Jean Helms Mills

Making sense of sensemaking: the critical sensemaking approach

– The purpose of this paper is to revisit the oft cited but as yet not operationalized Weicks sensemaking framework, in order to provide suggested ways forward. Development of a method based on Weicks 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 Weicks 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 Weicks original sensemaking approach and demonstrates how it can be used in a range of empirical studies, something that Weick himself suggested was lacking.

Change, talk and sensemaking

Purpose – 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.Design/methodology/approach – 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.Findings – 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, inc...

Workplace spirituality, contested meaning, and the culture of organization

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to existing critiques of workplace spirituality and organizational culture. The paper links the two by problematising definitions of workplace spirituality that employ a “culture approach” to change, in which the construct is limited to a set of values that gives particular meaning to the workplace.Design/methodology/approach – Properties of Weicks sensemaking model combined with a critical sensemaking approach are used to analyze texts in order to show how a spiritual culture may shape the actions of its members by serving as an implicit form of managerial control.Findings – The paper reveals how some texts, Mitroff and Dentons, in particular, advocate workplace spirituality as necessary for organizations and the individuals who work in them to prosper. Simultaneously, such texts may imply a form of pastoral power, the purpose of which is to re‐affirm a positive self‐image, due to the cueing effects of language that is voiced in specific contexts.Pra...

Tales in the manufacture of knowledge: Writing a company history of Pan American World Airways

Abstract The strength of historical accounts of organizations has been their ability to present the development of a particular company or companies in an apparently seamless, linear and concrete fashion (Rowlinson 2004). Recent academic literature on the subject has approached popular and conventional manners of writing company histories with much skepticism, questioning the particular nature and privileged status of knowledge produced in such accounts. Specifically, it has been suggested that understanding the intent of central historical actors, as well as grounding cultural accounts of company histories in the circumstances of their production can aid in a more holistic and in some cases plural (Boje 1995) understanding of the content of the history (Gillespie 1991; Rowlinson 2004). This paper begins with a review of the current literature on company histories in which two commonly discussed perspectives are outlined and discussed.We first argue that missing from the current perspectives of crafting company histories is an understanding of how the socio-political context in which the company history is crafted comes to influence the actual story told or knowledge produced about the company history. Second, it is suggested that a use of Actor-Network Theory or ANT (Latour 1987) may provide some useful insights as to the socio-political process of writing company histories and the influence of these processes on the nature of knowledge produced. Due to the emphasis on performativity in ANT (Law 1992), the third section of this paper extends the first two sections empirically by drawing on materials from the Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) archive at the University of Miami’s Otto Richter Library.1 Through a presentation of the political process of writing a company history of Pan Am, ANT is used to show how the actors involved in crafting the company history negotiate and craft what is now a privileged and taken for granted ‘factual’ company history. Finally, it is proposed that the strength of our approach lies in a recasting of company histories as created and crafted through the negotiated ‘ordering’ (Law 1994) of story-tellers.

Hurricanes Hardly Happen: Sensemaking as a Framework for Understanding Organizational Disasters

This study makes use of Weick’s sensemaking properties to help understand the actions, activities and sensemaking processes that occurred within and between several organizations that were working collectively in response to a hurricane. Through the sensemaking framework, we show how the response efforts were initially ‘disastrous’ themselves, and how effective inter‐organizational response necessitates shared meaning and heedful interrelating (Weick & Roberts, 1993), which we maintain, can only result when there is a convergence of both inter and intra organizational sensemaking. We highlight the importance of organizational identity as a critical element in the sensemaking process and show how this affects the processes of sensegiving, sensetaking, and sensemaking.

Ethnostatistics and Sensemaking: Making Sense of University and Business School Accreditation and Rankings

This article combines ethnostatistics with Weicks 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. These quantitative performance-based strategies include seeking accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business and the use of data produced by Macleans annual university rankings and other performance benchmarks—to position and validate themselves in their academic fields. Specifically, the authors deconstruct the production, meaning, and rhetoric used by business schools and universities when they draw 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.

Making Sense of Workplace Spirituality: Towards a New Methodology

The study of workplace spirituality is a relatively new area in the field of organizational theory. Although interest in the topic has grown significantly over the last 10 years, many of the traditional research methods are not well suited to study workplace spirituality at the organizational level. We propose that sensemaking offers a useful heuristic for understanding 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.

CMS: A satirical critique of three narrative histories

Reflections on the 20th anniversary of Organization provide an opportunity for considerations of the role of the past and history in critical studies of management. Yet, why should we care? Arguably, the pages of Organization are replete with analyses that take into account the past and history. Indeed they are. However, as has been contended elsewhere, such accounts have been remarkably under-theorized for a field noted for its thoroughgoing critique of anything that moves. Nonetheless, it is not our intention to go over that ground so much as provide an appropriate example of the problem at hand. We do this through analysis of three selected accounts of how critical studies of management came into being as a field of study. Drawing on Hayden White’s approach to history, we analyse three histories of critical management studies through a focus on their respective narrative form, choosing to privilege our own narrative as satirical critique. Thus, the article does double duty by directly joining with the reflections on Organization and critical studies of management, while providing an argument for the need for greater theorization of the past and history. In the process we provide some clues to the development of the field of critical studies of management; problematize the associated notions of history and the past and make suggestions for future directions of what has become known as Critical Management Studies.

Markets, organizations, institutions and national identity

Purpose – Through a case study of Pan American World Airways (Pan Am), this paper sets out to explore the roots of twentieth century globalization and the postcolonial nature of the trading relations involved.Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on Foucaults broad notion of “the archive” a critical hermeneutics approach is used to examine a series of company‐produced texts, including minutes, travelogues, company narratives, annual reports, film, diaries, and published histories.Findings – The paper argues that Pan Am contributed to the “idea of Latin America” and, in the process contributed to practices of dependency that served the interests of the USA. Drawing on a case study of Pan Am, the paper further argues that multi‐national corporations help to establish the contours of international trade by influencing the very character and boundaries of the territories traded in, with troubling implications for the countries traded in.Research limitations/implications – As a detailed case study extension o...

Theorizing the Past: Critical engagements

Like the ‘individual’, ‘the past’ is pervasive yet under-theorized in management and organizational studies (MOS) (Booth and Rowlinson 2006; Nord and Fox 1996). The idea of ‘the past’ is clearly embedded in a number of approaches and foci. The notion of organizational culture, for example, suggests a culmination of past factors that influence present behaviour; the theoretical character of ‘the past’ and its reconstruction, however, are rarely examined within studies of organizational culture (Rowlinson and Procter 1999). Similarly ‘the past’ is embedded in such concepts as ‘institutional field’ (Khurana 2007), ‘population ecology’ (Hannan and Freeman 1977), ‘labour process’ (Braverman 1974), ‘narratives’ (Brown et al. 2008), ‘tracking’ (Mintzberg and Rose 2003), ‘longitudinal study’ (Delios and Ensign 2000), ‘evolutionary analysis’ (Baum et al. 2004) and various other ways of talking about the past. Less obvious examples run the gamut from statistical analyses of preand post-test findings, through to management textbooks where considerable space is given over to the development of specific theories, such as motivation and leadership. More obvious examples can be found in dedicated ‘histories’ of management, organizations and business (Wren 2005). While the former tend to ignore the past as a theoretical issue or concern (except perhaps as a variable), the latter, including but not limited to mainstream