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。     

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.     

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.     

Unconscious Processes of Organizing: Intergroup Conflict in Mental Health Care

A critical but overlooked issue in Weick’s seminal work, The Social Psychology of Organizing (1969/1979), concerns ‘the heat’ of organizing processes, namely, the underground emotional processes underpinning the organizing of conflictual work relationships. We present a qualitative case study of psychiatric agencies mandated by public policy to collaborate but instead engaged in persistent conflict despite its deleterious effects on their working relationship and on the wellbeing of the clients they intended to serve. To explain these conflictual features of organizing, we integrate Weick’s organizing theory with systems psychodynamics to deepen the understanding of emotions in organizing, specifically the motivational forces underpinning sensemaking and actions between interacting psychiatric agencies. This integration of theories reveals a critical feature of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious organizing processes: When a threat is involved, sensemaking and action are overtaken by social defences, resulting in dysfunctional organizing of the primary task. Drawing on these findings, we enrich Weick’s seminal work by developing a model that portrays organizing as the ritualized interaction of emotions, sensemaking and behavioural responses.     

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.     

A cognitive hierarchy model of learning in networks

This paper proposes a method for estimating a hierarchical model of bounded rationality in games of learning in networks. A cognitive hierarchy comprises a set of cognitive types whose behavior ranges from random to substantively rational. Specifically, each cognitive type in the model corresponds to the number of periods in which economic agents process new information. Using experimental data, we estimate type distributions in a variety of task environments and show how estimated distributions depend on the structural properties of the environments. The estimation results identify significant levels of behavioral heterogeneity in the experimental data and overall confirm comparative static conjectures on type distributions across task environments. Surprisingly, the model replicates the aggregate patterns of the behavior in the data quite well. Finally, we found that the dominant type in the data is closely related to Bayes-rational behavior.     

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.     

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.     

Untangling Goal Tensions in Family Firms: A Sensemaking Approach

While economic and non-economic goals may converge in the long term, they often lead to tensions for organizational decision-makers in the short term, especially in family firms that place much emphasis on family-related goals. We draw on a sensemaking approach to investigate such potential tensions in the decision-making of family firms. Based on a qualitative analysis of 59 interviews, 501 items of archival data and 39 observations from eight private Irish firms, we explore the perceived goal tensions of family firm decision-makers as they seek to balance economic and non-economic goals. We identify three sensemaking mechanisms – ensuring continuity in the family firm, preserving family cohesion, and delegating responsibilities to trusted advisors – that assist family firm decision-makers in managing these goal tensions. Moreover, we identify that sensegiving based on three different values – sense of commitment, community embeddedness, and family firm identity – helps family firm decision-makers to justify and communicate their decisions. Our model contributes to a more granular understanding of the management of goal tensions and of decision-making in family firms by going beyond the question of whether family firms prioritize economic or non-economic; instead, it reveals concrete processes showing how firms balance and aim to incorporate both goals. Furthermore, we advance knowledge on sensemaking in family firms by revealing how sensemaking can explain idiosyncratic family firm behaviour and by showing how family firm decision-makers use specific values when ‘giving sense’ to justify their decisions.     

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.     

Towards risk-aware roadmapping: Influencing factors and practical measures

In spite of the significance of uncertainty and risk in strategy, there is still a general lack of attention to their explicit consideration in strategic planning processes. This lack of attention is also obvious in roadmapping in its application to strategic and innovation planning. This paper introduces and explores the concept of risk-aware roadmapping, which explicitly manages uncertainty and risk in roadmapping, and sheds light on what such a process will entail given the factors that influence it. The study adopts a qualitative approach involving in-depth interviews with roadmapping experts and case studies of roadmapping exercises. This paper contributes to knowledge by providing a process that adds three significant steps to the standard risk management process, to suit roadmapping and strategic front-end innovation planning and identifying the risk of missing valuable innovation opportunities, which is very often overlooked in practice. Theoretical implications for organisational sensemaking are identified especially in the use and management of constraints for sensemaking activities such as innovation planning.     

Sustainable development and profit? A sensemaking perspective on hybrid organisations and their founders

This article explores the sensemaking process of the individual entrepreneurs behind hybrid organisations that seek to both initiate environmental/social change and also generate profit. The work sheds light on how founders of six such organisations set-up initially in between 1978 and 1991 make sense of themselves and their firm and how this impacts on their business strategies. We examine the life-stories of these individuals to illuminate their perspectives on their experiences, motives and values. We suggest that both ambition and altruism motivate individuals to become involved in these firms, echoing the paradox of firms seeking both social change and value creation. The work enhances our understanding of both sensemaking theory and success factors for hybrid organisations and strategizing more broadly.     

Organizational Learning in Project‐Based Companies: A Process Thinking Approach

Although a traditional project model is clearly useful for laying out the patterns of relationships surrounding a project, it does not provide the temporally embedded accounts that enable us to understand how organizational learning takes place. The process thinking perspective offers a means to solving this problem. This article provides an analysis of how different processes interact dynamically in order to benefit project‐based companies' organizational learning. Two findings from this study are: (1) organizational learning is a dynamic concept that emphasizes the continually changing nature of a project‐based company and (2) sensemaking and negotiation of meaning are ongoing processes in project‐based companies.     

In Search of Theory Development in Grounded Investigations: Doctors' Experiences of Managing as an Example of Fitted and Prospective Theorizing

This article draws on a study of doctors’ experiences of clinical managing to highlight research conventions that limit the development and use of middle range theories in grounded studies. Using sensemaking and the psychological contract as example frameworks, we illustrate how customary deductive evaluations of middle range theories turn grounded researchers away from theory building. As a correction to these conventions, we offer an inductive approach to building existing theory in grounded investigations that does not depend solely on working with frameworks under different empirical conditions. We suggest that forward theorizing is most likely to progress from a synthesis of fitted explanation and prospective thinking that presses at the limits of the data's usefulness. To illustrate this approach, trialled thinking about novel theoretical juxtapositions and alternative sources was used in conjunction with our clinical director data. The value of this approach was supported in two ways. First, a number of fitted and prospective conjectures are offered about how social identity articulates with psychological contracts and sensemaking in role change situations. Second, new light is shed on the process by which particular social conditions differentially modify employees’ social categorizations, and how these inform employee responses to the evolving experience of role change. The article concludes with some tentative proposals for promoting more discussion of theory building in grounded investigations.     

城市发展对居住水平提高的绩效研究

城市居住水平提高是当前我国城市发展中面临的重要任务。城市发展带来居住水平提高,在不同城市间是有差异的。本文旨在运用DEA数据包络分析法,针对21世纪以来中国主要城市的发展水平与居住水平提高的实际绩效水平对比分析,从不同城市情况的比较分析中总结出问题及其形成原因,以期对城市的发展决策具有借鉴价值。     

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'.     

城市发展对居住水平提高的绩效研究

城市居住水平提高是当前我国城市发展中面临的重要任务。城市发展带来居住水平提高，在不同城市间是有差异的。本文旨在运用DEA数据包络分析法，针对21世纪以来中国主要城市的发展水平与居住水平提高的实际绩效水平对比分析，从不同城市情况的比较分析中总结出问题及其形成原因，以期对城市的发展决策具有借鉴价值。