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The purpose of this paper is to suggest that a key role of the professional US NFL head coach is as a sensemaker, sensegiver, and driver of intentional change.

Intentional change theory and sensemaking are used to explore NFL head coaches' roles as sense‐givers of intentional change during their pre‐game and post‐game press conferences.

This paper presents propositions that if substantiated demonstrate that examining professional head coaches' behavior during pre‐ and post‐game press conferences will yield insight into the coaches' skills as sensemakers, sensegivers, and agents of the intentional change process.

In addition to this paper being conceptual, not empirical, other limitations exist. There may be gender differences in coaching behavior; however, since there are no female NFL head coaches, gender‐related patterns can not be observed in this context. Since this study only addresses one sport, there may be differences in how coaches manage change in different sports. Future research will test these hypotheses empirically, distinguish these behaviors with respect to team performance, study different sports, and examine similarities and differences of male and female coaches in the same sport.

If the propositions in this paper are supported by future empirical work, this paper gives coaches (and those who evaluate them) additional insight into their behavior. It also will give another view into what makes for a successful coach.

While research inspired by athletic coaches influences organizational development research, few studies examine athletic coaches as organizational change agents. This paper conceptualizes coaches beyond their technical roles; it focuses on their sensegiving about the team's progress along the intentional change trajectory that they have set.

This paper uses the strategy‐as‐practice perspective to explore the relationship between practices and organisational routines of governance in pluralistic contexts. The purpose of this paper is to explore empirically how strategising activities and organisational actions interact. It discusses and illustrates the relationship between strategising and organising through routines of governance, and in particular the use of board papers.

This research is based on a single longitudinal “soft” case study. The researchers collected both primary and secondary data. Primary data collection took place from the end of 2004 until early in 2008. Primary data collection occurred through three main methods: interviews, meeting observations, and “shadowing” of participants; six participants were each shadowed for a working week (five days), and another participant was shadowed for three days. Interviews were held with 20 participants and typically lasted for between one and two hours. The interviews and meetings resulted in over 150 hours of audio recordings. In addition, notes of shadowing covered 420 hours.

The first section of this paper presents the theoretical foundation before describing the research method. A discussion then explores the relationships between one of the specific strategising practices – the creation of board papers – and formal organisational routines of governance. The conclusion suggests that in professional service firms, informal practices that provide feedback are important in ensuring the stability and continuity of formal organisational routines.

The links between micro, meso, and macro levels – that is to say, between actors, organisational actions, and institutional field practices – have already been broadly investigated. However, much of the research remains theoretical rather than empirical in nature. Furthermore, although researchers have been increasingly interested in strategising within organisations featuring multiple goals, diffuse networks of power, and knowledge‐based work processes, a deep understanding of practices in these organisations is still underdeveloped.

In this paper, we contribute to the understanding of how entrepreneurs can deploy their values to enable joint action of heterogeneous stakeholders. Such an understanding forms a critical endeavor to tackle grand challenges adequately. Building on sensegiving research, we conducted a single-case study of an entrepreneurial initiative that tackles gender inequality in Lebanon which has been successful in mobilizing heterogeneous stakeholders who ordinarily would not collaborate with each other. We find that the values of the founders were pivotal for the initiative’s success as those values activated latent values of stakeholders through processes of contextualization and enactment. We subsume these processes under the label value-driven sensegiving. As a result of value-driven sensegiving, heterogeneous stakeholders could make sense of the founders’ aspirational vision and the role they could play in it, which paved ways for tackling grand challenges collaboratively. Our study provides insights into the centrality of values for mobilizing heterogeneous stakeholders across boundaries. Therefore, it contributes to the body of work on sensegiving, societal grand challenges, and new forms of organizing.

Whereas past research has been valuable in explaining how “perceived usefulness” (PU) and “perceived ease of use” (PEU) constructs lead to technology acceptance and refusal behaviors in organizations, it has not explored the antecedents of these two factors. The purpose of this paper is to propose an interpretive approach to the study of front-line employees’ sense making of technological change as well as the understanding of behavioral and psychological origins of PU and PEU.

This study analyses a major transition in work mode induced by an IT innovation implemented within a leading French hospitality company. A qualitative method was employed to answer the research questions. The data were collected using 22 in-depth semi-structured interviews from front-line employees and their line managers in five 4-star hotels in Paris. The participants were asked how they made sense of the technological change and what they consider when they judge the usefulness and the ease of use during the implementation of change.

The analysis revealed that employees’ acceptance of technological change is paradoxical and shaped by a continuous process of sense making when using the IT innovation. The findings also suggest that PU can be explained by factors like job relevance, PEU and output quality. Anxiety, playfulness, perceived enjoyment, objective usability and facilitating conditions were identified as antecedents of PEU.

The paper reports the effect of perceptions of social influence, system characteristics, individual differences and facilitating conditions on PU and PEU constructs in IT adoption process. It is among the first to examine the antecedents of such beliefs in the hospitality industry through the use of a qualitative method. It also shows that that three variables – result demonstrability, computer self-efficacy and social influence process described by subjective norm and image – did not play a significant role in influencing the intensions of using the system through PU and PEU.

Understanding the antecedents of the two key predictors in technology acceptance models allows managers to implement efficient adjustments and interventions in order to positively influence employees’ IT innovation acceptance and use.

This qualitative study contributes to open the black boxes concerning the conceptualizations of PU and PEU. It advances the understanding of the employees’ acceptance of IT innovation.

Inequality is an important organizational phenomenon. Scholars have argued that inequalities persistently dwell in the flow of our lives and have a lingering impact. Yet, despite such compelling evidence, research has overlooked how individuals make sense of the inequalities they face inside and outside the organizations. The purpose of this paper was to address these gaps and capture its complexity on individual lived experiences with inequalities.

The present study used Seidman's adapted 2-interview strategy to collect the data. The first interview placed the participant's life history at the center, allowing the participant to share their childhood and adulthood experiences with inequalities inside and outside the organizations. The second interview focused on the concrete details of the participant's present lived experience and their reflections on the meaning of their experiences. In total, the present study relied on 26 interviews with 13 participants.

Lived experiences provided an extended-time view and allowed the researcher to explore how study participants perceived, coped and were shaped by inequalities throughout their lives. In addition, the sense-making perspective offered a new lens to study inequalities. Findings underscore the racial, class and gendered dynamics within organizations supporting their intersectional impact and acknowledge the pre-existing societal norms that condition individual actions and choices.

The study presents an “engaged” view of inequality to highlight it as a cumulative and complex experience. The findings help us recognize that participants are immersed in their specific contexts to act, negotiate, empower and make decisions under real-life pressures. Overall, the study pushes the boundaries of inequality research beyond its current episodic treatment.

The purpose of this paper is to address the distinctive problems of interventionist research that originate from intervention in ongoing practices as opposed to the experiment's design of a theory‐relevant context.

The paper is an essay, based on arguments of mapping closely and understanding the work environment of the managers under study, and of re‐framing (or re‐education) practices.

The paper finds that the intervention is valued in terms of improved practice, as well as theoretical contribution.

Learning theories (organizational and individual) should be included in the toolbox as well as methods of observing ongoing practices.

Interventionist research changes the way organizations think about how they organize their work (the appellate case); learning theory impacts work organization very concretely.

Management itself is intervention in organizational work practices, intervention in management practices will be something akin to Argyris et al.'s second loop (or Rorty's abnormal discourse) learning, which can be understood as re‐framing (or re‐education) practices. The use of case narratives and storytelling as ways of data capture are of particular interest in that respect.

Traditionally, one of the most central themes of the social teaching of the Church has been the ethical value of the human person as a creature endowed with an original personality. As a person, man works for a particular purpose, in a pragmatic and rational way, with the ability to decide for himself and to achieve fulfilment. For this reason, work is conceived as an essential element of the person, and needs to be performed in freedom. Our principal source will be the social teaching of John Paul II, and in particular his encyclical Laborem Exercens, since this devotes special attention to the issue of human work. Indeed the focus of this encyclical is human work, that is, the individual who achieves fulfilment in his work. It is man himself who gives his work sense and meaning. By working he fulfils his vocation and his very being. Therefore man’s work is “both a destiny and a calling, but above all, work is for man, not man for work” (Laborem Exercens, No. 6). In other words, man’s duty is to work, not only in order to produce and possess, but to achieve fulfilment.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which two factors are associated with identification, the feedback environment and feedback seeking: two forms of identification, supervisor identification and workgroup identification, were linked to matching sources of feedback environment and feedback seeking.

An empirical study was carried out with a sample of working students representing a variety of industries in the USA. Students (n=256) completed a written questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

Results indicated that feedback seeking frequency partially mediated the effect of supervisor feedback environment on supervisor identification. Similarly, feedback seeking partially mediated the effect of coworker feedback environment on workgroup identification.

Despite a cross-sectional design, these results support the role of feedback as a primary explanatory mechanism for how people can come to identify with multiple targets in their work environment.

In order to increase employee identification, organizations should train their managers to engage in contextual behaviors that support the feedback seeking process. Additionally, organizations may want to reinforce these coaching behaviors by incorporating them into the performance appraisal process for managers.

The vast majority of identification research has examined why people come to identify with targets in their work environment. This study represents one of the first to examine how people come to identify with those sources, fulfilling an important gap in the literature.

This article examines Max Weber’s theory of value spheres as a basis for a polytheistic religious sociology of institutional life. Weber’s approach implies institutional theory as a form of comparative religion. Two problems present themselves. If the values of the spheres are to be considered as “gods,” they do not align easily with Weber’s sociology of religion. Given that love was central both as a driver and a constituent in Weber’s understanding of salvation religions, it also implies that love be incorporated into our theorizing of institutional life, something entirely absent in the way we think about enduring forms of social organization. Taking the second seriously may enable us to fabricate a solution to the first.

The authors examine how a not-for-profit organisation (NPO) coordinates NPO's actions during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic to remain focussed on strategic and operational goals.

The authors conducted a live case study of an NPO as the crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. Drawing on a sensemaking perspective that incorporates sensegiving, the authors develop a framework of five types of organisational sensemaking. The authors analyse weekly planning meetings during which managers discussed past performance, forecast performance and the forecast duration of current cash reserves.

The authors show how three of the five types of organisational sensemaking helped to coordinate actions. The authors highlight how accounting information triggers organisational sensemaking processes; but depending on the type of organisational sensemaking, accounting information has little further role. The authors also show that the stability of decisions depends on the types of organisational sensemaking.

The authors show how coordination as a management control practice is enabled by organisational sensemaking within an NPO during a crisis. Organisational sensemaking enabled the agreement of actions, which enabled coordination. Accounting practices provided trigger mechanisms to facilitate organisational sensemaking.

Since this study is the first to examine sensemaking processes and accounting practices in coordination in an NPO in a pandemic, the authors contribute to the limited research on NPOs during crises and on the management control practice of coordination. The authors extend the accounting literature on sensemaking by showing that, whilst accounting triggers organisational sensemaking, accounting is only implicated in one type of organisational sensemaking and by revealing the different outcomes of the different types of organisational sensemaking.