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This paper considers the role of culture in crisis management narratives. The importance of sensemaking and sense-giving to crisis management is expanded by exploring how understanding organization culture may affect the plausibility of sense-giving narratives in crises.

The crisis management, sensemaking, sense-giving and organizational culture literature studies are briefly reviewed. The paper then explores how plausibility may be dependent on organizational culture and how different cultures may create different dependencies. Propositions are developed and the potential organizational interventions based on these propositions in the action research tradition are offered, as they are potential practical and research implications.

Organizational cultures as shared sensemaking mechanisms provide leaders with the framework for constructing crisis management messages. A plausible message must resonate within the shared cultural experiences of members to shape and direct behaviors during a crisis while maintaining necessary flexibility to evolve as the crisis progresses.

Potential avenues of future research include empirically testing the effects of cultural alignment on crisis management messaging employing action research or other methods, how strength of culture affects the process and the malleability of plausibility.

Practical implications include an organization's understanding of how culture affects not only the messages sent but also how employees might receive the sense-giving narratives. The paper also highlights the importance of flexibility in sense-giving narratives to allow evolution of the message as the crisis changes. Additional practical implications are provided.

This manuscript considers the role of culture in crisis management sense-giving narratives, a topic that has received little research attention. The manuscript argues that aligning the narrative within the organization's shared cultural understanding will increase employee acceptance and adherence to the message. The paper further discusses the importance of flexibility in the sense-giving narratives as the crisis changes.

Service research has previously documented service providers’ role in addressing the barriers of technology mediation, mostly at the service delivery level. The purpose of this study is to enhance our understanding about the role of service providers who hold strategic and operational roles, as well as investigate the impact of coordinated, organization-wide initiatives in dealing with the demands and associated emotional ambivalence of technology-mediated services.

This qualitative study draws from a series of in-depth interviews with health-care service providers who hold strategic and operational roles in health-care organizations along with participant observation to develop an understanding of the broader organizational context of telehealth services.

This paper outlines the strategic sense-giving process and highlights how health-care service providers who hold strategic and operational roles enact the sense-giver role. This study illustrates that strategic sense-giving involves the recognition of sense-making gaps; identification of sense-giving opportunities; and provision of templates of action.

This study illustrates that sense-giving can be performed by a number of organizational members in a more formalized way which extends informal sense-giving efforts at the peer-to-peer level. The importance of strategic sense-giving in providing templates of action for service providers and consumers is highlighted. This study also shows how strategic sense-giving safeguards against confusion and errors by communicating appropriate ways of using technology. Finally, the role of strategic sense-giving in helping service providers and consumers cope with the emotional ambivalence of technology-mediated service interactions are demonstarted.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how executives can rapidly gain employee acceptance for strategic change through reciprocal sensegiving. The author draw on a processual case study of a transformational European merger to study this question, highlighting the properties of reciprocity in making sense of urgent strategic change, then developing them through the lens of a gift exchange.

The author draws on several qualitative methods to study sensegiving and sensemaking processes in Alpha and Beta from 2011 to 2014: insider-outsider team meetings at the beginning, mid-way and at the end of the merger integration process, ethnographic field notes during a four-month research internship, one focus group meeting with Alpha and Beta managers after the announcement of the redistribution of managerial positions, interviews with a carefully selected sample of top and middle managers, participant observation in key sensegiving meetings with top managers and “custodians,” triangulation with secondary data from the database Factiva, and finally follow-up insider corroboration of the findings by the research intern who took up a management position at Alpha in 2014.

Likening executive and employee sensegiving to a gift-giving and gift-returning exchange, the author elucidates how executives induce employees to quickly “give in” to strategic change imperatives. the author single out the key third party role of custodians of reciprocity in the mechanism, using the metaphor of the Trojan horse to illustrate its executive use and point to the underexplored darker side of prosocial sensegiving dynamics.

Further research should clarify the long-term advantages and disadvantages of the mechanism. The Trojan horse mechanism possibly sacrifices long-term reciprocity for short-term purposes. Following the example of executives in this case study, use of the Trojan horse mechanism should be followed by attention to socio-political balance concerns, including new procedures that clarify the link between value creation aims and employees’ collective contribution. Without such a cohesion-building exercise, employees’ feelings of procedural injustice may build up, resulting in negative reciprocity in subsequent change projects.

The work indicates that a leader’s visionary credentials are not the main source of her norm-shaping power in a project of urgent strategic change. Visionary credentials are welcomed by the dominant group of employees as long as they are framed as a symbolic management exercise that will not substantially impact socio-political balance. Substantively, employees make sense of the justice of urgent strategic change primarily through the lens of custodians and their “power from the past.”

All in all, executives should use the Trojan horse mechanism sparingly, in contexts of urgent strategic change and institutionalized employee behavior. Working with sources and voices of resistance from lower levels of management is more likely to yield symbiotic integration benefits.

Applied to the problem of rapid strategic change in a non-crisis context, the Trojan horse mechanism is a solution to the question: how can executives avoid lengthy socio-political confrontations and quickly induce employee ownership of painful strategic changes?

The promotion of US exports has been a priority for the US Department of Commerce, with the aim of reducing the trade deficit. This, combined with the worldwide reduction in trade barriers, has opened up a number of foreign markets for US companies. A key element of export sales development is successful sales negotiations between US exporters and potential foreign buyers. This study examines sales negotiations between US exporters and foreign buyers from 47 different countries. A large‐scale model of the determinants of satisfaction in exporter‐importer sales negotiations is developed and tested. This model incorporates a series of antecedents (cultural divergence, contextual familiarity, goal compatibility, interdependence, trust, social orientation, cooperative orientation) and two major process variables (sense‐making and sense‐giving) which bring in a communications perspective. The effects of sense‐making and sense‐giving on flexibility and conflict and the impact of flexibility and conflict on satisfaction, the ultimate outcome variable, are also examined. The proposed model is tested with data gathered from 179 respondent US export/international sales managers. The fit was found to be excellent. Implications are provided for US export sales executives, along with a discussion of suggestions for future research.

For organizational leaders, managing strategic change is a primary management activity (By, 2005). Reflecting its significance as a management function, there is now a substantial body of literature and many dynamic models and “recipes” advising managers how to lead and implement strategic change. These models present an ordered macro approach to what, in reality, is a highly complex, recursive, and messy process. In this chapter we eschew these neatly packaged change management processes and explore the micro level arguments of leaders as they grapple with the uncertainty of strategic change and seek to give primacy to their sense of the change and related issues. Based on the findings of our extensive micro level study, we present a theoretical model which explains the mechanisms that underpin this important activity.

This paper aims to argue that, while destination benchmarking and visitor surveys seek to measure the visitor experience, they privilege the destination manager or researcher rather than taking the visitor's viewpoint. It seeks to suggest that capturing and analysing visitor stories while in the destination can facilitate understanding of how destination image changes with actual experience, and what factors or attributes are important, thereby offering a deeper insight into the process through which destination experience is transformed (sense making) and transmitted (sense giving) via those stories, that all important word of mouth publicity.

Unstructured interviews were recorded with visitors in Edinburgh and Greenwich. An interpretive approach was employed in analysing the interview data to uncover facets of visitor experience affecting the image conveyed through the narrative.

The research reveals three elements involved in the sense making and sense giving process and sets out the three categories of visitor consumption characteristics which are implicated in the process.

Although the outcomes of the sense making and sense giving process are mediated by the incidents, interactions and characteristics of the individual visitor, the process itself is common to all visitors. Analysing visitor narratives to uncover the mediating factors illuminates the visitor's actual destination experience and its impact on their understanding or image of a destination. Narratives proved to be a useful research tool.

The interview and analysis techniques used could be readily adapted for use alongside existing standardised visitor survey tools to provide destination managers and marketers a greater understanding of the impact of customer care and visitor management programmes and how narrative may be useful in tailoring destination marketing to meet the requirements of specific visitor groups.

The paper demonstrates the utility of capturing and analysing visitor narratives at the point of destination consumption for understanding actual destination experience and the way in which it is transmitted as word of mouth information to others.

The purpose of this paper is to capture legitimising principles of recent successions to the throne through narrative time. Further, this study considers leaders’ sense-giving to succession.

This research applies a “temporal narrative analysis” to explicate legitimising principles of narrative time in three recent case studies of royal succession: the kingdoms of Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The findings show that royal successions in three modern European constitutional monarchies are legitimised through giving sense to narrative time. The legitimacy of timing succession is embedded in multiple temporal narratives, in which heirs apparent are brought forward as the new generation who will modernise the monarchy.

The paper presents an innovative conceptual framework of sense-giving to succession through narrative time. This framework will be helpful to scholars who aim to grasp legitimising principles of temporal narration in leadership succession.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role and implications of storytelling and narrative as a means of making sense of, and giving sense to, the ambiguous concept of materiality.

The use of stories was “discovered” through the authors' attempts to “make sense” of data from 16 interviews with participants from the financial and nonfinancial reporting and assurance contexts. The authors analyse the participants' use of stories through a sensemaking/sensegiving lens.

While participants struggle to define what materiality is, they are able to tell “stories” about materiality in action. The authors find stories are a key vehicle through which participants make sense of and give sense to materiality, for themselves and (an)other. Participants tell three types of stories in sensemaking/sensegiving processes: the lived, the adopted and the hypothetical. The authors further identify “rehearsed” and “ongoing” narratives, which take any of the three story types. The use of stories to make and give sense to materiality reveals a disconnect between the static, technical definitions of materiality currently favoured by standard setters and guidance providers, and the creative authoring processes the participants employ.

The authors argue for a move towards the use of stories and narratives about materiality in standard setting, specifically “materiality in action”, which the findings suggest may assist in creating shared understandings of the ambiguous concept.

While previous research considers what materiality means within financial and nonfinancial reporting and assurance contexts, the authors empirically analyse how people understand and make sense/give sense to materiality. The authors also contribute to the use of sensemaking/sensegiving processes within the accounting literature.

It is commonly acknowledged that history matters in strategy. However, the strategy literature mainly discusses history in terms of path dependency, leaving little room for managerial agency, despite growing anecdotal evidence that managers can actively draw on corporate history to improve decision-making. An emerging literature on how managers use the past to give sense to internal and external stakeholders has given rise to a more agent-based approach to history, but while sense-giving is commonly connected to sense-making as a driver of strategic change, the role of history in sense-making remains unexplored. Drawing on the concept of analogical reasoning, this chapter theorizes the connection between corporate archives and managerial sense-making, arguing that analogies drawn from past experience can reduce uncertainty and foster learning. This theory leads to the suggestion that consulting the corporate archive can promote strategic renewal and thus boost performance.

This paper aims to explore the mechanism of brand internalisation when a brand transcends national borders. It focuses on the ways international and local managers interpret the brand, develop brand understanding and enact it through communication with other colleagues.

The research is based on a case study of IKEA in Russia and China during 2003‐2004.

The processes of brand conceptualising, comprehending and activating are identified, characterised by a weakening collective sense making amongst employees locally. Brand activating represents a discontinuity stage of brand internalisation when a shared brand understanding by employees becomes increasingly difficult to achieve. As such managers should broaden their brand contexts to include cultural elements and cues, involve local staff as well as adopt roles which facilitate collective sense‐making processes.

New research should explore local employees' brand experiences throughout their brand internalisation. It should also delve deeper into the ways they enact their brand in relationships with other local stakeholders.

The study argues that international managers need greater awareness of theirs' and local employees' roles in brand internalisation. Managers need to create common frameworks for sense making and work towards partnership relationships with local stakeholders.

This is an original paper of value to global retailers and other branded organisations.