Sensemaking in Organizations: Taking Stock and Moving Forward

摘要

Looking back over earlier reviews of the field and recommendations for future scholarship shows the considerable advances that sensemaking research has made in the last decade. There has been a burgeoning of empirical research in diverse organizational contexts, examining sensemaking by and between actors at different levels of the organization. Scholars now study how meaning is made in response to relatively minor surprises or ambiguities as well as major disasters, recognize the role of emotion as well as cognition, talk, and other kinds of action in the sensemaking process, and appreciate the challenges of constructing accounts that are widely shared across a collective. Initial forays have been made to examine embodiment and sociomateri-ality in sensemaking, and to link sensemaking processes to institutions and other macro-social structures. We encourage more work in these latter domains, and believe several fields would benefit from rigorous research that connects sensemaking to other important team and organizational processes.