Query: sensemaking

title: On Corporate Social Responsibility, Sensemaking, and the Search for Meaningfulness Through Work
abstract: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) focuses on many types of stakeholders and outcomes, including stakeholders outside of the organization and outcomes that go beyond financial results. Thus, CSR expands the notion of work to go beyond a task, job, intraindividual, intraorganizational, and profit perspective and provides an ideal conduit for individuals to seek and find meaningfulness through work. We adopt a person centric conceptualization of CSR by focusing on sensemaking as an underlying and unifying mechanism through which individuals are proactive and intentional agents who search for and find meaningfulness through work. Our conceptualization allows us to understand variability in CSR effects due to variability in employee sensemaking and the meaningfulness employees experience from CSR; highlight synergies across disconnected theories and streams of research originating in different disciplines and at the intraindividual, intraorganizational, and extraorganizational levels of analysis; and propose new research directions for the future in the form of propositions and research questions. By using sensemaking as a unifying underlying process, the proposed conceptualization explains how individuals find meaningfulness through work and, consequently, when and why employees experience CSR in a particular manner resulting in more or less positive outcomes for themselves, their organizations, and external stakeholders. Our proposed model could also be used in other individual level research domains that would benefit from (a) placing people and their search for meaningfulness center stage and (b) focusing on the role that same level and cross level interactions among intraindividual, intraorganizational, and extraorganizational sensemaking factors play in the process.

title: You can't always sketch what you want: Understanding Sensemaking in Visual Query Systems
abstract: Visual query systems (VQSs) empower users to interactively search for line charts with desired visual patterns, typically specified using intuitive sketch based interfaces. Despite decades of past work on VQSs, these efforts have not translated to adoption in practice, possibly because VQSs are largely evaluated in unrealistic lab based settings. To remedy this gap in adoption, we collaborated with experts from three diverse domains astronomy, genetics, and material science via a year long user centered design process to develop a VQS that supports their workflow and analytical needs, and evaluate how VQSs can be used in practice. Our study results reveal that ad hoc sketch only querying is not as commonly used as prior work suggests, since analysts are often unable to precisely express their patterns of interest. In addition, we characterize three essential sensemaking processes supported by our enhanced VQS. We discover that participants employ all three processes, but in different proportions, depending on the analytical needs in each domain. Our findings suggest that all three sensemaking processes must be integrated in order to make future VQSs useful for a wide range of analytical inquiries.

title: Power in Sensemaking Processes
abstract: This article examines the effects of power on sensemaking processes, bridging two major, yet traditionally separate, literatures in organization studies. Dividing power into its systemic and episodic forms, we elaborate how power shapes not only the content of sensemaking, but also the form of sensemaking processes. We explicate the distinct ways in which power works in four archetypal sensemaking processes: automatic (preconscious and committed) improvisational (preconscious and provisional) algorithmic (conscious and committed) and reflective (conscious and provisional) These ideal type processes help us theorize how influences related to systemic and episodic power induce more or less conscious and provisional forms of sensemaking. This refined understanding of sensemaking processes enables further explication of episodic power into distinctive kinds of sensegiving and sensebreaking activities.

title: Collective Sensemaking Around COVID 19: Experiences, Concerns, and Agendas for our Rapidly Changing Organizational Lives
abstract: Uncertainty is at the forefront of many crises, disasters, and emergencies, and the COVID 19 pandemic is no different in this regard. In this forum, we, as a group of organizational communication scholars currently living in North America, engage in sensemaking and sensegiving around this pandemic to help process and share some of the academic uncertainties and opportunities relevant to organizational scholars. We begin by reflexively making sense of our own experiences with adjusting to new ways of working during the onset of the pandemic, including uncomfortable realizations around privilege, positionality, race, and ethnicity. We then discuss key concerns about how organizations and organizing practices are responding to this extreme uncertainty. Finally, we offer thoughts on the future of work and organizing informed by COVID 19, along with a list of research practice considerations and potentially generative research questions. Thus, this forum invites you to reflect on your own experiences and suggests future directions for research amidst and after a cosmology event.

title: Sensemaking Reconsidered: Towards a broader understanding through phenomenology
abstract: We develop a typology of sensemaking in organizations that reconsiders existing sensemaking research by providing a more coherent and integrative conceptualization of what defines sensemaking and how it is connected with organizing. Drawing on existential phenomenology, we make the following core claims: (1) sensemaking is not a singular phenomenon but comprises four major types: immanent, involved deliberate, detached deliberate, and representational sensemaking; (2) all types of sensemaking originate and take place within specific practice worlds; (3) the core constituents of sensemaking within a practice world (sense action nexus, temporality, embodiment, and language) are played out differently in each type of sensemaking. Furthermore, we elaborate the links between sensemaking and organizing, focusing especially on the connections between types and levels of sensemaking, and the consequences of sensemaking outcomes for organizing. Finally, we discuss how the typology contributes to the existing sensemaking perspective, outline methodological implications, and suggest ways of advancing sensemaking research.

title: Spirituality and Entrepreneurship: The Role of Magical Thinking in Future Oriented Sensemaking
abstract: Drawing from a qualitative empirical study of Canadian entrepreneurs, we seek to understand the nature of entrepreneurial thinking. More specifically, we analyse entrepreneurs' cognitive capacity to mitigate the risk inherent in an uncertain future and overcome low community expectations of entrepreneurial success. We introduce the notion of 'magical thinking' an emergent construct that refers to a cluster of beliefs that maintain the motivation and focus of entrepreneurs by transmuting agency from a rational scientific context in which the entrepreneur imposes his or her will on the environment, to a spiritual context in which the entrepreneur perseveres by remaining true to trust in a wider cosmological belief system. We identify three key elements of magical thinking finding one's path, obtaining the answers and being at peace.

title: Sensemaking of a sustainability transition by higher education institution leaders
abstract: The understanding of meaning creation processes according to sensemaking theory and its role in conceptualising sustainability in higher education institutions is limited. The idea of sustainability obliges organisations and people to rethink worldviews and justify actions. This may ultimately introduce organisational change, often associated with a redistribution of power. Its extent depends on, among other factors, the prevailing definition of sustainability within the organisation. Through a process of sensemaking and sensegiving, academic leaders impose their own understanding of science, the university and sustainability upon others, while conceptualising sustainability to maintain or increase power. A principal medium for the reproduction and maintenance of power in organisations are discourses. Based on qualitative field research at a large German university, we examined how academic leaders make sense of and give sense to ambiguous fields of meaning in conceptualising a sustainable university. We identified three aggregated dimensions that form the change context of the transition: (1) discourse strategies applied to make and give sense, (2) triggers of resistance and (3) determinants of a collective sensemaking process. We reflected our findings on the existing literature on organisational change management for sustainability in higher education and present first considerations for a systematic meaning creation process that guides the definition of a commonly shared vision for a sustainable university.

title: 'I could help, but A dynamic sensemaking model of workplace bullying bystanders
abstract: How do we explain the behaviour of employees who encounter workplace bullying but fail to intervene, or sometimes even join the perpetrator? We often assume that bystanders witnessing bullying will restore justice, but empirical research suggests that they may also behave in ways that continue, or worsen, its progression. Recent theories have attempted to explain the process of bystander behaviour in response to general mistreatment, but the range of acknowledged behaviours is limited, and their scope is restricted to isolated incidents rather than complex, dynamic phenomena like workplace bullying. We offer a new model of bystander behaviours in workplace bullying. We use sensemaking theory to explain how appraisals of severity, victim deservingness and efficacy influence bystanders to enact a range of possible behaviours, and how post hoc sensemaking utilizing moral disengagement affects how bystanders appraise and respond to future bullying. We explain the influence of the social context on sensemaking and the reciprocal influence that individual bystanders have on the social context. Our model explains how bystander behaviours change over time in response to repeated incidents and how bystanders' responses affect other bystanders' appraisals and the bullying process, therefore providing a dynamic perspective on the role of bystanders in workplace bullying.

title: Meaning in the face of changing climate risks: Connecting agency, sensemaking and narratives of change through transdisciplinary research
abstract: This paper contributes to the body of knowledge associated with the analysis of transdisciplinary research. We use a narrative centered approach, focusing on hybridity, sensemaking and the potential for transdisciplinary research to foster agency. When confronted with changes, people as individuals and local communities as groups make sense of them in the light of their own knowledge, beliefs and experiences. The process by which communities make sense of changing institutional and natural environments can be defined as the interaction between their own frame of reference and the perception of the situational demands inherent to changes, together with their interpretation of these changes. Such a dynamic process of sensemaking constantly redefines the boundaries of the narratives that community members can call on to give meaning to their past, present and future. In this paper we use five case studies to analyze how this sensemaking plays out in situations of changing climate risk and changing frames of reference associated with the presence of transdisciplinary scientists. We identify the central challenge of ambiguity. We define ambiguity as situations where narratives of change assign different meanings to the changes observed. In such situations, we observe three potential outcomes in our case studies: (1) communities appear to be forced into inaction as a consequence of agency depriving senselessness; (2) communities appear to be cornered into maladaptation as a consequence of a misguided sense of agency; and (3) communities try to resolve ambiguity and effectively move forward as knowledge based agency fostering exercise. In light of these results, we argue that by contributing to the clarification of such ambiguities, climate science may contribute to increases in local agency, thus enhancing adaptive capacities. We conclude by proposing that climate science be place based and community centered. The purpose of such a shift would be aimed at building the agency enhancing sensemaking of local communities.

title: On the Making of Sense in Sensemaking: Decentred Sensemaking in the Meshwork of Life
abstract: This paper proposes and argues for sensemaking practices as fundamentally decentred. Sensemaking has been, at least since the late 1980s, an enduring subject for organisation studies researchers, and much longer for organisational practitioners. This research tradition has, however, tended to have a particular understanding of temporality (as divisible) tended to be centred on the human sense makers, and privileged as more valid that which can be made present, through deliberative sensemaking practices, at the expense of that which is absent, and perhaps ineffable. In short, by locating sensemaking in the deliberative sensemaking practices of humans other significant constitutive conditions of sensemaking became obscured from view. The main thrust of the paper is to develop a notion of sensemaking that is decentred not simply at the disposal of human subjects and where sense is always and already given and made simultaneously. That is, where every human attempt at framing is itself already enframed, significantly. We show how this reimagining of sensemaking, as decentred, has the potential to open up new avenues of research in sensemaking practices avenues that are more sensitive to temporal flow, the more than human, immanence, and the precarity of such practices. This shift is significant theoretically but also practically.