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Making sense of sensemaking:
the critical sensemaking
approach
Jean Helms Mills
Department of Management, Sobey School of Business,
Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada
Amy Thurlow
Public Relations Department, Mount Saint Vincent University,
Halifax, Canada, and
Albert J. Mills
Department of Management, Sobey School of Business,
Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to revisit the oft cited but as yet not operationalized Weick’s
sensemaking framework, in order to provide suggested ways forward. Development of a method based
on Weick’s sensemaking is suggested as a starting point for a heuristic that takes into account missing
elements from his original model while operationalizing (critical) sensemaking as an analytical tool for
understanding organizational events.
Design/methodology/approach – Following the trajectory of sensemaking, the limitations of
Weick’s model were discussed (i.e. failure to address power and context) and the critical sensemaking
was developed as a method that takes into account agency in context. Empirical studies that apply
sensemaking were discussed.
Findings – It is concluded that plausibility and identity construction are key to understanding how
some voices are heard over others and through critical sensemaking sense that can be made of such
phenomena as the gendering or organizational culture and discriminatory practices in organizations.
Practical implications – A heuristic can help people to understand the socio-psychological
properties involved in behavioural outcomes.
Originality/value – Critical sensemaking builds on and operationalizes Weick’s original sensemaking
approach and demonstrates how it can be used in a range of empirical studies, something that Weick
himself suggested was lacking.
Keywords Reasoning, Critical thinking, Organizational culture, Organizational processes
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction
In 1995, Weick developed, what he called, “sensemaking” as an alternate approach for
the understanding of the process of organizing. Instead of a focus on organizational
outcomes, sensemaking provided insights into how individuals and organizations give
meaning to events. Over time, sensemaking has been refined and explicated so that in
addition to being a stand-alone theoretical framework, it has now started being used as
a method of analysis. In this paper, we will explore the trajectory of sensemaking from
“a set of explanatory ideas” (Weick, 1995, p. xi) to what we suggest is a heuristic
that operationalizes sensemaking to analyze a number of organizational events, which
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1746-5648.htm
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Qualitative Research in Organizations
and Management: An International
Journal
Vol. 5 No. 2, 2010
pp. 182-195
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1746-5648
DOI 10.1108/17465641011068857
takes into account elements initially missing from Weick’s original framework
(Helms Mills, 2003; Thurlow, 2007). We will discuss this research and demonstrate the
value of both Weick’s sensemaking framework and subsequently critical sensemaking,
which takes into account issues such as power and context that were missing from
Weick’s framework, as a method of organizational analysis.
The trajectory of sensemaking
In 1995, Weick published his book Sensemaking in Organizations (Weick, 1995), in
which he proposed a framework that offered an explanation for how individuals and
organizations make sense of their environment. His approach moved the study of
sensemaking beyond the individual experience and into the realm of organizations and
organizing. He discusses sensemaking and organization as phenomena that are
mutually constituted (Weick et al., 2005). Brown et al. (2008, p. 1055) further describe
sensemaking and organization as essentially the same process:
To make sense is to organize, and sensemaking refers to processes of organizing using the
technology of language – processes of labeling and categorizing for instance – to identify,
regularize and routinize memories into plausible explanations [...]
While Weick (1995, p. 18) explicitly lays out “seven characteristics”, each being
“a self-contained set of research questions that relates to the other six” sensemaking
has its roots in his earlier work, The Social Psychology of Organizing (Weick, 1979), and
his subsequent research on loosely coupled systems and organizational disasters
(Weick, 1990). In these, Weick demonstrates the importance of organizational shocks in
initiating a sensemaking event and interlocking behaviours and structure on making
sense of situations. Two of his studies became the foundation for the properties of
sensemaking. For example, in his analysis of both The Mann Gulch fires (Weick, 1993)
and the Tenerife plane crash (Weick, 1990), Weick showed how small separate failures
can contribute to major disasters. He suggested that the interruption of important
routines leads to system breakdowns where people revert to familiar scripts and
habitual responses because of what is familiar and plausible to them. This is in part
influenced by the identity that they have constructed about themselves and partially
influenced by past experiences. It was from these studies of organizations as loosely
coupled systems, which led Weick to further explore the social psychological aspects of
organizations and to develop these sensemaking properties, which he suggests serve as
“a rough guideline for inquiry into sensemaking in the sense that they suggest what
sensemaking is, how it works and where it can fail” (Weick, 1995, p. 18).
Eventually, sensemaking, as we now know it, emerged and was refined to include as
a cohesive set of ideas, with explanatory properties (Weick, 1995). Weick (1995, p. xi)
offered sensemaking as an alternative to conventional ways of looking at the process of
organizing, describing it as “ a set of ideas with organizing possibilities”. He suggested
that sensemaking provided a useful way of uncovering the social psychological
processes that contribute to organizational outcomes, rather than focusing on the
outcomes themselves.
At its most basic, sensemaking is about understanding how different meanings
are assigned to the same event. As Weick explained, sensemaking is never-ending and each
new sensemaking event is triggered by uncertainty or ambiguity, which causes us to find
meaning. Because sensemaking occurs as a result of a shock, or break in routine, the study
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of sensemaking during or as a result of an organizational crisis offers particular insight into
the processes involved. Brown (2004) investigates the process of sensemaking following
a crisis, in the wake of the Piper Alpha disaster and the subsequent public inquiry.
Likewise, Boudes and Laroche (2009) analyze the process of sensemaking represented in
official reports following the 2003 deadly heat wave in France. Both these studies are
concerned with the ways in which meaning is constructed through sensemaking processes
following the interruption of routine understandings and practices.
Stein (2004) provides us with an analysis of the “critical period” or the period of time
in which a disaster unfolds. His work indicates that following a disaster’s “triggering
event” (Shrivastava, 1987), individuals engage in sensemaking not only in order to
figure out what to do next, but also to deal with anxiety and fear that may accompany
the experience. In his study, Stein (2004, p. 1247) illustrates how the astronauts and
National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials made sense of the Apollo
13 challenger disaster, an event that initially seemed implausible to both these groups,
by conducting systematic tests and checks in order to make sense of what appeared to
be a series of “multiple and unconnected failures”.
These examples of sensemaking in crises underscore Weick’s (2005) assertion that
disruptions in routine processes require individuals to make sense of what is occurring
now and to consider what should be done next (Boudes and Laroche, 2009). Thus,
we are constantly engaging in making sense of our environment through the influence
of seven interrelated properties. In addition to the ongoing nature of sensemaking,
these properties include identity construction, retrospection, focused on extracted cues,
driven by plausibility, enactive of the environment and social.
Grounded in identity construction. According to this property, who we are and what
factors have shaped our lives influence how we see the world. Our identity is continually
being redefined as a result of experiences and contact with others, for example, parents,
friends, religion, where we went to school, where we work and what type of job we do all
affect how we view certain situations. In the case of Mann Gulch, the firefighters
inability to drop their tools was directly related to the identity associated with being
a firefighter (Weick, 1993). To drop their tools was metaphorically the same as
letting go of their identity. Thus, identity construction is about making sense of the
sensemaker.
Retrospective. We rely on past experiences to interpret current events. Thus,
sensemaking is a comparative process. In order to give meaning to the “present” we
compare it to a similar or familiar event from our past and rely on the past event to
make sense. For example, the training that the Mann Gulch firefighters had received
was directed towards putting out fires. Being told to ignore the fire and take a different
course of action contradicted their retrospective sensemaking. Therefore, the majority
of men were understandably confused when they were ordered to build an “escape”
fire, to reroute the existing fire. Brown and Jones (1998) in their study of sensemaking
in the face of organizational failures indicate that the retrospective nature of
sensemaking may have particular impact in the case of a disaster or other failure.
As they point out:
Individuals construct their understandings of organizational events by shaping and omitting
information to bolster their self-esteem and feelings of control. Explanations of failure may
therefore be largely imposed after the event as participants seek to make sense of, and
synthesize the many possible meanings available to them (Brown and Jones, 1998, p. 74).
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Focused on and by extracted cues. The sensemaking process involves focusing on certain
elements, while completely ignoring others, in order to support our interpretation of an
event. Since sensemaking is retrospective, past experiences, including rules and
regulations, dictate what cues we will extract to make sense of a situation. By ignoring
the order to build the “escape” fire because it challenged their notion of what was right
and wrong, the firefighters were extracting cues that supported their training. Colville
et al. (1999) highlight the ways in which individuals focus on particular elements of a
situation or organizational plan much in the same way that we would use a map.
By focusing on key elements of a strategic plan, for example, organizations may ignore
other cues from the environment in order to stay on track. The sensemaking process may
allow individuals to interpret cues, or features of a map, in ways that support their
beliefs.
Driven by plausibility rather than accuracy. Driven by plausibility rather than
accuracy means that we do not rely on the accuracy of our perceptions when we make
sense of an event. Instead, we look for cues that make our sensemaking seem plausible.
In doing so, we may distort or eliminate what is accurate and potentially rely on faulty
decision making in determining what is right or wrong. With this property, we can see
why the firefighters felt that their actions seemed plausible to do, although as it was later
discovered, not the right thing to do. This property may also contribute to the
inconsistency of sensemaking among organizational members. Berry (2001) points out
that explanations of organizational behaviour may not be consistent across hierarchical
levels within an organization, or among different stakeholder groups, as one action may
have a variety of explanations. This reflects a situation where different meanings may
emerge as plausible for different groups within an organization in relation to a common
action, policy or event.
Enactive of the environment. Enactive of the environment suggests that sensemaking
is about making sense of an experience within our environment. Thus, our sensemaking
can be either constrained or created by the very environment that it has created. Similar
to a self-fulfilling prophecy, this property maintains that the environment that has been
created by the sensemaker reinforces his or her sense of credibility. In the case of the
Mann Gulch situation, panic prevailed when the realization that the fires were out of
control overwhelmed the men. This environment rendered them unable to consider the
situation rationally and strengthened their belief that they should hold on to their tools
and try to outrun the fire. This reliance on past experiences and inaccurate cues made
their actions seem “plausible” (i.e. credible) as the “right” thing to do.
Social. This property acknowledges that the sensemaking process is contingent on our
interactions with others, whether physically present or not. As well, an organization’s
rules, routines, symbols, and language will all have an impact on an individual’s
sensemaking activities and provide routines or scripts for appropriate conduct. But when
routines or scripts do not exist, the individual is left to fall back on his or her own ways of
making sense. For example, in their investigation of sensemaking among politicians
during a public scandal, Brown and Jones (2000) suggest that the need for individual
members of the British House of Commons to maintain a positive self-image and
reputation played a significant role in the creation of meaning around the event. The social
expectation, language, and routines defining the house and its members as “honourable”
influenced the ways in which the members made sense of the scandal for themselves and
their constituents.
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Ongoing. The process of sensemaking is a sequential process that never stops
because sensemaking flows are constant. Although this seems to contradict, the
statement that sensemaking is provoked by shocks or ambiguity, Weick maintains that
we are constantly making sense of what is happening around us but that we isolate
moments and cues from this continuous sensemaking to make sense of the current
situation, which we will be “forced” to attend to because of a break in the routine.
Initially, Weick claimed that the interrelated properties were equally important to
the sensemaking process, although one or another could be more dominant according
to the sensemaking event. More recently, he has acknowledged some of the criticisms
and limitations of sensemaking, including the suggestion that some properties may be
more pivotal than others (Weick et al., 2005). This will be discussed later in this paper.
In discussing the future of sensemaking, Weick (1995) agreed with
Czarniawska-Joerges (1992), who suggested that the essence of sensemaking is to
provide an understanding of how meaning and artifacts are produced and reproduced
collectively. At the same time, Weick identified sites of research where sensemaking
“clearly occurs” (i.e. policy making, socialization), methodologies that were more or less
useful in “tracking” sensemaking (i.e. social surveys as less useful and critical incidents
as more useful), and “language that allows us to grasp the essence of sensemaking as it
unfolds” (i.e. threats, opportunities) (Weick, 1995, pp. 172-3). Yet these studies and
methods were viewed by Weick as complementary to sensemaking. According to
Weick (1995, p. 174), expanding on any of these studies or areas of research would
“advance our understanding of sensemaking” but at this stage sensemaking still was
not viewed as a stand-alone method. More recently Weick has suggested that there is a
need for empirical studies that make explicit use of the properties of sensemaking
(Weick, 2005).
Making sense of sensemaking: a personal journey
In 1994, one of the authors of this paper was looking through books in the management
section of Waterstone’s in London. Sensemaking in Organizations (Weick, 1995)
jumped out because of the need to frame and make sense of the interview data that had
been collected from a public utility company that had been undergoing a series of
planned changes. These changes were being met with varying responses within the
organization and the author was looking for ways to understand the change processes
whereas the utility was seeking validity of the success of the changes. The seven
properties that Weick proposed seemed a perfect way to explain the different levels of
acceptance and to shed some light on why the organization had decided to engage in
change in the first instance, why specific change techniques had been chosen and how
changes that contradicted previous corporate values were rationalized.
By applying each of the seven properties of sensemaking to key events in the
organization, the author was able to study the process of change and find explanations
for some of these questions. For example, the identity construction of the president of
the utility centered round his previous roles as politician, university president, and
business person and his past experiences (retrospection) heavily influenced his
perceived understanding of the results of an employee attitude survey as “poor
morale”. Whereas his choice of a planned culture change programme and the
consultant who would facilitate it was influenced by management fads and fashions of
the time (social and enactive of the environment) and by what change programmes
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other utilities were using (extracted cues, plausibility). When he eventually hired
consultants to re-engineer the utility, which seemed to contradict the values instilled
during the culture change, we can understand his decision because of the ongoing
nature of sensemaking. Likewise, sensemaking properties were useful, to a point, in
explaining the varying levels of acceptance and resistance by employees to the change
initiatives throughout the organization (Helms Mills, 2003).
However, there were still gaps that sensemaking on its own did not appear to address
and in the process, further questions were raised that sensemaking alone did not answer.
What, for example, were the motives behind the selection of these change programmes?
What were the underlying social psychological processes that influenced the different
“sensemakings” of the same event (i.e. intersubjectivity)? What accounted for the
unequal distribution of power in certain contexts? How was gender accounted for in
context?
At the conclusion of her analysis, the author suggested that a way to overcome some of
these issues was to incorporate elements of Unger’s (1987a, b) notion of formative context
and to explain in more detail the social elements that affect the process of change and the
background factors that influenced sensemaking. To account for influences at the
organizational level,she turned toMillsand Murgatroyd’s (1991) concept of organizational
rules to explain how established rules of behaviour are mediated by individuals, according
to their own sensemaking and how they influence the process of sensemaking.In that way,
rules provide a link between behaviour and the creation and maintenance of
organizational culture (Helms Mills, 2003). In later iterations, the work of Foucault
(1979, 1980) was drawn on to explain how the possibilities of thought are influenced by
“knowledge” (Helms Mills and Mills, 2000).
During this process, it became apparent that Weick’s sensemaking model only went
so far in addressing how processes are interpreted and enacted and there was an
assumption that sensemaking was a democratic process, whereby all voices were more
or less equally important. As well, the interdependent properties were assumed to
carry equal weight, although Weick acknowledged that one or another could be more
important according to the situation. Since then, Helms Mills (2003) has argued that
identity construction is pivotal to the sensemaking process and more recently attention
has been drawn to the importance of plausibility in legitimizing sensemaking events
(Mills and Helms Mills, 2004). This paved the way for the refinement and articulation
of what is known as critical sensemaking.
Critical sensemaking
In developing sensemaking, Weick (1995, 2001) variously draws on ethnomethodology
and phenomenology to focus on the socio-psychological processes through which a sense
of situation is created out of various interactions. It is this focus on individual identity in
the context of social and on-going interactions that offers much in the way of providing a
way of reinserting agency in organizational studies (Nord and Fox, 1996). Further, as
argued elsewhere, it makes an “important contribution to our understanding of everyday
life in organizations” by providing an “ethnomethodology of organizing” (Mills, 2008).
Those strengths are, however, limited by Weick’s paradoxical treatment of sensemaking
as drawing on interpretive insights that are often times presented as grounded in a more
positivist notion of epistemological certainty, i.e. that the sensemaking process can be
somehow seen as grounded (or groundable) in scientific knowledge. True, Weick (1995)
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posits his approach as “a recipe” for understanding the process of organizing but he at
times presents sensemaking as explicable through reference to a concrete or definite set of
interrelated activities. Weick’s approach is also limited by an under focus on issues
of power, knowledge, structure, and past relationships.
The first issue of epistemological grounding raises the problem of “epistemological
circularity” whereby sensemaking seeks to problematize the basis of knowledge
production through reference to “a presupposed knowledge of the conditions in which
knowledge takes place” (Johnson and Duberley, 2000, p. 3). In other words, “explanation”
of how certain knowledge is produced (e.g. a seemingly natural sense of organization) is
grounded in reference to a more or less incontrovertible knowledge base – in this case,
sensemaking. But,as Johnsonand Duberley (2000,p. 4) contend, this is a circular argument
that raises questions about accounts of sensemaking that do not take into account the
researcher’s own imposed sense on the observations involved.
We address this problem in at least three ways: first, by seeking a triangulation of
methodologies (interpretism, poststructuralism, and critical theory) to provide different
frames of reference that can simultaneously ground and problematize (what we call)
critical sensemaking’s knowledge claims; second, by highlighting conscious the heuristic
as opposed to scientific character of the social psychological properties of sensemaking;
and third, following Johnson and Duberley (2000), by taking a “consciously reflexive” (p. 4)
approach that identifies the impossibility of “coming to a foundational set of
epistemological standards [...] while [maintaining] consistency with regard to the
epistemological assumptions” we do deploy (p. 177). To quote Jenkins (1999, p. 1), “nothing
is given to a gaze, but rather is constituted ‘in meaning’ by it”.
Moving to the issue of context, structure, and the discursive nature of sensemaking
we turned, respectively, to the work of Unger, of Mills, and of Foucault. Here, among
other things, we sought to make sense of why some language, social practices, and
experiences become meaningful for individuals, and others do not. Since sensemaking
happens within a social context and as an ongoing process, and it also occurs within a
broader context of organizational power and social experience, the process of critical
sensemaking may be most effectively understood as a complex process that occurs
within, and is influenced by, a broader social environment.
Although organizational shocks may prompt individuals to draw on a variety of cues
from their changing environments, one of the major concepts within critical sensemaking
(and sensemaking itself) is, as we have alluded to, the centrality of identity construction to
sensemaking processes. Change within organizations may cause individuals to ask
questions such as “who are we?” or “how do we do things?” The way in which individuals
make sense of these questions impacts their understandings of their own identities and
that of the organization. Identity construction is arguably a key component in the process
not just because it influences individual sensemaking, but also because it influences how
individuals understand the other six “properties”. Sensemaking describes a process of
identity construction whereby individuals project their identities into an environment
and see it reflected back. Through this process, they come to understand what is
meaningful in their own identities. Critical sensemakingshifts focus to how organizational
power and dominant assumptions privilege some identities over others and create them
as meaningful for individuals. For example, the identity of a “good employee” may be
privileged within an organization through texts, language, rules, etc. which emphasize
the characteristics of this identity. The construction of this identity may include rules
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about how employees should function within the organization. Employees may also be
encouraged to draw upon cues from their work environment and reflect an identity
privileged through other similar organizations or a broader social context. As with all
sensemaking, this exercise in identity construction occurs within a social and ongoing
process.
Nonetheless, on their own, the sensemaking properties do not fully explain why some
experiences, language, and events become meaningful for individuals while others do
not. Individuals do not make sense of their experiences in isolation of their broader
environments. For example, some individuals within an organization may have more
influence on meaning than others. Individuals with more power in organizations may
also exert more power on the sensemaking of organizational members. But crucially
“on-going sensemaking” (Weick, 1995) may embed received knowledge that influences
the possibilities of thought but which is underplayed in Weick’s original notion. Thus,
critical sensemaking sets out to provide a lens through which to analyze the power
relationships reflected in these inequalities within organizations and the consequences
of those power effects for individuals.
In a similar vein, plausibility essentially refers to a sense that one particular
meaning or explanation is more meaningful than others or that something feels right
within the range of possible explanations available to sensemakers in a given situation.
Yet there is no specific definition of what makes a particular explanation plausible.
Weick suggests that options make more sense when there are no better alternatives, for
others this explanation resonates more closely with existing identities and perceptions,
but also discursive possibilities.
As sensemaking is not a linear process, analysis does not happen in a particular
sequence. Although some properties may become more visible from time to time,
the sensemaking properties may also influence individual sensemaking simultaneously.
For example, the property of enactment may become visible in a particular sensemaking
process, but that same enactment of meaning may influence the plausibility of other
actions, and simultaneously the construction of individual identity. As individuals enact
their beliefs, they also make sense of them. And in effect, the use of language in the
describing of an event enacts the construction of sensemaking about the event. As a
result, individuals within organizations may not make sense of the same event in the
same way. To that end, there is no one “right” meaning attached to a given experience.
Critical sensemaking offers a frame of analysis that looks at actions and beliefs as driven
by plausibility not accuracy.
Drawing on Unger’s (1987a, b) notion of formative contexts as structures that limit
what can be imagined and done within that society. Critical sensemaking positions
the formative context as a link between dominant social values and individual
action. While no one formative context is necessary or fixed, some are privileged
within society above others. Therefore, they represent a restrictive influence on
organizational rules and individual enactment of meaning through the privileging of
these dominant assumptions. Formative contexts, and the related organizational rules
are both productive of and produced through discourse. By introducing the
dimension of formative contexts, the critical sensemaking framework creates space
for a discussion of how the macro-level context in which individuals operate affects
the cues they extract, the plausibility of various text and narratives, and the nature of
enactment.
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Critical sensemaking argues that the analysis of sensemaking needs to be explored
through, and in relationship to, the contextual factors of structure and discourse in which
individual sensemaking occurs. Although individuals are making sense of their day-to-day
actions on a local level, the concept of organizational power places local meanings in a
broader understanding of privilege. Mills’ organizational rules theory (Mills, 1988; Mills
and Murgatroyd, 1991) offers an analysis of how these actions are determined, since
organizational rules focus on social practices, which determine the ways in which
individuals organize and the manner in which “things get done” in an organization.
However, the rules also set limitations on individual sensemaking and actions. From that
perspective, rules provide a pre-existing sensemaking tool that contributes to the
plausibility of an interpretation or the likelihood of a cue to be extracted as meaningful. The
incorporation of organizational rules into the critical sensemaking framework also
introduces the concept of meta rules to sensemaking practices. These rules, which can
include privatization, competition, and globalization, are broad in scope and represent
points of intersection between numbers of formative contexts.
Critical sensemaking highlights the influence of organizational rules on individuals.
These rules can be in the form of either formal or informal organizational rules and they
reflect processes that impose order through organizational routines. In as much as rules
inform our understanding of how organizations may retain unity and cohesiveness, they
also constrain the ways in which individuals may act and the possibility of appropriate
interpretations of meaning. This perspective within a framework of critical sensemaking
provides insight into boththe power of the actors enacting rules, and the constraints under
which these rules are introduced to the organizations. Although powerful actors in the
organization may set the direction for the rules, which will provide a sense of cohesion
within the organization, they are themselves constrained by meta-rules and formative
contexts, which limit the availability of alternatives they may select from within a broader
formative context.
Finally, we draw on the work of Foucault (1979) and the notion of discursive
practice to account for the possibilities of sensemaking, plausibility, and identity due to
their embedment in powerful discourses. Take, for example, the employment of female
managers in North America or the UK. In the context of the twenty-first century any
sense of the situation would be influenced by a well-established discourse of
employment equity and its expression through rules, practices and other imaginative
possibilities, and related identity work (Rindfleish and Sheridan, 2003). Those
sensemaking possibilities would have been very different 50 years earlier when the
situation was dominated by a different discourse of gender (Terry, 1953).
In summary, critical sensemaking provides a framework for understanding how
individuals make sense of their environments at a local level while acknowledging power
relations in the broader societal context. The critical sensemaking framework takes a very
complex combination of variables including social psychological properties, discourse,
organizational rules, and the formative context in which organizations exist and offers an
analysis of how these forces combine to allow individuals to make sense of their
environments and take action on a day-to-day basis. Critical sensemaking, we argue, is
useful in analyzing the relationship between individual actions and broader societal issues
of power and privilege. It also provides a lens through which to view connections between
the formative context, organizational rules, and discursive and socio-psychological
properties of sensemaking that influence how individuals make sense of the world
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around them. It is, however, a complex process, which may evolve in different ways within
different contexts. We argue that the value of critical sensemaking lies in the attempt to
fuse (post)structural and socio-psychological factors to help explain the role of agency in
organizing.
Applications of sensemaking
Typically, an investigation of sensemaking processes would start from, or at least
relate to, an important organizational event. This event might be the arrival of a new
chief executive officer (CEO), a merger, layoffs, expansion, or anything that could have
disrupted the existing organizational routines. These sensemaking triggers, known as
“organizational shocks” (Weick, 1995), create ambiguity in the organization and force
individuals to make sense of things differently. We feel that sensemaking provides a
useful heuristic to study a range of organizational outcomes. Over time, it has become
clear that issues of power, identity, and legitimacy cannot be ignored and that in order
to provide a thorough application of sensemaking to these events elements of critical
sensemaking that address these issues must be incorporated into the analysis.
In her research involving a Canadian Community College undergoing organizational
change, Thurlow (2007) used critical sensemaking to investigate organizational narratives
of change at a Canadian Community College. Through this analysis she explored the ways
in which some narratives become privileged over others within the change process and the
manner in which these stories are made meaningful for individuals.
The college had received a $123 million investment from the provincial government
at a time when other postsecondary institutions in the region had experienced a decrease
in government funding. This investment came as a response to the college’s strategy to
convince government that it should become a more modern, national caliber college.
During the five years leading up to the announcement of the investment, the college
renewed its curriculum, changed its mission and vision, and restructured the
organization. The College’s CEO at the time had made the strategy to secure increased
funding a cornerstone of his change agenda. From the college perspective, there is no
question that the $123 million investment by the provincial government translated into
an interpretation of change as “successful” at that organization. This marked an
important milestone for the college. The most immediate effect was the legitimating of
the change initiative that the college had embarked upon five years before. With that,
came an important contribution to the construction of identities both for the organization
and for the individuals within the organization. For example, organizational members
made sense of change through several interconnected elements. The investment
provided an important cue, which influenced sensemaking processes. The image of the
organization changed externally, and the internal identity of the organization began to
follow suit. This cue was also important in enhancing the plausibility of the change
agenda in the organization. External validation of the work being done at the college
made the re-positioning strategy of the organization more plausible, and the social and
ongoing nature of sensemaking re-enforced the possibility that the new identity was
real. The investment strategy was also championed by an individual within the
organization, who demonstrated discursive power in presenting the narrative of change,
extracting cues, and influencing identity construction.
By engaging participants in a process of active “sensemaking” (Weick, 1995) as
they share their narratives of change, Thurlow’s study utilizes critical sensemaking
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by contributing to the creation of space for multiple voices in the investigation of the
language of organizational change.
Although sensemaking and critical sensemaking are still not widely recognized as a
method of analysis, there have been several studies that focus on a wide range of
organizations and situations that use sensemaking as a heuristic for understanding the
processes that led to the various outcomes. These include an early application of critical
sensemaking in a study of the Westray mining disaster in Nova Scotia in which 26 men
were killed (O’Connell and Mills, 2003). Here, the authors explore the construction of
organizational crisis through the discourse of media. Through critical sensemaking,
they show how the media served as a disproportionate influence in the creation of
a plausible organizational narrative after the crisis. By implicating the practices of
journalistic work and the relationships between news workers and those holding power
in organizations, O’Connell and Mills found that among available and plausible early
narratives of this event, enactment of a discourse of natural disaster and tragedy has
prevailed over those that incorporated human agency and organizational culpability.
In a similar vein, Helms Mills and Weatherbee (2006) used sensemaking properties to
help understand the actions, activities, and sensemaking processes that occurred within
and between several organizations working collectively in response to a major hurricane
in Atlantic Canada. Their research highlighted the importance of organizational identity
as a critical element in the sensemaking process and showed how this affected the
processes of sensegiving, sensetaking, and sensemaking between the emergency
response organizations and what impact this had on collective decision making.
Other uses of Weick’s sensemaking as a method include a study of business school
rankings (Helms Mills et al., 2006), which combined ethnostatistics with a sensemaking
framework to explore how and why Canadian business schools and universities use
comparative rankings and performance measures to signal to audiences about selected
features and characteristics of their institutions. Specifically, the authors deconstructed
the production, meaning, and rhetoric used by business schools and universities by
drawing on accreditation and rankings in the processes of socially constructing a sense
of academic standing that is used to project a plausible image to both external
and internal audiences. Sensemaking has also been proposed as a useful heuristic
for understanding identity construction and resistance by call centre employees
(Carroll et al., 2008), the process of institutionalizing workplace spirituality, as well as a
way to study how and why workplace spirituality initiatives are wholly accepted by
some individuals and resisted by others (McKee et al., 2008).
Conclusion
In the 15 years that have passed since Weick published Sensemaking in Organizations,
sensemaking as an analytic approach has been incorporated into a number of research
studies (i.e. Brown, 2000, 2004; Boudes and Laroche, 2009; Berry, 2001). The majority of
the work in this area highlights the strong connections between narrative analysis
and sensemaking in the social construction of meaning. However, there is still a lack
of empirical studies that draw specifically upon Weick’s framework as a method of
analysis. Here, we have tried to show what sensemaking is, what its deficiencies are,
how these can be overcome by the merging of Weick’s original model, with formative
context theory, poststructural discourse analysis, and rules theory, and how
sensemaking has been applied across a variety of situations.
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With the recognition of identity construction as a pivotal element of critical
sensemaking, we feel that it offers research into identity work, in particular by providing
ways to understand how identity is embedded in and from selected discourses and the
ignoredsocial psychological processes within which these discoursesoperate (HelmsMills
and Mills, 2008). As well, agency is better explained because critical sensemaking
demonstrates the processes whereby individuals make sense of their reality (through
ongoing identity construction that enables them to extract cues to make events plausible).
Plausibility also increases the potential of critical sensemaking as a heuristic. Thus,
the discursive power of the actor proposing a particular manner in which to make
sense of an experience, the access individuals have to a plurality of discourse, and in
fact, the access individuals have to the proposed meaning, all influence plausibility.
The centrality of this property explains the process not only of how some discourses
are privileged over others but also how plausibility is itself contextual.
It is our contention that sensemaking on its own, makes an important contribution to
our understanding of everyday life because of its focus on the social psychological
processes of organizing. Sensemaking is an ethnomethodology of organizing (Mills, 2008).
We have already seen how sensemaking can be a useful heuristic to understand the
processes that contribute to, or exacerbate organizational disasters, how it can be used to
understand resistance because sensemaking helps us to understand the process of agency
in organizationaldecision making. Sensemaking has explanatory properties that allow the
researcher to shed light on the process of structuration and the discursiveness of discourse.
Whereas critical sensemaking has the potential for feminist research because it provides
the means to trace the psychological processes that lead to the creation of gendered
sub-structures and it has the capacity to explain how discriminatory practices become
acceptable over time. In short use of Weick’s sensemaking framework and critical
sensemaking has the potential for social change (Mills, 2008).
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About the authors
Jean Helms Mills, PhD, is a Professor of Management at the Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary’s
University in Halifax, Canada. She is the author of Making Sense of Organizational Change
(Routledge, 2003) and has co-authored and edited six additional books. Jean is an Associate Editor
for Gender, Work and Organization and past Associate Editor of Culture and Organization, as well
as serving on the editorial boards of several other journals. Jean Helms Mills is the corresponding
author and can be contacted at: jean.mills@smu.ca
Amy Thurlow is Department Chair and an Assistant Professor in the department of public
relations at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax. Her research is in the areas of
organizational communication, change, and sensemaking. She has a PhD in Management from
Saint Mary’s University, Halifax and is an accredited Public Relations Practitioner and a
Member of the Canadian Public Relations Society.
Albert J. Mills, PhD, is Director of the PhD (Management) programme at the Sobey School of
Business, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He is the author, co-author,
and co-editor of 14 books, including Gendering Organizational Analysis (1991), Managing
the Organizational Melting Pot (1997), and Sex, Strategy and the Stratosphere: Airlines and
the Gendering of Organizational Culture. He has just completed the Sage Encyclopedia of Case
Study Research.
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