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Human resource development (HRD) research and practice mostly have focused on performance improvement although HRD fundamentally pursues human development as a whole. The purpose of this study is to conceptualize meaningful work in the context of HRD and provide implications for HRD research and practice.

This study reviewed the literature on topics such as meaningful work, the meaning of work, workplace spirituality, the value of work and work as a calling, to understand the concept of meaningful work. In addition, this study reviewed existing studies on meaningful work in HRD journals to investigate the current status of meaningful work research within the field of HRD. This study reviewed the related literature such as meaningful work, the meaning of work, workplace spirituality, the value of work and work as a calling, to understand the concept of meaningful work. In addition, this study reviewed the existing studies on meaningful work in HRD journals to investigate the current status of meaningful work research in HRD.

The findings of this study identified three main themes in conceptualizing meaningful work, namely, positivity; significance and purpose; and human fulfillment. The authors also suggest that the meaningful work discourse in HRD expands a research boundary of HRD and enables a holistic approach to HRD research and practice.

For future research, the authors recommend that HRD research deepens its understanding of meaningful work and its related concepts. They also recommend studies pursuing empirical evidence to reveal the significance of meaningful work.

Given the limited studies on meaningful work in HRD and a lack of understanding of meaningful work, this study proposes a comprehensive understanding of meaningful work, especially within the HRD context. This study also suggests a holistic approach to HRD by stressing a humanistic perspective beyond the performance-oriented HRD.

The national core curriculum is renewed in Finland approximately every ten years, the most recent one being 2016. The core curriculum sets the general goals, providing the foundation for district- and school level curriculum development work (Finnish National Board of Education, 2016). The messages from transnational educational policy (e.g. OECD) are apparent in the core curriculum. However, districts, schools and teachers are highly autonomous in upholding, resourcing and deciding about the curriculum making at the local sites of activity. Accordingly, the curriculum making relies heavily on shared sense-making as a tool for cultivating transformative learning throughout the educational system. The chapter draws on the results of the national “School Matters” research project (2014-2018), to provide the meta-analysis of the sense-making in national curriculum making. Results suggested that the shared sense-making focused on engaging educational practitioners in learning at all layers of the system. However, the means for facilitating shared sense-making between the different layers of the system and curriculum was perceived to be less coherent by the stakeholders at the district and school level, than at the state level. This implies that the educational providers should not only be involved in co-creation of the aims, contents and values of the curriculum document, but also in designing novel and ecologically valid ways for orchestrating the complex and dynamic curriculum making.

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 research is to reveal the gendered nature of social arrangements in order to bring to the surface the hidden discourses that mediate the opportunities of women leaders in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability.

The author uses critical sense-making (CSM) to analyze interviews with CSR leaders toward understanding the interconnected layers of influences they draw from as they make sense of their experiences.

Despite the positioning of women as being untapped resources within CSR, the reality within CSR leadership indicates that resilient, stereotypical social constructions of gender are being (re)created. However, cues can disrupt the ongoing process of sense-making and create shocks that represent opportunities for resistance as discriminatory practices are revealed.

Applying CSM as a methodology and to the field of CSR adds a component to CSR and gender scholarship that is currently missing. CSM as a methodology bridges broader sociocultural discourses and the local site of sense-making, making visible the structures and processes that enable some narratives to become legitimized by the formative context and protect the status quo.

If these leaders are able to use their discursive power to establish an alternate, dominant narrative throughout their organizations – a culture of emotional empathy within CSR – alternate meanings about the nature and purpose of CSR may emerge while highlighting the need for change.

Applying CSM as a methodology and to the field of CSR adds a component to CSR and gender scholarship that is currently missing. CSM as a methodology bridges broader sociocultural discourses and the local site of sense-making, making visible the structures and processes that enable some narratives to become legitimized by the formative context and protect the status quo.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the processes of knowing and sense‐making in small client‐based firms.

The paper adopts a qualitative approach to the case studies of two small firms in the public relations sector located in the North West of England. The paper also assumes that the firms are “activity systems” and thus draws on the “activity theory” as a framework for conducting the empirical study.

The data and analysis highlight the firms' ability to survive, grow and innovate, drawing on knowing and sense‐making recipes shaped mainly by the extent and nature of the managers' networks and “significant others” including policy makers, customers, suppliers and competitors.

The paper is based on two case studies. Although in‐depth analysis is achieved through narratives of rich data, it cannot be generalised across firms. Increasing the number of cases will certainly add validity for pattern recognition and this is the future direction of research.

Managerial knowledge and experience gained from past events and incidents are important inputs of decision making. The paper argues that managers naturally draw on their “intuition” in their enactment of events. Such intuitions and judgments are complemented by intended courses of action. It is reflection on such incidences that realises the experiences. Reflective and reflexive attempts provide valuable learning moments for managers and organisations.

The paper notes that there is a limited account and understanding of the processes of knowing and sense‐making in SMEs. It therefore offers a framework for illustrating the dynamic interactions between managers' enacting, knowing and the development of sense‐making recipes. It is an attempt to contribute to the understanding of “knowing” in SMEs.

The purpose of this study is to examine how international workers engage into and make sense of expatriation and how sense-making enacts further action.

Given the corporate influence over expatriation, empirical data were collected from a single case study organization, a well-established Portuguese retail company. The primary data sources were the in-depth interviews with 13 international workers, while other secondary data sources included company documents that provided the background information required to understand the interviewees and describe the organization. The experiences of expatriation through the accounts and stories of these workers were subject to thematic content analysis.

The findings demonstrate that international workers act as sense-makers and sense-givers vehicles about expatriation. By doing so, they enact a plausible and dominant story that ultimately bounds the perception of divergent cues and limit their own action. While this ongoing dialogue between expatriation meaning and action can raise organizational actors’ capacities to negotiate and influence further meaning and action, it also validates existing practices and generates further compliance.

Despite being limited to a single organizational context, this study offers a contextualized approach to the study of expatriation that complements earlier research and highlights sense-making dynamics and related outcomes, further extending the applications of the sense-making perspective. This study suggests new research avenues exploring the politics and negotiation bonds from which expatriation sense-making can emerge as well as the opportunities for disruptive sense-making.

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.

This paper aims to examine, through a qualitative study, how auditor independence is socially constructed within the network of individuals involved in the realization of ISO 14001 audit engagements – ISO auditors, consultants, and managers of certified companies. The paper analysis focuses on the sense-making strategies used by actors within the network to develop and sustain trust (or doubt) in professional independence.

This study is predicated on a theoretical perspective centered on sense-making processes and the construction of inter-subjective meanings around claims to expertise. Interviews were conducted with 36 Canadian practitioners – including ISO auditors, managers of certification bodies, accreditation inspectors, consultants, and corporate environmental managers – to better understand how confidence into auditor independence is constituted in the flow of daily life within the small group of people involved in the surroundings of ISO 14001 audit engagements.

Practitioners use a range of sense-making strategies to construct and maintain the belief that IS0 14001 audits meet the professional requirements of auditor independence. As such, the constitution of confidence involves stereotyping, distancing, storytelling and procedural mechanisms that are collectively mobilized in the production of a culture of comfort surrounding the concept of auditor independence.

Through interviews with a range of actors involved in the achievement of ISO 14001 audits, the study provides insight into the production of meaning related to one of the chief claims surrounding auditing expertise, that of professional independence. This paper also points to a lack of self-criticism in the ISO auditing community since practitioners seem disinclined to adopt a reflective attitude of professional skepticism towards the claim of auditor independence.

Purpose – To present detailed examples of the social construction of understandings, exploring interplay between social and individual sense making.

Methodology/approach – A form of ethnomethodological discourse analysis is undertaken using text from online discussions groups for people with kidney failure. Sense making is theorised using Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology (1999) as a starting point. Chatman's Theory of Normative Behaviour (2000) and Pettigrew's Information Grounds (1999) are considered for their potential to theorise social impacts on individual understandings, while a practice theoretic approach (Gherardi, 2009a, 2009b) illuminates dynamics between social and individual sense making.

Findings – Local understandings developed out of repetition with gradual modification of ideas. Meanwhile, generic information such as facts was usually contextualised by descriptions of lived experiences. In this way, specifics were emphasised rather than generalities. However, the detailed, non-prescriptive commentaries provided by individuals gathered into usefully loose (non-specific) fields of possibilities.

Research implications – Information and knowledge manifest as transient and customised. This suggests a need for caution if researchers conceive people as having stable ‘knowledge structures’ which can be mapped by research, and it raises questions about durable incarnations of information.

Practical implications – People must produce flexible understandings particular to their situation. This requires time, reiteration and access to contributions from a range of sources. Provision of generic information during one-off interactions is only a first step towards support of these larger needs.

Originality/value of paper – Extends relational conceptions of information and verb-based metaphors for sense making, by proposing sense making, information and knowledge as transient and customised.

This paper aims to call attention to the relative neglect in strategic decision‐making research to include a sense dimension, proposing a broadened conceptualization of strategic decision making that accounts for the processes through which managers generate sense when exposed to turbulence in their environments.

Based on scholarly writing and empirical‐oriented examples, the paper illustrates how managers cope with unusual and unexpected situations, and discusses fruitful directions for future research.

When faced with turbulence, managers generate and communicate sense through believing in and arguing for a certain course of action, and through meeting talk and interaction that entwine with emotions. The focus on both retrospective and prospective orientation of action unfolds a sense dimension integral to which are belief and emotion.

Important questions for future research concern the role “plausibility” plays in strategic action, the relationship between retrospective and prospective orientation of action, and the information conveyed by emotions.

The paper could contribute to an increased awareness among practitioners that they can act effectively when coping with turbulence simply by making plausible sense, and encourage reconciliation between calculative rationality and emotion, in practice promoting their complementarity.

The paper affords a broadened conceptualization of strategic decision making through interrelating scholarly writing on strategic decision making, sense‐making and emotion. It also draws inspiration from Polanyi's work on tacit dimension and knowing, furthering an understanding of how retrospective and prospective orientation unfold in connection with a tacit relation, constituting a so‐called sense‐made reality.