Sense-making Practices Research Articles

Theorizing celebrity cultures: Thickenings of media cultures and the role of cultural (working) memory

AbstractThe concept of celebrity culture remains remarkably undertheorized in the literature, and it is precisely this gap that this article aims to begin filling in. Starting with media culture definitions, celebrity culture is conceptualized as collections of sense-making practices whose main resources of meaning are celebrity. Consequently, celebrity cultures are necessarily plural. This approach enables us to focus on the spatial differentiation between (sub)national celebrity cultures, for which the Flemish case is taken as a central example. We gain a better understanding of this differentiation by adopting a translocal frame on culture and by focusing on the construction of celebrity cultures through the ‘us and them’ binary and communities. Finally, it is also suggested that what is termed cultural working memory improves our understanding of the remembering and forgetting of actual celebrities, as opposed to more historical figures captured by concepts such as cultural memory.

Students’ sense-making frames in mathematics lectures

The goal of this study is to describe the various ways students make sense of mathematics lectures. Here, sense-making refers to a process by which people construct personal meanings for phenomena they experience. This study introduces the idea of a sense-making frame and describes three different types of frames: content-, communication-, and situating-oriented. We found that students in an abstract algebra class regularly engaged in sense-making during lectures on equivalence relations, and this sense-making influenced their note-taking practices. We discuss the relationship between the choice of frame, the students’ sense-making practices, and the potential missed opportunities for learning from the lecture. These results show the importance of understanding the ways students make sense of aspects of mathematics lectures and how their sense-making practices influence what they might learn from the lecture.

‘Backroom Boys’: Occupational Dynamics in Crime Scene Examination

Despite a sustained preoccupation with crime scene investigation in policing and instructional literatures, government reviews and media accounts, the crime scene examiner has received scant sociological attention. Focusing on scientific support personnel in an English police force, this article analyses how embedded actors who routinely facilitate the provision of crime scene examination reflect on their role and position in the investigative process. The analysis draws on data collected in a small number of semi-structured interviews with stakeholders at different levels of seniority, in order to map an understanding of the inter and intra-professional interactions, exchanges, dependencies and negotiations employed by those working at the coalface of investigative practice. Hoping to illuminate some of the sense-making practices behind the enactment of forensic activities, the discussion examines the articulation of professional identities and the conclusion reflects more broadly on the processes of professionalisation and discourses of professionalism that accompany standardised forensic accomplishments.

Kültürel kimliklerin çeşitliliği bağlamında özgün bir örnek: “Şavak Aşireti”

As is the case in social sciences, in the literature of Anthropology, too, the beliefs ascribed to “blood tie” outstand as cultural constituents in communities identified with the concept “tribe”. This is, apperantly, true for the tribal structure in Tunceli (Dersim), too. What is more, the tribal structure in Tunceli (Dersim) necessitates a common religious belief (subsumed to blood tie). As for the Savak Tribe, it has been observed that there exist different languages and religious beliefs. Through this article diverse sense-making practices, identity and culture relations shaped around the distinct religious beliefs and languages of Savak communities- living in the rural Tunceli (Dersim) and characterized with nomadic husbandry- has been anthropologically scrutinized

Language learner stories and imagined identities

In seeking to better understand English language learners and their imagined identities, which is the central focus of our article, scholars have drawn extensively on the work of Norton and colleagues. This work has foregrounded the language learner as a participating social agent with complex and changing identities. It is this agentive sense of self that is linked, in narratives, to larger socio-cultural and historical social practices. Our interest here lies particularly in the effects of migration on language learners. With this in mind, we advocate that classroom communities be fostered wherein a range of narrative identities, as sense-making practices, are respectfully harnessed as resources for learners of diverse linguistic histories, to create more socially just and responsive “possible worlds”.

Sens, objets et stratégie en pratiques dans un projet immobilier

Les pratiques de construction de sens sont au cœur de l’elaboration de la strategie des organisations. Dans le cas d’une gestion par projets, cette construction collective de sens s’appuie sur l’utilisation d’objets. Les auteurs proposent ici une heuristique integrative permettant d’analyser les pratiques a l’œuvre dans un projet immobilier. Leurs resultats contribuent a une meilleure connaissance des microfondations de la strategie et du sensemaking.

Leadership, Identity, and Ethics

This special issue of Journal of Business Ethics focuses on the interactions between leadership, ethics and identity. A substantial literature is developing centered on ethics and morality in work organizations. In recent times, critical attention has focused on how identities are best conceived and researched, the discursive resources that are drawn on in processes of identity construction, and how identities are embedded in relations of power. A much larger and longer established management and organization studies literature exists which has theorized and explored empirically aspects of leadership. However, surprisingly, little attention has been devoted to how notions of ‘‘leadership,’’ ‘‘ethics,’’ and ‘‘identity’’ are connected conceptually or in practice. This is an important gap that our special issue seeks to address. In studying how ethics are embedded in leadership and identity issues, we gain a better understanding of basic sensemaking practices of organizational actors involved in ‘‘leading’’ and ‘‘following,’’ and of how identity issues are bound-up with the desire to become a leader, the style that a leader adopts, influence strategies used, and use of power. In this issue, we aim equally at scholars whose principal interest is ‘‘ethics and leadership,’’ ‘‘ethics and identity,’’ and ‘‘identity and leadership’’. Leadership, Ethics, and Identity

A Date with Science and Religion: An Analysis of the Encoding & Decoding Practices at the Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit in Charlotte, North Carolina

Museums are sites of contested meaning that bring together artifacts of the other with the sense-making practices of patrons. The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit in Charlotte, North Carolina exemplifies a similar struggle as patrons negotiate between appeals to the authority of science and appeals to the authority of the Bible. Our analysis demonstrates that religion—rather than class struggle—permeates the encoding and decoding practices there. This struggle is exacerbated in part because of the religious nature of the arti-facts on display; and also because when read as a text, the site's latent discourse reinforces the collective belief among many Evangelical Christians in the accuracy of the Bible. Furthermore, the exhibit's public relations campaign, its layout and design, and the predominantly Christian background of its guests coalesce to amplify a sense of the numinous.

How Tongans Make Sense of the (Non-) Use of Lexical Honorifics

So many different kinds of understandings about language have been analyzed under the rubric of language ideology that the time is past due for some distinctions among these kinds to be made. In this paper I identify two different kinds of realizations of Tongan language ideology about the use of lexical honorifics. I describe how Tongans make sense of past situations where, from their point of view, lexical honorifics “should” have been used, but weren't. I argue that Tongan sense-making practices constitute a phenomenological metapragmatics that has properties distinct from those of normative language ideology about honorific use in Tonga. I offer this paper as a tribute to Jane Hill's contribution to the study of honorifics and their place in language ideologies through her research with Mexicano (Nahuatl) speakers in Mexico.

Making sense of domestic violence intervention in professional health care

Intervening in domestic violence in the health care and social service settings is a complex and contested issue. In this qualitative, multidisciplinary study, the barriers to but also the possibilities for health care professionals in encountering victims of violence were scrutinised. The focus was on omissions in service structure and practices. The data consisted of six focus group interviews with nurses, physicians, social workers and psychologists in specialist health care (n = 30) conducted in Finland in 2009. The aim was to explore professionals' processes of making sense of violence interventions and the organisational practices of violence interventions. Four types of framing of the domestic violence issue were identified: (i) practical frame, (ii) medical frame, (iii) individualistic frame and (iv) psychological frame. Each frame consisted of particular features relating to explaining, structuring or dismissing the question of domestic violence in health care settings. The main themes included the division of responsibilities and feasibility of treatment. All four frames underlie the tendency for healthcare professionals to arrive at sense-making practices where it is possible to focus on fixing the injuries and consequences of domestic violence and bypassing the issue of violence as the cause of symptoms and injuries. The results indicate that developing successful practices both in identifying survivors of domestic violence and in preventing further victimisation requires a broad understanding of the effects of domestic violence and the challenges for health care professionals in dealing with it. New perspectives are needed in creating adequate practices both for victims of violence seeking help and for professionals working with this issue. Strong support at the organisational level and established practices throughout the fields of health and social care are the key elements in building a responsible approach to domestic violence.

Making Sense Under a Midnight Sun

This essay analyzes the sense-making practices at work in directing a Russian–American youth arts program that included 2 weeks in Russia, and the production of a documentary film about that program. Both the filmmaker and the transdisciplinary art program director examine together their efforts to make sense of the event as their expectations for it collapse. We explore ways the creative practices of our disciplines shape our sense making and structure how we understand success, failure, and art. We trace how our experience both eludes sense and makes sense, and seek to reflect the provisional, incomplete, and emergent status of both our collaboration and our experiences of sense making. We struggle with the impulse that knowledge must be tamed and stabilized by narrative to be theoretically productive, and we suggest that the processes of thoughtfully and creatively contextualizing lived experiences have knowledge-value that exceeds the “success” or “failure” of their expression in conventional forms.

Philanthropic Soldiers, Practical Orientalism, and the Occupation of Iraq

This article discusses the ways in which white, male, United States soldiers make sense of both themselves and Iraqi others. Drawing from qualitative interviews with twenty-four said soldiers from southern Indiana, most of whom having deployed to Iraq, it is shown how these soldiers perform gendered and racialized Orientalist discourses to rationalize United States empire and in particular the military occupation of Iraq. Specifically, imperialist discourses that imagine a superior “us” and an inferior “them” and understand United States state violence as ultimately a Western humanitarian “rescue” are shown to be powerful cultural logics in the sense-making practices of the interviewed soldiers. This article then is concerned with what others have called “practical Orientalism”—or the ways in which formal and official Orientalist discourses are adopted by everyday actors.

The role of gestures in the mathematical practices of those who do not see with their eyes

In this paper, we aim to contribute to the discussion of the role of the human body and of the concrete artefacts and signs created by humankind in the constitution of meanings for mathematical practices. We argue that cognition is both embodied and situated in the activities through which it occurs and that mathematics learning involves the appropriation of practices associated with the sets of artefacts that have historically come to represent the body of knowledge we call mathematics. This process of appropriation involves a coordination of a variety of the semiotic resources—spoken and written languages, mathematical representation systems, drawings, gestures and the like—through which mathematical objects and relationships might be experienced and expressed. To highlight the connections between perceptual activities and cultural concepts in the meanings associated with this process, we concentrate on learners who do not have access to the visual field. More specifically, we present three examples of gesture use in the practices of blind mathematics students—all involving the exploration of geometrical objects and relationships. On the basis of our analysis of these examples, we argue that gestures are illustrative of imagined reenactions of previously experienced activities and that they emerge in instructional situations as embodied abstractions, serving a central role in the sense-making practices associated with the appropriation of mathematical meanings.

Learning in the contingency of talk-in-interaction

This article offers a critical examination of the recent initiative that considers developmental issues to be an important agenda in CA-based studies (Brouwer and Wagner, Journal of Applied Linguistics 1: 29–47, 2004; Firth and Wagner, Modern Language Journal 91: 800–819, 2007). This initiative seems to take a narrower view of learning than what natural interactional details in CA studies allow us to see. Spoken interactions are not always stable enough to demarcate the objects of learning for theoretical predictions or pedagogical prescriptions, particularly when seen in reference to contingent pragmatic actions enacted in discourse-in-interaction. The contingency of interaction has to be treated as central if we want to recover learning as the participants experience it. This paper proposes that if the contingency of interactional details is treated as being analytically central, CA research can still tell us very useful things about the phenomena of learning because it can recover the participants' contingent sense-making practices through which the task of learning is discovered, acted on, and realized. This point is demonstrated through a close analysis of two excerpts from English as Second Language (ESL) classroom interaction.

Real-time interaction and sense-making practices

Real-time interaction and sense-making practices

Can Ethnographic Techniques Tell Us Distinctive Things About World Politics?

Iver Neumann's paper on speech-writing practices in the Norwegian foreign ministry, besides presenting a fascinating glimpse of a side of official political action that we scholars don't often see, implicitly raises a broader methodological question: can ethnographic techniques tell us distinctive things about world politics? What is the benefit of pursuing an ethnographic approach to IR research? To begin with, we should distinguish between ethnographic methods and ethnography as a form of interpretive methodology . Methods are techniques for the collection of data, while methodology deals with how epistemological and ontological considerations are incorporated into the research process (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2002:459–460). “Ethnography” conventionally implies both a method and a methodology: the method of participant-observation, and the methodology of endeavoring to make sense of how others make sense of the world (Geertz 2000:56–58). The two are linked, of course. The methodological goal of abandoning attempts to account for the world “as it really is in itself” in favor of a focus on sense-making practices—a goal which stems from a philosophical rejection of both the mind-body duality and the correspondence theory of truth—calls for some kind of data collection technique that respects the involvement of the researcher in and with the object researched (Jackson 2006). But it is …

“Put on a Jacket, You Wuss”: Cultural Identities, Home Heating, and Air Pollution in Christchurch, New Zealand

Central heating, insulation, and double glazing, such as you might find in many countries with colder climates in the northern hemisphere, are virtually lacking in Christchurch, in New Zealand's South Island. In this city, houses tend to be inadequately heated and rely primarily on a combination of open fires, log burners, and electrical heaters. This form of home heating, combined with local climatic and topographical factors, results in high levels of wintertime air pollution. While much research has been conducted into the air-pollution problem in Christchurch to date, this research has focused on physical contaminants and their effects on health, rather than on the ways in which air pollution is socially and culturally mediated and on the sense-making practices of those who create pollution and suffer its effects. Based on information drawn from focus groups, we argue that reluctance to change behaviour results partly from investments in particular cultural identities which are tied into hegemonic masculinities and understandings of national identity, such as the masculine pioneer heritage established during the colonial period. We also explore the spatial relationships that air pollution plays out within and on the ‘body’ and how it transcends and weakens the bounded body. We believe that analyses which draw on theories of hybridisation, embodiment, identity, and discourse, and which highlight the links between modes of behaviour, identity and sense of place, and the interactions between humans and nonhumans, are able to shed new light on our understandings of public perceptions and responses to air pollution in Christchurch.

Turning Points: Using Teachers’ Mathematics Life Stories to Understand the Implementation of Mathematics Education Reform

In this study, teachers’ narrative descriptions of themselves as learners and teachers of mathematics were used to understand teachers’ interpretations and implementations of a reform-oriented mathematics curriculum. Twenty elementary school teachers’ mathematics life stories were categorized into six types, based on teachers’ descriptions of both their early experiences with mathematics and their current perceptions of themselves as mathematics learners and teachers. The focus in this article is on the sense-making practices (noticing, interpreting, implementing) of teachers who told turning-point stories – those stories in which the teachers initially experienced significant failures in mathematics, but, as the result of a turning-point experience, now view themselves positively as both learners and teachers of mathematics. The importance of both the turning-point story and the particular meanings teachers attribute to this story for understanding teachers’ specific practices in the context of reform are detailed here, followed by implications for curriculum design.

Reflexivity, description and the analysis of social settings

The concept of .reflexivity. has become an often-intoned mantra in contemporary social science, particulary, perhaps, sociology. This article, however, argues that the .blanket use. of .reflexivity. glosses over and confuses many different actual definitions and understandings of the concept - not least because the concept operates differently as a move within each of the divergent analytic .games. that compose the overall discipline. One (among many other) crucial distinctions is that between .stipulative. and .essential. reflexivity - the former originating in part in G.H.Mead.s notions of the .I. and the .Me., and extended within current theories of reflexive modernity. This concept has been wrenched by professional social scientist from its mundane moorings and has been .elevated. into an analytic technique of self interrogation. By contrast, .essential. reflexivity, as adduced by ethnomethodological sociologists, remains resolutely emplaced in the domain of lay society-members. ordinary sense-making practices: it here refers to the reciprocal, back-and-forth determinations of sense of members. mundane descriptions of their specific circumstances and of the circumstances they describe - description and circumstance reflect upon each other during the sense-making practices. A brief example of essential reflexivity is given- reflexive formulations in ordinary conversations. Keywords: reflexivity, description, ethnomethodology.

Resourceful Sensemaking in an Administrative Group

ABSTRACT In this study, we present the concept of resourceful sensemaking as an extension of Weick's sensemaking theory. Resourceful sensemaking extends Weick's theory by carefully examining the influence of the lifeworld on organizational sensemaking practices. Lifeworld factors that affect organizational sensemaking are brought out in a dialectical method wherein a working definition of the resourceful sensemaking concept is compared with the sensemaking practices of an administrative group. We then show how this dialectical method can help develop a more robust formulation of the resourceful sensemaking concept. The paper ends by discussing the strengths and shortcomings of the concept and suggesting directions for future organizational sensemaking research.