Sensemaking Lens Research Articles

Influencing others to prevent hospitality food waste: The reception of food waste messages by hospitality employees

Hospitality employees play a crucial role in food waste prevention, yet there is little understanding of how employees can influence the way food waste is thought about and dealt with within their workplace. To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 UK hospitality actors, including frontline employees, managers and business owners to understand how they influence others, and have been influenced by others, to prevent food waste. We analyse the data through a sensemaking lens, which shows that food waste messages are received and made sense of instantly, or with delay due to exposure over time, or when the time is right. This reception process is active or passive, and congruent or incongruent, which has implications for whether food waste messages are understood as intended and the behavioural outcomes of the reception process. Developing a more comprehensive understanding of how food waste messages are received, understood and enacted has implications for food waste communications and how hospitality actors can influence the way food waste is thought about and dealt with within their workplace.

Understanding content dissemination on sensemaking: WHO’s social listening strategy on X during the initial phase of COVID-19

Abstract Purpose Guided by the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication model (CERC, Reynolds and Seeger 2005. Crisis and emergency risk communication as an integrative model. Journal of Health Communication 10(1). 43–55.), the present study aimed to study how X (formerly Twitter) users sensemaking and efficacy based message. Additionally, the study also aimed to understand how the World Health Organization (WHO) responded to the emerging conversation. Methods Unsupervised machine learning was conducted on 6.1 million tweets between January and March 2020 to understand sensemaking about COVID-19 among X users. Additionally, content analysis was used to examine if the World Health Organization (WHO) responded to popular emerging conversations via content on their own X handle. Findings The majority of dominant topics in COVID-19 tweets from January to March 2020 related to understanding the virus and the crisis it caused. X users tried to make sense of their surroundings and re-create their familiar world by framing events. Content analysis revealed that WHO engaged in effective social listening and responded quickly to dominant X conversations to help people make sense of the situation. Practical Implications The initial stage of COVID-19 pandemic was marked with uncertainty. However, WHO had a robust communication strategy and addressed the dominant conversation during the time frame including debunking misinformation. Originality/Value The present study fills the research gap by situating the themes in the context of the health crisis and extending the CERC model to user-generated content via the lens of sensemaking and efficacy messages during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the study segmented the timelines into smaller time intervals to understand how sensemaking evolved over time.

“Students Really Benefited From That Hybridization”: Facilitated Sensemaking in a No‐Excuses Charter Network

ABSTRACTThis ethnographic cross‐case study examines five teachers' year‐long efforts to implement practice‐based physics instruction within the unique organizational context of a no‐excuses charter network. The teachers were attempting to adapt their didactic, rigid, and compliance‐based instructional approach to include more opportunities for students to figure out disciplinary concepts through evidence and consensus. To assist in these efforts, teachers partnered with a university‐based physics education program to redesign the network's coherent instructional infrastructure. The program provided curricular materials aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards, facilitated professional learning sessions, and assisted with instructional coaching before and during the 2018–2019 school year. Researchers collected ethnographic field notes and artifacts during professional learning sessions, partnership meetings, and bi‐weekly lesson observations of case teachers. They also conducted interviews with teachers and students. An organizational sensemaking lens was used to analyze data and informed the production of ethnographic case profiles, vignettes, and cross‐case comparisons. Findings included the constraints and affordances of a coherent instructional infrastructure for facilitating teacher sensemaking. Hybridized instructional practices also emerged across case teachers' classrooms as products of facilitated sensemaking. Implications for supporting teachers in fitting novel instructional approaches to their organizational contexts are discussed. This paper is part of the special issue on Teacher Learning and Organizational Contexts.

Addressing the elephant in the room: How do we understand value for money in transport Public Private Partnerships?

Value for Money (VfM) is often considered the criterion for assessing whether Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), or the traditional procurement should be adopted to deliver infrastructure projects and their services. Yet, this decision is mostly focussed on whichever approach that embodies a lower cost while neglecting the value it can bring to projects. Addressing this elephant in the room, a set of interviews with highly experienced professionals (with an average of 23-year working experience in infrastructure procurement) were conducted to engender an in-depth understanding of VfM. Through the lens of sensemaking, our results empirically demonstrated the duality of VfM in the context of transport projects instead of the previous foci on cost, time, and quality (i.e., traditional VfM), and further unearthed the nuances when considering them. As such, this research contributes to the PPP body of knowledge by providing a more meaningful concept of VfM. For practitioners and decision makers, it proposes a framework to benchmark their VfM assessments of infrastructure interventions.

Exploring mothers' metaphorical sensemaking of dyslexia.

Through a reflexive thematic analysis of a large online support group for dyslexia and a sensemaking lens, this study investigated how mothers made sense of their child's dyslexia through metaphors. Mothers used metaphors to characterise their feelings surrounding dyslexia, their school-based interactions and their identity as advocates. The language mothers use offers a generative, textured way to understand the lived experiences of supporting a child with learning differences. Whilst mothers articulated much frustration and anger, they also voiced encouragement, advice-giving, empathy and hope, illustrating how their sense of agency was both threatened and empowered by the experience of having a child with dyslexia. There is much mothers must process, understand and navigate surrounding their child's dyslexia and the findings underscore the need for early school-based screening, support and intervention.

The Consequentiality of Absences in Social Settings: A Sensemaking Perspective

Empirical sociology’s focus on ‘things’ follows an Aristotelian legacy that prioritises discreteness and concrete singularities – that which are perceived to exist. In turn, such convention is predicated on an ontology of being and a natural focus on presence – the ubiquitous assumption that reality is ultimately atomistic and substantial. This metaphysical outlook has produced outstanding scholarly results. However, it also overlooks the significance of an alternative absence, a persistent but undetected ‘otherness’ that can affect social outcomes. The study shows how absences shape actionable imperatives in social settings and identifies requisite mechanisms through which social arrangements are enacted. Thus, it joins the burgeoning sociology of nothing, absence and loss and stresses the enactive consequentiality of what is missing through a sensemaking lens.

Making sense of farmland biodiversity management: an evaluation of a farmland biodiversity management communication strategy with farmers

Biodiversity is a valuable resource that supports sustainability within agricultural systems, yet in contradiction to this agriculture is recognised as a contributor to biodiversity loss. Agricultural advisory services are institutions that support sustainable agricultural development, employing a variety of approaches including farmer discussion groups in doing so. This study evaluates the impact of a farmland biodiversity management (FBM) communication strategy piloted within Irish farmer discussion groups. A sensemaking lens was applied in this objective to gain an understanding of how this strategy could create an actionable space for FBM promotion amongst farmers. The strategy was piloted with six Irish dairy farmer discussion groups, after which focus groups were conducted with members of these groups. Additionally, baseline and endline surveys were completed by the members to determine their knowledge, attitude and on-farm practices relating to FBM. Analysis of the focus group data identified that the communication strategy supported the affordance of sensemaking with respect to FBM. Analysis of the data from the baseline and endline surveys relating to knowledge, attitudes and practices found that engaging with the communication strategy promoted farmers to improve their attitude in relation to FBM. Results from this study provide important lessons for agricultural advisory services to support farmers in incorporating FBM into the overall management of their farms and, in turn, to promote the improvement of farmland biodiversity and contribute to a sustainable future.

Comparing AI and student responses on variations of questions through the lens of sensemaking and mechanistic reasoning

Physics education research (PER) shares a rich tradition of designing learning environments that promote valued epistemic practices such as sensemaking and mechanistic reasoning. Recent technological advancements, particularly artificial intelligence has caught significant traction in the PER community due to its human-like, sophisticated responses to physics tasks. In this study, we contribute to the ongoing efforts by comparing AI (ChatGPT) and student responses to a physics task through the cognitive frameworks of sensemaking and mechanistic reasoning. Findings highlight that by virtue of its training data set, ChatGPT’s response provide evidence of mechanistic reasoning and mimics the vocabulary of experts in its responses. On the other hand, half of students’ responses evidenced sensemaking and reflected an effective amalgamation of diagram-based and mathematical reasoning, showcasing a comprehensive problem-solving approach. Thus, while AI responses elegantly reflected how physics is talked about, a part of students’ responses reflected how physics is practiced. In a second part of the study, we presented ChatGPT with variations of the task, including an open-ended version and one with significant scaffolding. We observed significant differences in conclusions and use of representations in solving the problems across both student groups and the task formats.

A Faith-based Entrepreneurial Sensemaking Lens: Empowerment, Risk, and Agency

Starting a business is an endeavour that requires the ability to identify an opportunity, match the necessary resources and manage the uncertainty and risk associated with doing so. Using a qualitative methodology, we explore the role that faith plays in this new venture creation as regards Christian entrepreneurs in South Africa and how it affects their sensemaking process. We find that that their faith influences the entrepreneurial sensemaking process in complex ways and demonstrate the formation of a shared sense of agency between God and the entrepreneur - a paradox of agency. This agency shifts from the entrepreneur in the creation phase to a faith-aligned agency over time, which helps mitigate identity conflict and uncertainty. We demonstrate the dynamics and webs of association between the economic and the social realms both in terms of the initial decision-making process but also the entrepreneurs’ desire for both an economic and social impact.

Premature return of self-initiated expatriates in the spectre of a global crisis: a sensemaking perspective

Global mobility studies have focused on the repatriation of assigned expatriates in multinational organisations overlooking the difficulties that self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) face upon returning home prematurely. Recent converging global crises have demonstrated the precarious and challenging circumstances that SIEs confront when relocating abroad of their own volition without the security and support of an organisation. Applying a sensemaking lens, our qualitative study reveals that a global crisis’s volatile and unpredictable nature triggers a sensemaking process for SIEs on whether to withdraw prematurely or remain on assignment. Specifically, we unpack how, in attempting to put structure on what was a highly complex, anxious, and stressful situation, SIEs engaged in a sensemaking process of enactment, selection, and retention in deciding whether to return home early. This process involved interpreting varying contextual cues and emotions in acute conditions, processing conflicting information from a nexus of sensegiving actors, and engaging retrospectively in reflexive frames. Our findings enrich existing work on the challenges of SIE repatriation by illuminating the utility of crisis sensemaking to understand how SIEs navigate premature withdrawal amid crisis conditions.

Generating value in program alliances: the value of dialogue in large-scale infrastructure projects

Collaboration forms the backbone of program alliances, with the ‘pain-gain share’ regime acting as an incentive to engender behaviours that foster teamwork and trusting relationships to flourish. While dialogue within and between parties in a program alliance has been identified as key to establishing collaboration and trust, there is limited understanding of how it is engendered and maintained to ensure the delivery of superior project outcomes. In filling this void, our paper aims to address the following research question: How does the value of dialogue influence effective collaboration in program alliances? A sense-making lens is adopted to garner an understanding of the value of effective dialogue in two program alliance infrastructure projects. The value and power of dialogue are examined by addressing a recurring problem that negatively impacted the performance of the alliances and their projects: rework. We show that effective dialogue mitigated rework as participants had a shared purpose. Enacting dialogue helped shape the program alliances’ culture and foster an environment where people felt safe to ‘speak up’. This paper’s contributions are 2-fold as we: (1) unearth new value-laden principles to support dialogue in program alliances; and (2) provide empirical evidence for practitioners to help them understand the value of dialogue in delivering a program of infrastructure projects using an alliance delivery strategy.

Hold-Ups and Failures in Negotiated Order: Unearthing the Nuances of Rework Causation in Construction

Despite the significant amount of research undertaken to determine the causes of rework, construction organizations still struggle to mitigate its occurrence. This paper presents research from an ongoing longitudinal study using a sense-making lens to examine rework causation in a transport megaproject. It was observed that rework often emerges as a consequence of hold-ups, which are failures in negotiated order stemming from misunderstandings, misinterpretations, role ambiguity, and breakdowns in communications and interactions between project participants. Rather than adopting a reductionist view of rework causation that focuses on the use of prefixes such as poor, limited, inadequate, and lack of, which abounds in the construction and engineering management literature, this research unearths the nuances associated with errors and rework, enabling a richer understanding of the context within which it manifests in projects. The upshot is that a new theoretical framing is presented to understand better the why and how of rework causation in construction.

Using sensemaking as a lens to assess student learning on corporate social responsibility and sustainability

AbstractPrior literature suggests that teaching corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability has led to little development of students' reflexive engagement with the challenges of sustainable development. To shed light on this criticism, we apply sensemaking—as entailing the three stages of scanning for information, interpreting it and identifying alternatives of action—to CSR/sustainability education. Analysing cognitive maps of CSR, drawn by undergraduate finalists from a UK business school, we find that students are able to produce complex cognitive maps in terms of scanning for information; however, cognitive bottlenecks occur at the second and third stages of sensemaking. A key pedagogical challenge is, therefore, to support students in moving beyond scanning towards developing meaning and acting on that basis. By introducing a sensemaking lens, we add to a deeper understanding of the complexities associated with CSR education as it aids (or impedes) critical engagement and action.

The social organization of errors and the manifestation of rework: learning from narratives of practice

Despite the considerable amount of research that has examined rework causation in construction, it remains an inherent problem that can potentially result in adverse project outcomes. This situation has arisen as studies have tended to ignore the social organization of errors (i.e. the pattern of relationships and social interactions between and among individuals and teams). Instead, studies have adopted a ‘reductionist view’ of rework causation by identifying its proximal and root causes rather than addressing the conditions resulting in its manifestation. This paper uses a case study approach with a sense-making lens to create a series of narratives of rework events that arose while constructing a transport mega-project. By making sense of the context surrounding the error events, it is revealed rework manifests from failures in ‘negotiated order’ which stems from role ambiguity, misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and break-downs in communications and interactions between people and organizations. As a consequence of these findings, their theoretical and practical implications arising from the research are discussed.

When ‘less is more’: The rationale for an adaptive toolbox to manage the risk and uncertainty of rework

Determining the risk and uncertainty of rework in construction has received limited attention due to a paucity of information about its frequency and causes. Errors made during construction, which may require rework, can go undetected, manifesting as an engineering failure during an asset’s operation and thus jeopardise system safety. Therefore, this paper addresses the following research question: How can practitioners make better decisions to mitigate the risk and uncertainty of rework during the construction of infrastructure assets and ensure system safety? Using a mega-transport infrastructure asset as a case setting, we adopt an interpretative line of inquiry and examine people's experiences with managing the risk and uncertainty of rework under the auspices of a sense-making lens. Our analysis revealed that heuristics were being used informally to determine rework risks and uncertainties due to the absence of information, resulting in them becoming curiosities as the same mistakes were repeated and learning stymied. We suggest that developing an adaptive-box tool comprising heuristics can provide the much-need theoretical foundation to effectively manage the risk and uncertainty of rework. Such heuristics would be adaptable to different situations as they are fitted to the environment through evolution and/or learning by amending them successively in small steps.

On Becoming a Spiritual Manager: A Cosmology Episodes Approach to Spiritual Integration at Work

The process in which managers integrate insights from spiritual development into their working lives is complex and has received only little scholarly attention. This paper employs a sensemaking lens and uses the cosmology episodes approach to analyze a 10-year longitudinal, in-depth single-case study. This unique study reveals that the process contains several iterations of successive cosmology episodes and the role of spirituality shifts accordingly. In addition, the concept of transformative pivots is used to understand how shifts advance the process in sensemaking as the manager is cast from rigid sense-losing into resilient sense-losing and improvising. While in alignment with previous accounts of spiritual integration, this paper adds by providing an in-depth longitudinal understanding of a single case and revealing the underlying structure seen through a sensemaking lens.

A sensemaking perspective on the roll-out of transdisciplinary learning communities in an academic environment from Bolivia

ABSTRACT Through a sensemaking lens, this article investigates the concrete appropriation of the so-called transdisciplinary learning communities-approach (TLC for short) as part of a Flemish–Bolivian university cooperation project for development. The article has its empirical basis in ethnographic research conducted between 2017 and 2020 on four campuses of the Bolivian university UCB. The primary data is the so-called organisational talk, gathered through interviews, participant observations, and meetings with Bolivian university staff members who are the main players involved in the Flemish–Bolivian university cooperation project. The analysis suggests that an informal, horizontal, and symmetrical style of organisational communication between organisational members seems to have a positive impact on the appropriation of TLC, which in turn leads to more successful experiences of cooperation with communities and other external partners in the social environment.

Making sense of downstream labour risk in global value chains: The case of the Australian cotton industry

While the efforts by actors on the buyer-side of value chains – such as brands and retailers – to address upstream labour abuses are well documented, there is a lack of research into how actors on the production-side of value chains – such as raw material producers – can identify and address downstream labour risks. This research presents the findings of an action research project that focused on the Australian cotton industry. By applying a sense-making lens, we propose four properties that can be used to identify labour risk in global value chains, providing insights into the capacity of producers to address downstream labour abuses. We suggest that there is a possibility for a ‘book-end’ approach that combines upstream and downstream actions by buyers and producers in global value chains.

Entrepreneurship-driven organizational transformation for sustainability: a sensemaking lens

PurposeThis paper adopts a sensemaking lens to explore the process of entrepreneurship-driven organizational transformation for sustainability.Design/methodology/approachAnalysis is based on an in-depth case study of a large European meat company. Sensemaking by top and middle managers is analyzed over the period of 18 months.FindingsThe findings show how, over time, bidirectional sensemaking, that is, sensemaking for and of sustainability-oriented entrepreneurship, directed and accelerated organizational transformation for sustainability. The case company transformed with regard to organizational strategy, structure, operations and identity. The process revealed temporally different involvement of top and middle managers in sensemaking.Originality/valueThis paper offers unique insights into fast and emergent sustainability-oriented change in an established organization within a highly topical context. The results highlight how continuous and increasingly shared sensemaking can help top and middle managers navigate organizational change for sustainability in dynamic environments over time.

Searching for learners’ voices: Teachers’ struggle to align pedagogical-reform policy with instructional practice

Abstract Globally, pedagogical reform policy seeks to give space to learners’ voices. But teachers often struggle to engage learners in knowledge construction, deconstruction and reconstruction; as advocated by official curriculum reform policy. Aligning classroom practice to pedagogical-reform policy remains an uphill struggle for most teachers. This article examines Zimbabwean teachers’ efforts to align teaching methods to new curriculum policy which seeks to engage learners in classroom discourse. Using a qualitative multiple-case study and the theoretical lens of sensemaking, a case study of History teachers assessed how they were implementing new pedagogical prescriptions. Data gathered from the document analysis, interviews and 47 lesson observations suggest that, although participants made efforts to open up a space for learners’ voices, they often drifted towards teacher-centred practice. Some participants complained that the unavailability of technology‑based instructional resources, recommended in the new reform policy, made them resort to rote pedagogy. Others believed that teacher didacticism and the dictation of notes were inevitable in History instruction. The use of learner‑centric approaches (as advocated by policy) appeared to be just a drop in the ocean. This study recommends pedagogical reorientation for teachers if learners’ voices are to be heard and large-scale instructional reforms are to be successfully enacted at classroom level.