Theory of Organizational Sensemaking
Acronym
N/A
Alternate name(s)
N/A
Main dependent construct(s)/factor(s)
Enactment/Action in sensible environment
Main independent construct(s)/factor(s)
Extraction of cues, Construction of plausible image, Selection, Retention,Ecological change
Concise description of theory
“Sensemaking is a way station on the road to a consensually constructed, coordinated system of action” (Taylor and Van Every 2000, p. 275). Stating more elaborately, sensemaking is viewed as a process of organizing, it involves turning chaos circumstances that contains cues about what is happening into a situation comprehended explicitly in words that has meanings which serves as platform for action. Sensemaking happens in a sequential manner. First, people identifies cues about organizational circumstances. Second, they extract these cues and are converted to words and categories. Third, they make plausible sense (image or framework) retrospectively and enact what is needed to bring order to the ongoing circumstance. Sensemaking as a process focus on the interplay between action and interpretation of context in which action is taken than the traditional way where sole focus was given to the action of individual decision maker. In other words, when people confront with chaos and complex situation, and ask “what’s the story here and now what should I do”.
Sensemaking is distinguished from other explanatory process (understanding, interpretation and attribution) by seven characteristics, which serve as a guideline to what actually sensmaking is, how it works and where it can fail. These seven characteristics are 1) Grounded in identity construction (Need within individual to have a sense of identity) 2) Retrospective (Meanings are formulated based on the reflection of their experience) 3) Enactive of sensible environments (activity of “making” that which is sensed) 4) Social (sensemaking is a social process) 5) Ongoing ( sensemaking never start or ends, assuming that individual always in middle of an ongoing situation) 6) Focused on and by extracted cues ( extracted cues act as a point of reference to plausible meaning of situation) 7) Driven by plausibility rather than accuracy (sensemaking is achieved through plausible reasoning based on incomplete information but will fit the facts, and accuracy not necessary condition).
Diagram/schematic of theory
N/A
Originating author(s)
Karl E. Weick (1969, 1995)
Seminal articles
Weick, K.E. The Social Psychology of Organizations, Addison‐Wesley Publishing Co., Reading, MA, 1969. Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations (Vol. 3). Sage. Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the process of sensemaking. Organization science, 16(4), 409-421. Weick, K. E. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative science quarterly, 628-652. Weick, K. E. (2012). Making sense of the organization, Volume 2: The impermanent organization (Vol. 2). John Wiley & Sons.
Originating area
Social Psychology (Katz & Kahn, 1966)
Level of analysis
Organization
Links to WWW sites describing theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking, Wikipedia entry on Sensemaking
Links from this theory to other theories
Enactment Theory (Weick, 2005)
IS articles that use the theory
Jensen, T. B., Kjærgaard, A., & Svejvig, P. (2009). Using institutional theory with sensemaking theory: a case study of information system implementation in healthcare. Journal of Information Technology, 24(4), 343-353. Herrmann, A. F. (2007). Stockholders in cyberspace: Weick’s sensemaking online. The Journal of Business Communication (1973), 44(1), 13-35. Seidel, S., Recker, J., & Vom Brocke, J. (2013). Sensemaking and sustainable practicing: functional affordances of information systems in green transformations. Mis Quarterly, 1275-1299. Russell, D. M., Stefik, M. J., Pirolli, P., & Card, S. K. (1993, May). The cost structure of sensemaking. In Proceedings of the INTERACT'93 and CHI'93 conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 269-276). ACM.
Contributor(s)
Ben Krishna, Doctoral Student at Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, India
Date last updated
18/12/2019 Please feel free to make modifications to this site. In order to do so, you must register.