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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 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 study explores the politics of ideology in the process of sensegiving and sensemaking at a Japanese retailer in Hong Kong. Studies on power and politics are scarce despite key role of power and politics in understanding the factors behind the conflict between the management's policy legitimization (sensegiving) and employees' policy interpretation (sensemaking). By using the three dimensions proposed in the critical sensemaking approach (discourse, rules and contexts), this paper explores the complex mechanism of power and politics in sensemaking and sensegiving.

Using 15 months of participant observation as a salesperson, this paper discusses how the Japan-centric customer service philosophy (dominant discourse), customer service policies and practices (organizational rules) and asymmetric power structure between the Japanese global headquarters and Hong Kong subsidiaries (formative contexts) are presented and perpetuated through the sensegiving–sensemaking process.

Dominant discourse was observed in the management's sensegiving, which placed the Japanese style of customer service over others. This ethnocentric dominant discourse informed the creation of customer service policies, although the realization of the discourse was determined by the employees' conflicting interpretations of the organizational rules. As a formative context, an asymmetric power structure was present that positioned the Hong Kong subsidiary as subservient to the global headquarters in Japan. This shows that the political process of sensegiving and sensemaking deeply implicates the dominant discourse, organizational rules and power structure as central forces that determine the level of perpetuating ideology.

This research illustrates the wider implications of power and politics in sensegiving–sensemaking studies and provides a complex picture of ethnocentric management.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce Bourdieu’s social theory, and its “thinking tools” of habitus, doxa, field and capital, as a sensemaking theory.

The emic research studied, for a particular group, the firm-wide implementation of a new system. The study used data occurring naturally in the organization (executive newsletters), and externally (third-party surveys), as well as 23 participant interviews to structure the social space (field) and determine what is of interest (identity). Interviews were coded for habitus, doxa, field, capital, symbolic violence and strategies to re-assert interviewees’ own doxa versus logic imposed by the powerful.

A unique, esteemed identity was being erased through executive attempts to introduce a new culture at the firm, and the new systems represented a challenge to this valued identity. Participants used strategies to re-assert their identity through not participating in the logic of the new tool: discussing misuse, lack of use, relative unimportance and low priority of the new tool.

Change that threatens an esteemed, valued identity is more likely to be resisted. The logic of an established practice or system (beyond merely gathering user requirements) is beneficial in understanding potential reactions to a new system. Change in systems that occur simultaneously with the imposition of a new culture, particularly where the system is seen as being a representation of that imposed culture, may be resisted through non-practice (misuse or lack of use) of the new system.

The paper demonstrates the applicability of Bourdieu’s social theory to organizational studies, providing a sensemaking of change and acts of resistance.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the critical management literature through a fusion of Latin and North American lenses (one author is from Argentina and one from Canada), to question the extant women in management literature, which is rooted in an epistemology that serves to construct the notion of a broad, universal set of expectations of the role of men, women and managers, in which other ethnic groups, in this case men and women from so-called Latin American countries, are taken for granted.

Using a critical sensemaking lens, the paper explores the narratives of female executives in Argentina to help us understand how these women make sense of their careers within a Latin American context and the implications and outcomes of this understanding. The paper's approach involves three interrelated elements – feminist poststructuralism, postcolonialism and critical sensemaking.

The narratives from the Argentinian executives reveals the tension between different cultures and idiosyncrasies among countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico; and that the way to navigate those differences entails understanding and learning about the other. These executive women from Argentina – las jefas – are heard mainly because they represent the managerial identity that multi-national corporations foster in any overseas branch.

In terms of the data used in this study, the paper acknowledges that this is an exploratory study that allows us to access women's stories from a pre-existing source. The paper recognizes that the authors are limited by the texts that are secondary sources, and if the authors had been able to conduct the interviews themselves they might have asked different questions.

The findings of this research can help organizations to develop and implement a pluriversal and inclusive equity training programme through and awareness of the sensemaking of those involved.

The use of a critical framework on postcolonialism, feminism and postructuralism together with critical sensemaking to understand female executives from the South of America.

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.

The purpose of this article is to address research gaps relating to agency and institutionalism in new institutional theory (NIT) and institutional work (IW) and use the critical sensemaking (CSM) approach to bridge the debates around agency, especially on issues of language and discourse, actor network theory (ANT) and history.

A conceptual analysis of the literature is performed to discuss issues of agency in IW and CSM in organizations, and examples of empirical studies are used to illustrate connectivity, contrast and fusion.

The analysis illustrates points of distance (rather than disconnect), but most importantly, connectivity and the potential for further developments between the literature on IW and CSM.

Discussion around new possibilities to focus on agency has the potential to contribute to humanist thinking about the (agentic) character of organizations and the potential for social change.

The article contributes to the discussion of agency in the organization through a starting point (i.e. CSM) outside of NIT.

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.

This research investigates the politics of smiling as a central driver for employees to navigate power dynamics within the prevailing discourse at a Japanese retailer in Hong Kong. Existing critical management studies emphasize power in organizational language, often neglecting the role of employees’ emotions in sustaining discourse. This paper examines employees’ smiles as tools for legitimizing (sensegiving) and interpreting (sensemaking) discourse. It explores how the use of their emotional display influenced the outcome of the company’s attempt to legitimize discourse. This research divides the discourse process into five phases: formation, codification, implementation, monitoring and adaptation.

Using the critical sensegiving and sensemaking approach, this paper discusses how employees’ interpretations of corporate policies shape the perpetuation of dominant discourse and outcomes. Data were collected through the author’s long-term participant observation in the Hong Kong branches of Japanese retailers.

The formation phase discusses the emergence of a dominant discourse favoring Japanese practices in the company’s Hong Kong operations. Codification involves the conceptualization of standard smiles in customer service policies. In practice (implementation, monitoring and adjustment), employee smiles serve as tools for negotiating power—shaping careers, earnings and shift preferences. This paper argues that this discourse shapes organizational norms while employees’ sensemaking influences the discourse implementation. Furthermore, this paper highlights the transnational impact of Japanese culture in Hong Kong, which has shaped the way Japanese top management and local employees interpret the dominant discourse.

This study demonstrates the importance of discussing the display of emotions and employees’ intentions to understand their impact on the outcome of discourse implementation. This study also reiterates the significance of discussing the influence of one culture on another to understand the broader social context that affects the perpetuation of discourse.