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Socially responsible firms are known to improve competitive advantage and create workplaces that protect employees and the society in the long-term. Yet, the transitionary and project-based nature of the construction industry makes it difficult to espouse socially responsible practices. This study aims to adopt a person-centric conceptualisation of social responsibility by drawing on processes of individual sensemaking to gain a deeper understanding of small-business social responsibility (SBSR).

The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 people from the construction industry in Sri Lanka to develop retrospective narratives.

The findings suggest that individuals in small-business construction firms rely on intraindividual, organisational and wider societal considerations to make sense of SBSR. What drives these interviewees to be responsible is determined not so much by profitability or reputation but by their own SBSR sensemaking process.

This study examines how individuals make sense of social responsibility in transitionary project-based small businesses in the construction industry.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are common in today's corporate world, yet nearly half of them fail. Among such failed M&As, hostile takeovers cover a large proportion. The purpose of this paper is to understand the puzzling evidence of a successful hostile takeover amid multiple red flags, including cultural clash. Towards that end, this study explores the case of a recent successful takeover of Mindtree Ltd. by Larsen and Toubro Ltd. and proposes the role of sensemaking and sensegiving and their interaction within the framework of context, employees and leadership.

This paper uses a secondary data-based case methodology to develop arguments and frameworks. The case study is built on multiple data sources, including newspaper articles, published reports, company data and company reports. This paper also uses public interviews given by the company heads during the process of the takeover. This paper also uses the Corley and Gioia method of qualitative data analysis using thematic coding.

This paper reports a framework based on a real-world case study. This paper explains that a successful alignment of sensemaking and sensegiving between the acquired firm's employees and new leadership could be an ingredient in managing a hostile takeover. The analysis also revealed eight aggregate dimensions of the data structure based on thematic coding analysis.

The proposed model can be further tested using empirical methods. This paper is limited in its access and analysis of only secondary data.

This paper provides novel implications in terms of sensemaking and sensegiving interaction for managers and executives.

This paper is the first to bring the role of sensemaking and sensegiving into the context of hostile takeovers. This paper would provide a new impetus from an interpretive perspective to research hostile takeovers and give novel insights for managers and executives.

Drawing on Weick’s sensemaking perspective, this study aims to describe how Czech social entrepreneurs shape the shared meaning of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and what approaches to the crisis the sensemaking process leads to.

This study is based on the principles of grounded theory. Through in-depth interviews with 25 social entrepreneurs, it captures the entrepreneurs’ experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of their understanding of social enterprise identity. Interviews with experts in the field of social entrepreneurship were also conducted to help achieve a deeper analysis of the entrepreneurial cases.

Results of research show that despite the obstacles, most social entrepreneurs arrive at a positive redescription of the crisis. Enterprises not affected by the pandemic adopt a conventional approach. The most vulnerable enterprises are paralyzed and wait with uncertainty for future developments in their enterprise’s situation.

As knowledge of vulnerabilities is a key prerequisite for crisis prevention, this research can serve as a useful material for business incubators and other institutions that provide mentoring and expertise to start-up social entrepreneurs including focus on crisis management implementation.

This study complements the theory of crisis sensemaking with the level of social entrepreneurship, which is characterized by a dichotomy of social and business goals that results in a specific shared meaning of identity which is tied to perceptions of vulnerabilities. This study describes the influence of perceived identity on coping with a crisis.

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on distributed sensemaking by studying how the police establish and develop their new position as police contacts during the police reform.

The authors studied how the position of police contact, a cornerstone of the recent Norwegian police reform, was interpreted and practised. The authors interviewed police contacts at two different times during reform implementation to explore how they made sense of and practised their job.

The authors identified three interpretations of the position of police contact and describe them as ideal types: an administrative position, a professional position and a strategic position. The ideal types were reinforced rather than developing towards a shared understanding. Our data demonstrate that the sensemaking processes and experimentation to settle into the new position involved local actors internally in the police and externally in relation to local authorities, and reinforced local interpretations.

This study supports the notion of sensemaking as distributed but extends previous research by suggesting that “ideal types” help us understand the content of interpretations. This study also extends the understanding by showing that distributed sensemaking takes place as individuals make sense of more open-ended problems. This challenges the understanding of the term distributed, because unless challenged, distributed sensemaking in isolated pockets of the organization remain local, and the authors suggest that the term local distributed sensemaking captures this phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the financial decision-making process of farmers and to highlight the potential role that improved farm financial management (FFM) could play in developing sustainable farm enterprises.

This paper adopts a qualitative approach with 27 semi-structured interviews exploring farmers’ financial decision-making processes. Subsequently, the interview findings were presented to a focus group. Sensemaking theory is adopted as a theoretical lens to develop the empirical findings.

The evidence highlights that FFM has a dual role to play in farmer decision-making. Some FFM activities may act as a cue, which triggers a sensebreaking activity, causing the farmer to enter a process of sensemaking whilst some/other FFM activities are drawn upon to provide a sensegiving role in the sensemaking process. The role of FFM in farmer decision-making is strongly influenced by the decision type (strategic or operational) being undertaken and the farm type (dairy, tillage or beef) in operation.

The literature suggests that the majority of farmers spend little time on financial management. However, there are farmers who have quite a high level of engagement in FFM activities, when undertaking strategic farm expansion decisions. Those FFM activities help them to navigate through operational decision-making and to make sense of their strategic decision-making.

This research aims to examine the relationship between transactive memory systems and team sensemaking in the presence of critical boundary conditions, namely, task conflict and reward interdependence.

The data for Study 1 was collected from 304 team members who worked in 87 organizations in the Information, Communication and Technology sector of Pakistan. Study 2 is based on team-level data that was collected from 180 teams working in the New Product Development sector, with four to seven members in each team. The data tested the three-way interaction effect of the transactive memory systems, task conflict and reward interdependence on team sensemaking.

Results have shown that transactive memory systems have a positive relationship with team sensemaking, particularly when both task conflict and reward interdependence were perceived to be high.

To reap synergies, human resource managers should avoid disrupting team structures, assigning new members to a team or rotating team members very frequently. Moreover, if a team is experiencing high task conflict, reward interdependence may encourage conflict to remain constructive.

The current study is one of the first few attempts that examine the pivotal role of task conflict and reward interdependence as boundary conditions on transactive memory systems and team sensemaking. This research, therefore, highlights the role of transactive memory systems in enhancing team sensemaking at higher levels of task conflict and reward interdependence.

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?

Scholarly research has increasingly emphasised the need for more research that provides fine-grained empirical accounts of how context plays a role in sensemaking. The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth look at how broader institutional context shapes the sensemaking of organisational change in a novel empirical context of a Pakistani commercial bank.

A qualitative inductive case study of a commercial bank using interviews and archival material.

Actors make sense of an organisational change initiative by accessing broader societal institutional logics when the field-level organisational logics are not plausible. The consequences of such frame switching may include the provocation of emotionally charged perceptions of politics and moral valuations of legitimacy.

This study is based on a single organisational case study in a particular national context.

This study urges organisational change leaders to consider the role of informal interpersonal relationships and culturally shaped, and emotionally charged, perceptions of change among the change recipients, beyond the technical considerations of the industry concerned. Instead of just focussing on official interaction and top-down communication, along with creating top-level “guiding coalitions” to manage change, organisational leaders need to be sensitive to informal channels at the lower rungs of the organisation to pick emotional reactions of change recipients.

The study contributes to the literature on sensemaking of organisational change by showing how the institutional context, a neglected factor in the literature, impacts sensemaking. The study also contributes to the empirical literature on microfinance (MF) by providing an in-depth account of a commercial bank that introduced MF as a product line.

The contemporary organizational environment calls for work team members to be more resilient in the face of likely setbacks, which are routinely experienced at the workplace. In two separate studies of work teams, we examine the impact of team sensemaking on team bricolage and subsequently, on team resilience. These studies further investigate whether task interdependence moderates the mediation of team bricolage for the relationship between team sensemaking and team resilience. In brief, these two studies conceptualize and test the relevance of team sensemaking, team bricolage and task interdependence for team resilience.

A sample of 213 team members participated in the self-administered survey for Study 1. For Study 2, a second sample collected from 81 teams, elicited team-level data by consensus among team members.

Findings show that team sensemaking as an antecedent has a significant and positive impact on team resilience. The results also show how and when the relationship between team sensemaking and team resilience is facilitated through an underlying mechanism of team bricolage in the presence of task interdependence among team members. This research improves the understanding about the relationship between team sensemaking and team resilience by examining the underlying mechanism and boundary condition under which the relationship is the strongest.

These findings have important implications for human resource managers. In face of adverse events, team sensemaking plays a pivotal role as it can enable team members to have better situational awareness, communication and reflection. Team sensemaking can be further facilitated for improved team resilience by embedding bricolage and task interdependence components in the employee orientation, job description and training of potential and current employees.

These findings demonstrate that in the wake of adverse events, team sensemaking can play a pivotal role as it enables team members to have better situational awareness, communication and reflection. For team resilience, the findings imply that team sensemaking can be further facilitated by team bricolage in the presence of task interdependence in work teams. Thus, managers of modern work teams and organizations can sensitize team members about these aspects through employee orientation, job description and on and off job training activities.

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.