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In the novel, The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers probes the American malaise through the longings of a young adolescent girl. Twelve‐year‐old Frankie no longer sees the world as round and inviting as a school globe. No, the world is huge and cracked and turning a thousand miles an hour. Indeed, the world seems separate from herself. In the midst of chaos, Frankie sees her brother's upcoming wedding as a chance to feel connected, to feel that she matters. The story focuses on Frankie's efforts to be a “member of the wedding,” as she recognizes, “they are the we of me.”

Service research has previously documented service providers’ role in addressing the barriers of technology mediation, mostly at the service delivery level. The purpose of this study is to enhance our understanding about the role of service providers who hold strategic and operational roles, as well as investigate the impact of coordinated, organization-wide initiatives in dealing with the demands and associated emotional ambivalence of technology-mediated services.

This qualitative study draws from a series of in-depth interviews with health-care service providers who hold strategic and operational roles in health-care organizations along with participant observation to develop an understanding of the broader organizational context of telehealth services.

This paper outlines the strategic sense-giving process and highlights how health-care service providers who hold strategic and operational roles enact the sense-giver role. This study illustrates that strategic sense-giving involves the recognition of sense-making gaps; identification of sense-giving opportunities; and provision of templates of action.

This study illustrates that sense-giving can be performed by a number of organizational members in a more formalized way which extends informal sense-giving efforts at the peer-to-peer level. The importance of strategic sense-giving in providing templates of action for service providers and consumers is highlighted. This study also shows how strategic sense-giving safeguards against confusion and errors by communicating appropriate ways of using technology. Finally, the role of strategic sense-giving in helping service providers and consumers cope with the emotional ambivalence of technology-mediated service interactions are demonstarted.