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Theorists within and outside LIS observe that neither information nor experience is usefully conceived as stable entities. This chapter focuses instead on experiencing and considers how people respond interactively within situations in flux, using that perspective to explore sense making. Methodologically guided by Dervin, ethnomethodology and practice theory, I spent two years participating in online discussion groups where people discussed experiences of kidney failure. I use content analysis of textual interactions to demonstrate the centrality of experiences in the discussions, followed by thematic analysis to explore why experiencing appeared to be central to sense making. I found that contributors described active and reactive responses to environments, in which emotions, understanding and other forms of experiencing forged and ‘mangled’ each other, processes which I interpret using metaphors from practice theory. These iterative processes, though painful at times, apparently kept contributors’ understandings connected to their experiences of reality. Therefore this chapter extends understandings of the centrality of experiential and embodied aspects of sense making, while also addressing problems with using static metaphors and methods to explore dynamic processes.

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.

This piece explores the philosophical origins of sense-making as defined in Brenda Dervin’s methodology.

This conceptual paper locates the origins of sense-making's rich ontological, epistemological and etymological heritage to the Classical Greece and the Pre-Socratic period. The Greek origins of sense-making‘s philosophical undercurrents surface again in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit before the idea is picked up again in twentieth century philosophy and library science.

This is a conceptual paper and no empirical findings are presented.

This paper makes an original contribution to the study of information seeking and to sense making theory and methodology.

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.

The Sense‐making approach to studying and understanding users and designing systems to serve their needs is reviewed. The approach, developed to focus on user sense making and sense unmaking in the fields of communication and library and information science, is reviewed in terms of its implications for knowledge management. Primary emphasis is placed on moving conceptualizations of users, information and reality from the noun‐based knowledge‐as‐map frameworks of the past to verb‐based frameworks emphasizing diversity, complexity and sense‐making potentials. Knowledge management is described as a field on the precipice of chaos, reaching for a means of emphasizing diversity, complexity and people over centrality, simplicity and technology. Sense making, as an approach, is described as a methodology disciplining the cacophony of diversity and complexity without homogenizing it. Knowledge is reconceptualized from noun to verb.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model of competitiveness for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by investigating the structural relationship between organizational structure, knowledge quality (KQ) dimensions, improvisational creativity, compositional creativity and innovation in an emerging market – Malaysia – grounding in sense-making and organizational improvisational theories.

A total of 358 valid questionnaires administered among SMEs’ top management were used in examining the measurement model and structural relationship between latent constructs using partial least squares (PLS) path-modelling approach.

The findings indicate that a flat organizational structure influences business entities’ sense-making activities in the way they realize the intrinsic value of knowledge (intrinsic KQ) and take action to apply the organizational knowledge (actionable KQ). These sense-making activities are also conducive to SMEs’ improvisational creativity, compositional creativity and innovative capabilities. All KQ dimensions are positively interrelated, thus supporting sense-making theory.

A sustainable competitive advantage for SMEs requires a setting that is based on a lean, decentralized and cooperative organizational structure that shapes organizational KQ. As a contribution to the literature, accessibility KQ is introduced as a KQ dimension. Even though previous research was unclear on the reflectiveness/formativeness of KQ, by applying confirmatory tetrad analysis-PLS, this study empirically supports that KQ is a formative construct.

The purpose of this study is to provide insights in how formal bargaining and informal sense making interact and solve problems of understanding between principal and contractor during procurement through the competitive dialogue (CD) of a complex construction project.

In an in‐depth case study, a process approach is taken to study how formal bargaining and informal sense making interact in a discrete set of critical events during negotiations in the procurement stage.

The critical events show that problems of understanding arise due to risk aversion and differences in expectations by at least one of the parties involved. In most of the events observed, aspects of the project context are behind the development of problems of understanding.

Negotiations develop in either positive or negative cycles. If managers of both the procuring authorities and the contractors are aware of these cycles, they might be able to influence and use them to their mutual benefit.

By studying the dynamics in interaction processes between principal and contractor during the procurement stage obstacles and preconditions for an effective CD are shown.

A small number of psychological contract studies have explored the cognitive processes that influence employees' evaluation and reactions to perceived contract breach. The aim of this paper is to extend this reseaerch with a qualitative study on breach using a sense making perspective.

In total, 15 interviews employing critical incident technique to examine employee sense making processes were carried out.

The findings highlight the variety of ways employees perceive contract breach and the processual nature of the experience. Emotions and actions were intertwined in the process of attributing responsibility and finding an explanation for the breach.

Contract breach is not necessarily a discrete event and reciprocity is integral to the sense making process. The findings provide a basis for future research that could explore the role of time, contextual factors and various employer representatives as sense‐givers in psychological contract evaluations.

Employer representatives can aid employees to make sense of critical events that occur in organizations to minimize the effects of breach.

The paper provides an under‐researched sense making‐perspective on psychological contract breach. Through a qualitative inquiry, the complex nature of the employees' experience of and reaction to breach, is highlighted.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the way in which organizational culture affects alliance performance. The literature has begun to focus on intra-firm antecedents of alliance success, but so far has mainly focused on structural aspects like the presence of an alliance department. This paper proposes that interrelated processes of sense-making in alliances and sense-making about alliances shape organizational culture to make it more supportive of alliances.

A survey was developed to operationalize an alliance supportive culture construct. Results from 179 alliance managers were analyzed to investigate the inter-relationship of alliance experience, alliance supportive culture and alliance performance.

Alliance supportive culture was found to fully mediate the relationship between alliance experience and performance. This finding suggests that experience with alliances leads to better alliance performance when this experience is translated into the organizational culture.

Further research may explore how alliance culture interacts with structural elements of alliance management as identified in the alliance capability literature. The interaction between alliance culture and alliance capability is as yet unexplored. In addition, research may take place to explore which elements determine sense-making about alliances.

Managers should not only focus on tools and processes to improve their alliance success. They should also augment the sense-making process about alliances and remove cultural impediments to working with alliances.

Many studies have found a relationship between alliance experience and success. This paper shows this is not a direct relationship, but that it operates via cultural change based on sense-making about alliance experience. This mediation effect has not been established before.