Making Sense of Inquiry Sensemaking

This paper presents a discourse analysis of a report of a tribunal of inquiry in order to further our understanding of inquiry team sensemaking. The subject of the paper is the report of the Allitt Inquiry into attacks on children on Ward 4 at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital in the UK. Premised on an understanding of the report as an exercise in sensemaking, and sensemaking as a narrative process, the paper illustrates how authorial strategies centred on issues of normalization, observation and absolution are employed to create a rhetorical and verisimilitudinous artefact. This, it is argued, is accomplished as part of a more general strategy of depoliticizing the disaster event, legitimating social institutions (especially those connected with the medical profession), ameliorating anxieties by elaborating fantasies of omnipotence and control, and thenceforth acting as a sensitizing narrative archetype.     

Sensemaking in Crisis and Change: Inspiration and Insights From Weick (1988)

When Karl Weick's seminal article, ‘Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations’, was published in 1988, it caused the field to think very differently about how crises unfold in organizations, and how emergent crises might be more quickly curtailed. More than 20 years later, we offer insights inspired by the central ideas in that article. Beginning with an exploration of key sensemaking studies in the crisis and change literatures, we reflect on lessons learned about sensemaking in turbulent conditions since Weick (1988), and argue for two core themes that underlie sensemaking in such contexts: shared meanings and emotion. We examine when and how shared meanings and emotion are more and less likely to enable more helpful, or adaptive, sensemaking, and conclude with some suggestions for future research in the sensemaking field.     

Of Organizing and Sensemaking: From Action to Meaning and Back Again in a Half-Century of Weick’s Theorizing

The themes of organizing and sensemaking have reverberated throughout Weick’s remarkable career and constitute one of the hallmarks of his contribution. We review his major works and show how Weick differentially emphasizes organizing and sensemaking over time and, eventually, arrives at a fuller integration of meaning and action. Initially, Weick (1969; 1979) models their relationship as linear, focusing on how organizing functioned as a context for sensemaking, an approach we label Sensemaking in Organizing. Later, however, Weick (1995a; 2005) construes their relationship in more dynamic, interactive, and reciprocal cycles, modelling sensemaking as the process whereby organizing is achieved, an approach we label Sensemaking as Organizing. We explore the evolution and implications of these approaches and discuss their impact on management scholarship. Finally, we draw out potential future research directions at the interface of organizing and sensemaking.     

From zero to teamwork: a manufacturing journey

This article is a case study of the implementation of employee-empowered problem-solving teams. Topics include how projects were selected, how project teams were trained, and how obstacles were overcome. Ths article concludes with 10 recommendations for organizations that would like to initiate team-based activities.     

Post-acquisition Integration as Sensemaking: Glimpses of Ambiguity, Confusion, Hypocrisy, and Politicization

ABSTRACT   Though many studies have examined post-acquisition integration challenges, they have mainly focused on rationalistic explanations for the difficulties encountered in post-acquisition integration. There remains little knowledge of how the 'irrational' features of post-acquisition decision-making may impede organizational integration. This study attempts to bridge that gap by examining post-acquisition decision-making from a sensemaking perspective. The paper presents an in-depth analysis of a merger between a large Finnish furniture manufacturer and three smaller Swedish furniture companies. By focusing on the sensemaking processes surrounding integration issues, we uncover four interrelated tendencies that illuminate why the frequent problem of slow progress during post-acquisition integration occurs: inherent ambiguity concerning integration issues; cultural confusion in social interaction and communication; organizational hypocrisy in integration decision-making; and the politicization of integration issues.     

工程项目知识管理组织模式研究

知识管理作为一种新型的管理模式与方法,已经被广泛地应用到各个行业中。文章对知识管理组织模式进行了一定程度的探讨,提出了以团队为基础的工程项目知识管理组织,以便在工程项目实施过程中能更有效地进行知识管理。     

Towards a Theory of Serendipity: A Systematic Review and Conceptualization

Serendipity – the notion of making surprising and valuable discoveries – plays a major role in the success of individuals and organizations alike. Previous research has established the importance of serendipity and identified important individual- and organizational-level antecedents. However, the literature has been dispersed and the boundaries of the concept have been blurry, leading to a lack of conceptual clarity and structure, and thus limiting validity and managerial actionability. Based on a systematic literature review, I synthesize existing management-related research on serendipity and explicate the emergence and composition of serendipity in the organizational context. I first identify three necessary conditions that differentiate serendipity from related concepts such as luck or targeted innovation: agency, surprise, and value. Then, I draw from the literature on sensemaking, event-based theorizing, and quantum-based approaches to management to conceptualize the process of cultivating serendipity in the organizational context as a process of enabling potentiality and materialization, and develop a multi-level theory of (cultivating) serendipity. This conceptualization contributes to our collective understanding of how, why, and when (i.e., under what conditions) organizations can leverage the value in the unexpected, which opens up fruitful avenues for further research.     

Sensemaking on the Shop Floor: Narratives of Knowledge in Organizations*

ABSTRACT This paper explores the role of narratives in organizational inquiry and knowledge work. Following the tenets of the phenomenological method, the paper digs into the ‘life world’ of organizations in order to capture the taken for granted stream of everyday routines, interaction, and events that constitute both individual and social practices. An empirical case study examines the narrative‐based processes of sensemaking and knowledge acquisition in the setting of a traditional pressing plant at Fiat Auto, Italy. The focus of analysis is on how a best performing team engages in the resolution of disruptive occurrences on the shop floor. Through the deconstruction of narratives underlying problem‐solving activities, the case identifies a distinctive mode of investigation conceptualized as ‘detective stories’. The detective's method highlights the interplay between time and narrative in shaping the interconnected processes of organizational knowledge creation, utilization, and institutionalization. More generally, the findings of the paper stress the importance of conjectural knowledge and common‐sensical wisdom in the everyday life of organizations.     

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.     

The Contraction of Meaning: The Combined Effect of Communication,Emotions, and Materiality on Sensemaking in the Stockwell Shooting

In this paper, we seek to understand how individuals, as part of a collective, commit themselves to a single, and possibly erroneous, frame, as a basis for sensemaking and coordinated actions. Using real‐time data from an anti‐terrorist police operation that led to the accidental shooting of an innocent civilian, we analyse how individual actors framed their circumstances in communication with one another and how this affected their subsequent interpretations and actions as events unfolded. Our analysis reveals, first, how the collective commitment to a framing of a civilian as a terrorist suicide bomber was built up and reinforced across episodes of collective sensemaking. Second, we elaborate on how the interaction between verbal communication, expressed and felt emotions, and material cues led to a contraction of meaning. This contraction stabilized and reinforced the overall framing at the exclusion of alternative interpretations. With our study we extend prior sensemaking research on environmental enactment and the escalation of commitment and elaborate on the role of emotions and materiality as part of sensemaking.     

Human Resourcing in Practice: Managing Employment Issues in the University

Participant observation in two universities is used to throw light on processes of sensemaking engaged in by managers concerned with human resourcing issues. Analysis of managerial sensemaking in the case study organizations is carried out using concepts from earlier sociological theorizing about human resource or personnel management, treating these theoretical ideas as resources for use in the researchers' own sensemaking. It is shown that theoretical 'sense' can be made of the managerial or 'lay' sensemaking in the universities in terms of a need to handle various tensions which are inherent in all employment management work in industrial capitalist societies. And it is argued that there is clear continuity between what is currently occurring and has occurred in the past. This interpretation is shown to differ from that of an alternative approach in social science sensemaking, that which uses the notion of a new paradigm of 'HRM'.     

The Changing Power of 'Explanations': Directors, Academics and Their Sensemaking from 1989 to 2000

This paper is based on empirical research conducted with directors in large UK organizations, first in 1987–89, and again in 1998–2000. While the time frame has changed, the focus of the inquiry has remained constant – how do you 'run' a large organization – and data gathered reflect significant changes over time as to how the question is answered. This paper addresses one particular aspect of this complex material: the changing power of practitioner and academic explanations across the decade, highlighted by comparing and contrasting this data and its analysis over time.
The paper illustrates a surprising degree of consistency (in contrast to 1987–89 findings) in practitioners' contemporary explanations of their organizing: all talk of strategic focus, shareholder value and corporate governance, phrases previously never mentioned. This reflects a variety of changes across the decade, including an important concentration of power amongst investors. As well as the methodological implications of 'repeating' this study, the changing power of academics' explanations 'on' organization is also discussed as conceptual frameworks gain and lose their resonance with the times. The paper concludes that sensemaking (Weick, 1995) offers the most appropriate perspective by which such shifts in the power of explanations may best be appreciated.     

Acting Intuition into Sense: How Film Crews Make Sense with Embodied Ways of Knowing

This study contributes to a holistic understanding of sensemaking by going beyond the mind–body dualism. To do so, we focus analytically on a phenomenon that operates at the nexus of mind and body: intuition. By observing four film crews, we unpack how people act their intuition into sense – that is, how they transform, through action, an initial sense (intuition) that is tacit, intimate, and complex into one that is publicly displayed, simpler, and ordered (i.e., a developed sense). Our model identifies two sensemaking trajectories, each of which involves several bodily actions (e.g., displaying feelings, working hands-on, speaking assertively). These actions enable intuition to express a facet of itself and acquire new properties. This study makes three important contributions. First, it develops the holistic-relational character of sensemaking by locating it in the relations among multiple loci (cognition, language, body, and materiality) rather than in each one disjunctively. Second, it theorizes embodied sensemaking as a transformative process entailing a rich repertoire of bodily actions. Third, it extends sensemaking research by attending to the physicality and materiality of language in embodied sensemaking.     

Thriving in the New Normal: The HR Microfoundations of Capabilities for Business Model Innovation. An Integrated Literature Review

Firms need to respond to the increasing competition and change of the current New Normal environment by being more innovative, and especially in developing new business models. This paper seeks to explore how microfoundations, particularly with respect to human resource management, play a key role in facilitating innovation in business models through the development of key needed capabilities. Four themes are identified with respect to business model innovation (BMI) in the New Normal: BMI as an enabler to create and operate across industries and product-markets; BMI as a mechanism for firms to better navigate changing institutional landscapes; BMI as giving rise to business model portfolios; and concurrent and cumulative innovations that can lead to BMI. This paper also develops a conceptual framework that presents a synoptic view of the five essential capabilities for BMI, which include analogical reasoning, sensemaking, dynamic capabilities, organisational ambidexterity, and organisational learning. Finally, it is shown how the microfoundations of a bespoke, development-oriented BMI HR architecture can support the advancement of these capabilities and thus contribute to the strategic HR literature.     

What,when, and who: Manager involvement in predicting employee resistance to acquisition integration

Applying sensemaking research to acquisition integration, we outline factors that influence employee resistance to acquisitions. While integration is widely viewed as important to acquisition outcomes, there is limited systematic study of how employees react to the integration process. Using survey data from Chinese acquirers and applying partial least squares structural equation modeling, we examine what changes with human and task integration with the speed of when changes are made to explore relationships with employee resistance. Consistent with a temporal perspective of acquisition processes and sensemaking we find slower task integration may mitigate employee resistance to acquisition integration. However, employee resistance to the speed that changes are made likely varies for who is involved, suggesting different roles for top and middle managers. Specifically, middle management involvement with slow human integration and top management involvement with fast task integration reduces employee resistance following an acquisition.     

Micro‐Practices of Strategic Sensemaking and Sensegiving: How Middle Managers Interpret and Sell Change Every Day*

abstract This paper looks at the workings of ongoing primary sensemaking and sensegiving micro‐practices by which middle managers interpret and sell strategic change at the organizational interface. Through middle managers’ routines and conversations related to the implementation of a strategic change in a top‐of‐the‐line clothing company, the article shows how they contribute to renewing links with stakeholders, in particular clientele, by drawing on their tacit knowledge. Interpretative analysis of these routines and conversations highlights four micro‐practices of strategic sensemaking and sensegiving: translating the orientation, overcoding the strategy, disciplining the client, and justifying the change. The paper outlines a practice perspective of sensemaking and sensegiving. It ends by suggesting the necessity of looking at middle managers’ role as interpreters and sellers of strategic change at the micro level for a better understanding of their contribution in sustaining competitive advantage through their everyday activities.     

On the way to Ithaka[1]: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Publication of Karl E. Weick’s The Social Psychology of Organizing

Karl E. Weick’s The Social Psychology of Organizing has been one of the most influential books in organization studies, providing the theoretical underpinnings of several research programs. Importantly, the book is widely credited with initiating the process turn in the field, leading to the ‘gerundizing’ of management and organization studies: the persistent effort to understand organizational phenomena as ongoing accomplishments. The emphasis of the book on organizing (rather than on organizations) and its links with sensemaking have made it the most influential treatise on organizational epistemology. In this introduction, we review Weick’s magnum opus, underline and assess its key themes, and suggest ways in which several of them may be taken forward.     

The ‘textual attitude’ and new technology

One of the most important tasks information systems executives face is making sense of emerging opportunities for organizational innovation through information technology. However, the parlance of information systems practitioners yields a variety of metaphors suggesting that this crucial task is a perilous one, in which success is far from assured. This paper reports on an interpretive study of these metaphors, using data from field interviews. Five images are identified, which evoke certain hazards and illuminate aspects of a successful executive response. The subsequent analysis of these images reveals how they serve constructively in promoting rationality in sensemaking, against a background that includes an ontologically problematic innovation and belief formation under institutional pressure. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the wider role of discourse in innovation sensemaking.     

混乱环境中企业战略决策的意义构建过程解析——两个林业局的对比案例研究

在混乱环境中,企业需要理解新事件真实的战略意义,以快速、准确地转变或修正战略决策。现有文献过度简化了意义构建的过程,并忽略了战略决策者社会属性在意义构建过程中的作用,本文旨在描述企业战略决策者在混乱环境中的意义构建过程,建立企业意义构建过程模型,提炼组织心理与角色承诺在意义构建过程中的作用。通过对迎春林业局和伊图里河林业局的对比案例研究,本文发现:混乱环境中企业战略决策的意义构建过程包括发现、选择、变革、设定和固化五个阶段;组织心理和角色承诺在这一过程中扮演极其重要的角色,组织心理固化和角色承诺固化会阻碍企业意义构建的顺利开展。研究结论有助于解释和解决混乱环境中企业的生存和发展问题。     

A Cognitive Interpretation of Data Analysis

This paper proposes a scientific model to explain the analysis process. We argue that data analysis is primarily a procedure to build understanding, and as such, it dovetails with the cognitive processes of the human mind. Data analysis tasks closely resemble the cognitive process known as sensemaking. We demonstrate how data analysis is a sensemaking task adapted to use quantitative data. This identification highlights a universal structure within data analysis activities and provides a foundation for a theory of data analysis. The competing tensions of cognitive compatibility and scientific rigour create a series of problems that characterise the data analysis process. These problems form a useful organising model for the data analysis task while allowing methods to remain flexible and situation dependent. The insights of this model are especially helpful for consultants, applied statisticians and teachers of data analysis.