult to document and trace over a relatively short period of time and may, more appropriately lend itself to more longitudinal research. Practical implications – This paper strongly suggests that we need to move beyond structural accounts to capture the voice and agency of immigrants. In particular, as we have tried to show, the sensemaking and sensemaking contexts in which immigrants find themselves provide important insights to the immigrant experience. Social implications – This paper suggests widespread policy implications, with a call for greater use of qualitative methods in the study of immigrant experience. It is suggested that policymakers need to move beyond uniform and structural approaches to immigration. How selected immigrants in context make sense of their experiences and how this can help to identify improved policies need to be understood. Originality/value – This paper is original in going beyond both structural and psychological accounts of immigration. Through the developing method of Critical Sensemaking, the study combines a focus on structure and social psychology and their interplay. Thus, providing insights not only to the broad discriminatory practices that so-called non-White immigrants face in Canada (and likely other industrial societies) but how these are made sense of. The study is also unique in attempting to fuse sensemaking and discourse analysis to show the interaction between individual sensemaking in the context of dominant discourses.

Play on the mother-ground: children’s games in rural Odisha

In rural northern Odisha, children’s outdoor peer play is a pervasive, though barely considered, form of village activity. This essay foregrounds elementary school-aged children’s play as a form of social interaction with landscapes. Specifically, it examines how children at play develop embodied experience and knowledge of place vis-à-vis adult constructions of space and place. The article draws on ethnographic research with children from paddy cultivator and forester families to answer questions around how the village environment and its core resources and symbolic motifs shape play and how peer play shapes children’s sense of their environment. Earth, or soil, for instance, was found to have a central place in both adult-determined productive and symbolic spheres, as well as in children’s imaginative play and games, highlighting connections between the symbolic motifs of a wider spatial context and the internal spatiality of children’s play. As well as a site of symbolic continuity, children’s play was found to be both an index and a site of transformation within Odishan villages. First, as environments change, so do the central motifs and resources with which children play – for play is foremost an exercise of adaptive flexibility. Second, games were found to provide rural young people with an open-ended context within which to develop their own peer responses to their social and spatial circumstances through dialogues, arguments, embodied exchanges and critical sense-making, which accompany their play. These, in turn, impact and transform local spatial contexts, by imbibing them with generational significances. The study raises important questions for further research into the play-environment connection.

Making Sense from the In-Between State:Immigrants’ Identity Work & the Macro-Processes of Resistance

This paper explores, the ‘in-between state,’ where the sensemaker tries to manage competing senses of a situation. We draw on the poststructural methodology of critical sensemaking (CSM) in the stu...

Immigrant Professionals, Microaggressions, and Critical Sensemaking in the U.S. Workplace

This study uses the frameworks of microaggressions and critical sensemaking (CSM) to examine the work realities of immigrant professionals (IPs) in the United States, a context rarely explored in organizational communication research. Findings indicate that IPs experience verbal, attitudinal, and professional microaggressions stemming from their ethnic/national group membership, which they make sense of by using critical discursive strategies; rationalizing, creating alternative selves, and taking ownership/blaming self. Theoretical insights provided by the frameworks and practical implications highlight the contributions of this study.

Telling tales out of school: Sensemaking and narratives of legitimacy in an organizational change process

Summary In this study we take a critical sensemaking approach to investigate organizational narratives of change at a Canadian community college to show how individuals make sense of the change process. In particular, we draw upon the property of plausibility to show how the president and CEO of the college legitimized the change narratives by drawing on rhetorical strategies of legitimation, which resonated with sensemakers in the organization. As plausibility is enhanced through legitimation, individuals in the organization become engaged in a sensemaking process, which resonates with their experiences and organizational identity. We contend that the organizational narratives constructed through this sensemaking process reflect a legitimation of plausible meaning. Plausibility emerges in this case study as a critical element in the sensemaking process, and highlights the importance of narrative practices of legitimation in sensemaking around organizational change.

Sense-making and actor networks: the non-corporeal actant and the making of an Air Canada history

This paper contributes to critical organizational historiography and the development of ANTi-History through analysis of the history of a major event in the development of Air Canada. We contend that an important gap in ANTi-History is the explanation of the point where decisions occur (i.e. understandings of the micro-processes involved in enrollment, network establishment and the production of knowledges of the past). To deal with the lacuna, we draw on insights from Critical Sense-making in the performance of our historical analysis – undertaken through a seven-step process of moves. We identify not only the need to understand the role of sense-making in network formation and the production of knowledges of the past, but also the role of actants that transcend human and nonhuman actors in influencing behavior (i.e. non-corporeal actants).

Sensemaking the Small Business Credit Crunch: The Network of Recession and Barriers to Recovery

In this paper we use Critical Sensemaking and Actor-Network Theory to apply business anthropology to the lending of money to small business, the financial crisis, the recession and possible recovery. A plausible link between fear of becoming a lender who made a substantial mistake (as the mortgage lenders pre-2008 have been characterized) and unwillingness to lend is described. Statistical evidence of low levels of lending has been interrelated with extensive narrative and discourse analysis of the text of small business persons, entrepreneurs, lenders, pundits and reports on the economic crisis. A theory of prospective sensemaking is described from the actions of bank officers and the surrounding discourse.

Making sense of the Latin American “other”: executive women in Argentina

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the critical management literature through a fusion of Latin and North American lenses (one author is from Argentina and one from Canada), to question the extant women in management literature, which is rooted in an epistemology that serves to construct the notion of a broad, universal set of expectations of the role of men, women and managers, in which other ethnic groups, in this case men and women from so-called Latin American countries, are taken for granted.Design/methodology/approach– Using a critical sensemaking lens, the paper explores the narratives of female executives in Argentina to help us understand how these women make sense of their careers within a Latin American context and the implications and outcomes of this understanding. The paper's approach involves three interrelated elements – feminist poststructuralism, postcolonialism and critical sensemaking.Findings– The narratives from the Argentinian executives reveals the tension between different cultures and idiosyncrasies among countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico; and that the way to navigate those differences entails understanding and learning about the other. These executive women from Argentina – las jefas – are heard mainly because they represent the managerial identity that multi-national corporations foster in any overseas branch.Research limitations/implications– In terms of the data used in this study, the paper acknowledges that this is an exploratory study that allows us to access women's stories from a pre-existing source. The paper recognizes that the authors are limited by the texts that are secondary sources, and if the authors had been able to conduct the interviews themselves they might have asked different questions.Practical implications– The findings of this research can help organizations to develop and implement a pluriversal and inclusive equity training programme through and awareness of the sensemaking of those involved.Originality/value– The use of a critical framework on postcolonialism, feminism and postructuralism together with critical sensemaking to understand female executives from the South of America.

Stop ‘helping’ me! Identity, recognition and agency in the nexus of work and care

This article explores what it is like to be a ‘working carer’—that increasingly common category of employee who combines paid work with unpaid care.1 We draw on phenomenology for our initial motivation, epistemological assumptions and method of data analysis, and on critical sensemaking as a template for interpretation and theorization. In line with critical sensemaking, we see identity as a central feature of personhood, and we examine our participants’ identity work through the specific refractions of plausibility, context and agency. These highlight the inconsistencies and oscillations of identity work, and the ways in which it is influenced by competing discourses of the right kind of employee and the right kind of woman. We foreground the existential aspects of sensemaking, as participants struggle to come to terms with the impact of care on their own life-projects and search for meaning. This reflects our belief that experiential approaches to work-related issues have a vital part to play in a ‘turn to meaning’ in critical organizational research. Key implications for practitioners and campaigners are discussed, and policy makers urged to address the issue of working carer identification, recognition and support with greater sensitivity to the label’s psychological and existential implications.

Reading between the lines: gender, work and history

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the role of history in the creation of gender dynamics at work.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on an ANTi‐history – which draws on actor‐network theory (ANT) – and critical sensemaking framework, the authors analyze a written history of a teachers' union to examine how historically contextualized networks of actors shape notions of gender.FindingsThe findings support the notion of history as socially constructed story telling, which serves to shape rather than describe gendered relations at work.Research limitations/implicationsThe research is limited to archival materials as the participants are not available as direct informants. Archives by their nature are incomplete and some accounts are summaries.Practical implicationsUnderstanding the socially constructed role of history will help management educators and practitioners to examine historical accounts as part of the problem of gendered relations. The paper reinforces the notion that understanding of discrimination may be lost as power imbalances are written out of historical accounts in the attempt to be politically correct.Originality/valueThe paper's contribution to research lies in its application of new methods of historical analysis (namely, ANTi‐history and critical sensemaking) and a focus on history as a powerful sensemaking device that shapes on‐going sensemaking.

Making sense of sensemaking: the critical sensemaking approach

– The purpose of this paper is to revisit the oft cited but as yet not operationalized Weick's sensemaking framework, in order to provide suggested ways forward. Development of a method based on Weick's sensemaking is suggested as a starting point for a heuristic that takes into account missing elements from his original model while operationalizing (critical) sensemaking as an analytical tool for understanding organizational events., – Following the trajectory of sensemaking, the limitations of Weick's model were discussed (i.e. failure to address power and context) and the critical sensemaking was developed as a method that takes into account agency in context. Empirical studies that apply sensemaking were discussed., – It is concluded that plausibility and identity construction are key to understanding how some voices are heard over others and through critical sensemaking sense that can be made of such phenomena as the gendering or organizational culture and discriminatory practices in organizations., – A heuristic can help people to understand the socio‐psychological properties involved in behavioural outcomes., – Critical sensemaking builds on and operationalizes Weick's original sensemaking approach and demonstrates how it can be used in a range of empirical studies, something that Weick himself suggested was lacking.

Workplace spirituality, contested meaning, and the culture of organization

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to contribute to existing critiques of workplace spirituality and organizational culture. The paper links the two by problematising definitions of workplace spirituality that employ a “culture approach” to change, in which the construct is limited to a set of values that gives particular meaning to the workplace.Design/methodology/approachProperties of Weick's sensemaking model combined with a critical sensemaking approach are used to analyze texts in order to show how a spiritual culture may shape the actions of its members by serving as an implicit form of managerial control.FindingsThe paper reveals how some texts, Mitroff and Denton's, in particular, advocate workplace spirituality as necessary for organizations and the individuals who work in them to prosper. Simultaneously, such texts may imply a form of pastoral power, the purpose of which is to re‐affirm a positive self‐image, due to the cueing effects of language that is voiced in specific contexts.Practical implicationsThe paper suggests that a cultural approach to understanding workplace spirituality influences how people can make sense of the organization in which they are members. The potential inordinate reverence of work and one's contribution toward enhanced organizational performance is of interest to all members of organizations because it highlights how control is achieved.Originality/valueThe paper offers some insights into the conditions that promulgate the linkage between work and spiritual fulfilment, and it promotes the continuing development of critical spirituality in organizations in order to overcome the potential managerial instrumentality that is highlighted in this paper.

Change, talk and sensemaking

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on the change experience of a regional health centre that was merged in the late 1990s and shows how organizational talk becomes privileged in the change process, and how some talk becomes meaningful in the constitution of organizational identity.Design/methodology/approach – The paper analyzes the process through which some talk is privileged in the organizational change process. The deconstruction of language used throughout this analysis highlights the relationship between sites of power and the ability to affect sensemaking among organizational members. Using a post‐structuralist approach, the authors apply the analytic framework of critical sensemaking (CSM) and critical discourse analysis.Findings – Organizational talk is presented as the enactment of a sensemaking process and insights are offered into the process of how organizational identities are maintained, altered or constrained during change. The discursive effects of the language of change, inc...

“I Just Say I’m in Advertising”: A Public Relations Identity Crisis?

This study uses a critical sensemaking approach and draws upon role identity theory to explore individual understandings of the public relations identity. Public relations practitioners are asked to share their own sensemaking about their professional identities within the context of negative societal perceptions of the field.

Organizational Change and Representations of Women in a North American Utility Company

Using a critical sensemaking approach, this article explores the process that leads to the formation of different types of masculinity over time. In particular it looks at organizational change programmes, the subsequent representation of organizational men and women in corporate documents and the consequences this has on the gendering of organizational culture. Annual reports from a North American electrical company, Nova Scotia Power, which underwent significant changes between 1972–2001, are used to show how the company's masculinist cultures were reflected in company policies and portrayed in the images and text in these documents. The focus of this article is on how strategic change programmes influenced different notions of masculinity over time, how these understandings were enacted through organizational policies, how this identity was (unconsciously) portrayed in images and text and what effects this had on the gendering of organizational culture.