Search results

The purpose of this paper is to analyze current literature on critical sensemaking (CSM) to assess its significance and potential for understanding the role of agency in management and organizational studies.

The analysis involves an examination of a selection of 51 applied studies that cite, draw on and contribute to CSM, to assess the challenges and potential of utilizing CSM.

The paper reveals the range of organizational issues that this work has been grappling with; the unique insights that CSM has revealed in the study of management and organizations; and some of the challenges and promises of CSM for studying agency in context. This sets up discussion of organizational issues and insights provided by CSM to reveal its potential in dealing with issues of agency in organizations. The sheer scope of CSM studies indicates that it has relevance for a range of management researchers, including those interested in behavior at work, theories of organization, leadership and crisis management, diversity management, emotion, ethics and justice, and many more.

The main focus is restricted to providing a working knowledge of CSM rather than other approaches to agency.

The paper outlines the challenges and potential for applying the CSM theory.

The paper reveals the range of problem-solving issues that CSM studies have been applied to.

This is the first major review of the challenges and potential of applying CSM; concluding with a discussion of its strengths and limitations and providing a summary of insights for future work.

This chapter looks at kindness in organizations through the perspectives of critical sensemaking and the communicatively constituted organization (CCO). These perspectives unlock questions about the meaning of kindness and the challenges for individuals within organizations to make sense of how kindness is enacted around them. This approach is in contrast to a growing literature encouraging kindness as strategy within the workplace, emphasizing the potential of strategic kindness to improve employee and organizational performance. From the CCO perspective, kindness is reflected as a socially constructed phenomenon. Through this critical lens, this chapter will challenge assumptions about kindness within organizations, exploring the ways in which power and privilege influence its meaning.

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.

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.

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.

A heuristic can help people to understand the socio‐psychological properties involved in behavioural outcomes.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the change experience of a regional health centre that was merged in the late 1990s and shows how organizational talk becomes privileged in the change process, and how some talk becomes meaningful in the constitution of organizational identity.

The paper analyzes the process through which some talk is privileged in the organizational change process. The deconstruction of language used throughout this analysis highlights the relationship between sites of power and the ability to affect sensemaking among organizational members. Using a post‐structuralist approach, the authors apply the analytic framework of critical sensemaking (CSM) and critical discourse analysis.

Organizational talk is presented as the enactment of a sensemaking process and insights are offered into the process of how organizational identities are maintained, altered or constrained during change. The discursive effects of the language of change, including the belief that change is actually a discursive process about the mutual constitution of language and identity in a process of making sense of the discourse of change, are discussed.

The merging of critical discourse analysis with CSM provides an alternative means of understanding organizational change, including the socio‐psychological processes that occur within the privileging of the language of change.

For organizational change practitioners, the paper provides insights into the importance of how organizational members make sense of the change language discourse, which can affect how they introduce future change processes.

The paper provides a novel way of understanding the change process and furthers the empirical use of (critical) sensemaking as a method.

Adaptivity has long been recognized as a key aspect of teaching and shown to be particularly important for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers leading discussions about texts. Teachers' abilities to make such adjustments are especially important when facilitating discussions in digital contexts, as was made clear with the shift to virtual teaching caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the structure and process of teacher inquiry supported ELA teachers in enacting and cultivating adaptive repertoires for facilitating discussion in online contexts during the disruptions of the 2020–2021 school year.

As an inquiry team comprising teacher-researchers from secondary and university-based contexts, the authors used practitioner inquiry methods in the context of a multi-year, multi-sited study involving, design-based and teacher-research methodologies.

This paper shows how teachers’ engagement in digital teacher inquiry groups supported their willingness to be playful and adapt their practices in response to one another, creating conditions for powerful teacher learning through relational inquiry online. This paper identified three specific relational practices that were critical for cultivating adaptive repertories in teachers’ learning with and from each other: cultivating empathy; attuning to silences and actively listening; and decentering authority across multiple platforms and modalities. The authors discuss how teachers carried these practices to and from their digital discussions with their students and with each other, demonstrating how this recursive cycle of inquiry and practice deepened their learning, relationships and adaptive repertoires.

The authors discuss the implications of these practices for equity-oriented and dialogic teacher learning that can transform classroom practice, illustrating the power of online teacher inquiry groups for developing ELA teachers’ adaptive expertise – something urgently important for teaching in digitally mediated contexts and through unsettled times.