# Chapter 3: Sensemaking in Organisations Everyday sensemaking and organisational sensemaking are not identical. There are continuities, as we saw in the case of Garfinkel's jurors who make sense in the jury room the same way they make sense outside it. But there are also discontinuities. Czarniawska-Joerges (1992), for example, argues that organisational life "is taken for granted to a much lesser degree" (p. 120) than is everyday life. In phone behaviour, for example, people challenge, debate, and defend, continually, whether one should give one's name or position or phone number when answering the phone in the office. Answering with the name of the unit suggests being a team player, whereas answering with one's own name suggests a willingness to take responsibility (p. 120). The point is not which one is right. The point is that this question never gets raised anywhere but at work. And it gets raised frequently. It exemplifies how much of organisational life is fair game for continual negotiation, controlled information processing, and mindful attention and how much needs to be re-accomplished and how pervasive is the need for account-ing, justification, and rationalising. The only thing people do not do is take things for granted, which is what they spend most of their time doing everywhere else. Czarniawska-Joerges (1992) also argues that sensemaking in organisational life is distinctive because "the job itself is taken much more for granted than the organisational life" (p. 212); because organisations challenge everything and ask for explanations of everything including rationality itself (p. 121); because socialisation is shallower, more transient, and more easily upended by deviants and mavericks and less controlled by the elders (p. 121); and because social competence tends to be office specific, local, narrowly defined, and non-predictive of what will pass as competence anywhere else within the firm (p. 121). One begins to wonder when work ever gets done and whether the whole reason routines seem so characteristic of organisations is that they free up the controlled processing necessary to make sense of the dilemmas that need to be managed before people can even get at the work. The purpose of this chapter is to make the transition from sensemaking in general to organisational sensemaking and to begin to show how organisations structure and are structured by sensemaking processes. The transition touches on three topics. First, I describe briefly a historical chronology that traces how the idea of sensemaking in organisations has developed. In doing so, we begin to accumulate some conceptual resources necessary to construct a consistent picture of sensemaking in organisations. Second, we use these resources to construct a description of the nature of organisations and organising that is consistent ontologically with the sensemaking processes associated with it. Third, we examine a specific piece of research, Porac et al's (1989) study of garment making in Scotland, to show how the seven generic properties of sensemaking manifest themselves in actual organisations. ## Historical Roots of Sensemaking Part of professional development consists of cultivating an appreciation of historical roots of current issues, questions, and concepts. In the case of sensemaking, however, these roots are sufficiently diverse, recent, discipline specific, and contested that any attempt at conventional representation of history could be misleading. To deal with this problem, I follow the example of jazz musicians. Among musicians, there is the saying "you're only as good as your last date," by which they mean that history and reputation count for less than does the most recent exhibit of your craft. The same can be said of the topic of sensemaking. Sensemaking, as a focus of inquiry, is only as significant and useful as are its most recent exemplars. The way those exemplars are framed, discussed, and investigated is what sensemaking is about and can contribute. In other words, what has been thought and learned and conveyed by predecessors is known largely through its influence on these current debates (Freese, 1980). The problem is that if one takes those current debates and tries to work backward to uncover a historical progression that leads to them, the path is strewn with seductions of hindsight bias and concealment of the powerful role that chance plays in the determination of outcomes (Brands, 1992). My point is not to disparage history. Instead, my point is that I intend to concentrate on those conceptual tools that are currently being used to address issues of sensemaking. These tools and issues can often be traced back to earlier discussions and exemplars from which they might have descended. Throughout this book, I will suggest many of these plausible predecessors. But I nest these predecessors in the context of current issues that seem to incorporate their insights or would benefit if they did so. For example, Burns and Stalker (1961) developed the influential contrast between mechanistic and organic systems and noted that organic systems work only when they have a "depend-ably constant system of shared beliefs about the common interests of the working community and about the standards and criteria used in it to judge achievement, individual contributions, expertise and other matters by which a person or a combination of people are evaluated" (p. 119). This historical contribution to our understanding of sensemaking is cited, sans the complete quotation, in the context of Smircich and Stubbart's (1985) effort to describe organisation as a quality of interaction (found on p. 73 in this chapter). This juxtaposition suggests both a lineage and a way for each concept to enrich the other. Although I have nested relevant history in current issues, I can unnest it sufficiently to give some sense of how the topic of sensemaking has developed over the years. In the following list, I have chosen several key references and listed them chronologically rather than alphabetically, along with a brief phrase that captures some of the historical significance of the work for the topic of sensemaking. **Important Resources** **for Organisational Sensemaking** 1. James, 1890/1950 (Selectivity is an essential characteristic of consciousness and the criterion used for selection is relevance of stimuli to ongoing goals. Ideas and meanings are considered valid \["truth happens to an idea"\] when consequences of holding them are desirable or useful or good). 2. Thomas and Thomas, 1928 (The maxim "If men define situations as real they are real in their consequences" (p. 572) alerts researchers that subjective bases of action have non-subjective results, that groups vary in their definitions of the situation, and that the situation determines behaviour). 3. Mead, 1934 (Social process precedes individual mind). 4. Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939 (The environment of organisations is to be understood in terms of the meanings employees attach to objects. "For the employee in industry, the whole working environment must be looked upon as being permeated with social significance. Apart from the social values inherent in his environment, the meaning to the employee of certain objects or events cannot be understood," p. 374). 5. Barnard, 1938 (Organisations are viewed as systems of action, consciously coordinated by communication, which introduces action, controlled information processing, and communication as tools for sensemaking). 6. Weber, 1947 (Social action can be understood if investigators take into account its meaning for those involved). 7. Selznick, 1949 (Organisations derive their meaning and significance from interpretations people place on them). 8. Jaques, 1951 (Concept of culture is introduced and defined as "customary and traditional way of thinking and doing things, which is shared to a greater or lesser degree by all of its members, and which new members must learn and at least partially accept in order to be accepted into service in the firm," p. 251). 9. Deutsch and Gerard, 1955 (Concept of informational social influences posits that people accept information from one another as evidence of reality in order to reduce uncertainty). 10. Boulding, 1956 (Organisations can be symbol-processing systems, social sys-tems, and transcendental systems, as well as machines and clockworks). 11. Festinger, 1957 (Sensemaking operates in the service of post-decision dissonance reduction). 12. March and Simon, 1958 (Organisational routines free up attention that can then be used to understand non-routine events). 13. Dalton, 1959 (Learning to live in ambiguity requires that people interpret the meaning of what they see for what they want to do. Ambiguity selects "those most able to absorb, or resolve and utilise, conflict for personal and organisational ends," p. 258). 14. Thompson and Tuden, 1959 (The extent of agreement about causality and preferences for outcomes determines which organisational forms will be more and less effective for decision making. As agreement decreases, politics become more influential). 15. Burns and Stalker, 1961 (Contingency point of view, built on contrast between mechanistic and organic systems, displaces idea of one best way to manage and allows for social construction as a response to high uncertainty). 16. Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek, and Rosenthal, 1964 (Persistent role ambiguity that defies sensemaking has negative effects on psychological well-being. 17. Bitter, 1965 (The concept of organisations is a commonsense construct, and formal organisational designs are schemes of interpretation that competent users can invoke for information, direction, and justification without incurring the risk of sanction). 18. Katz and Kahn, 1966 (Organisations are open systems whose activities are patterned by processes that are responsive to alterations of inputs). 19. Schutz, 1967 (People use socially determined typifications to make sense of everyday life). 20. Garfinkel, 1967 (Rationality is socially constructed in everyday interaction and is used to legitimise what has occurred). 21. Berger and Luckmann, 1967 (Over time, people act in patterned ways and take these patterns for granted as their reality, thereby socially constructing their reality. 22. Weick, 1969 (An evolutionary epistemology is implicit in organisational sensemaking, which consists of retrospective interpretations built during interaction). 23. Blumer, 1969 (Human association consists of the dual process of interpretation \[ascertaining the meanings of the other person\] and definition \[conveying indications to that person about how to act\] in order to sustain joint conduct). 24. Steinbruner, 1974 (Concept of cybernetic decision processes introduces the possibility of a satisficing sensemaker.) 25. Staw, 1975 (Members of workgroups given false feedback about their performance reconstruct the histories of their interaction to explain the outcome). 26. March and Olsen, 1976 (Pervasive ambiguity in organisations means that most of what we know about events comes from interpretation). 27. Giddens, 1976 (Social structures simultaneously are created by and constrain the process of meaning creation). 28. Bougon, Weick, and Binkhorst, 1977 (Conceptualisation and measurement of cause maps operationalise organisational phenomenology). 29. Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978 (Social information-processing model suggests that both task environmental characteristics and attitudes - needs are socially constructed). 30. Pondy, 1978 (Leader effectiveness lies in the ability of the leader to give others a sense of what they are doing and to articulate this sense so that they can communicate about the meaning of their behaviour). 31. Brown, 1978 (Formal organisation is embodied in shared paradigms). 32. Daft and Wiginton, 1979 (Sensemaking is affected by the richness of the language used: It takes natural language to register complex phenomena). 33. Ranson, Hinings, and Greenwood, 1980 (Interpretive schemes constrain and emerge from organising). 34. Louis, 1980 (Newcomers cope with the change, contrast, and surprise of their entry experience by seeking situation-specific interpretation schemes and cultural assumptions to aid sensemaking). 35. Pfeffer, 1981 (A critical administrative action in systems of shared meanings is the construction and maintenance of belief systems, through language, symbolism, and ritual, that legitimate and rationalise decisions made on the basis of power and influence). 36. Kiesler and Sproull, 1982 (Social cognition processes are analysed for their relevance to managerial problems sensing, which is conceptualised as noticing, interpreting, and incorporating stimuli in the interest of adaptation). 37. Meyer, 1982a (Symbolic variables involving strategy and ideology that reflect interpretation processes in organisations predict adaptation to unexpected jolts better than do structural variables such as slack). 38. Martin, Feldman, Hatch, and Sitkin, 1983 (Organisational stories summarise prior sensemaking and provide prototypes of what matters). 39. Putnam, 1983 (The interpretive approach to organisations is codified as the study of subjective, intersubjective, and socially created meanings that create and recreate social structures through communication). 40. Daft and Weick, 1984 (Patterns of scanning, interpretation, and learning vary across organisations as a function of their willingness to act in order to learn and their willingness to accept that the environment is difficult to analyse). 41. Smircich and Stubbart, 1985 (The environments within which strategies unfold are environments of the strategists own making). 42. Mintzberg and McHugh, 1985 (Ongoing retrospective sensemaking creates emergent strategies that differ from intended, deliberate strategies, suggesting that learning can substitute for rational decision making). 43. Barley, 1986 (To understand new technologies while structuring their relationships, medical professionals use a variety of scripts). 44. Daft and Lengel, 1986 (Organisational designs that remedy a problem of lack of clarity (equivocality] differ from those that remedy a problem of lack of data \[uncertainty\]). 45. Dutton and Jackson, 1987 (Labeling an issue as either a threat or an opportunity affects subsequent cognitions and motivations directed at processing the issue). 46. Starbuck and Milliken, 1988 (Analysing managerial "misperceptions" as evidence of filtering rather than information-processing errors better fits what we know about the construction of meaning in organisations). 47. Poracet al., 1989 (Mental models of strategists in the Scottish garment industry are formed and have effects in ways that are consistent with the tenets of an interpretive approach). 48. Feldman, 1989 (Bureaucratic analysts, working on ill-defined policy problems, are observed to make collective interpretations that reflect organisational rather than societal definitions of interests). 49. Isabella, 1990 (Interpretive frames of references, tasks, and construed realities evolve through four distinct stages- anticipation, confirmation, culmination, and aftermath - as organisational change unfolds). 50. Dutton and Dukerich, 1991 (Shifting images and identities of the New York Port Authority as it grapples with homeless people at its facilities influence how employees interpret and act on issues). 51. Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991 (Strategic change in a major university is shown to consist of iterative sequential processes of meaning construction \[sensemaking\] and attempts to influence sensemaking (sensegiving). 52. Gioia, 1992 (Using script analysis, a corporate insider present in the early stages of the growing concerns about fires in Ford Pintos analyses his failure to initiate an early recall using script analysis). 53. Pentland, 1992 (Efforts to make sense of customer inquiries to a software support hotline are embodied in moves that enact the structure of the organisation). 54. Weick, 19936 (The Mann Gulch disaster is reanalysed to show that disintegrating role structures heighten the difficulty of sensemaking). 55. Elsbach, 1994 (Spokespersons for the cattle industry use verbal accounts to manage impressions of legitimacy in the face of threat, which shows how institutional practices can be changed by individuals). ## A Sensemaking Perspective on Organisation Diverse as these historical inputs to the topic of sensemaking might seem, there is a reasonably coherent view of the nature of organisation that runs through them. It is important at the outset to develop some appreciation for ways to conceptualise organisations and their environments that accommodate sensemaking processes and their products. Failure to address this step could lead to problems like this: Whilst certain schools of thought accept the concept of organisation and its use as an "accounting practice" by which people attempt to make sense of their world, they do not recognise organisations as such. From the standpoint of the interpretive paradigm, organisations simply do not exist. Strictly speaking, therefore, the notion of there being a theory of organisations characteristic of the interpretive paradigm is somewhat contradictory. (Burrell & Morgan, 1979, p. 260) There is no such thing as a theory of organisations that is characteristic of the sensemaking paradigm. Nevertheless, there are ways to talk about organisations that allow for sensemaking to be a central activity in the construction of both the organisation and the environments it confronts. For example, consider Scott's (1987) superb analysis of organisations. He defines the concept of organisation three ways. First, there is the organisation as rational system such as is found in the work of Weber (1947) and Simon (1957) and defined by Scott as "collectivities oriented to the pursuit of relatively specific goals and exhibiting relatively highly formalised social structures" (p. 22). Second, there is the organisation as a natural system as is found in the work of Roethlisberger and Dickson (1939), Barnard (1938), or Parsons (1960) and defined by Scott as "collectivities whose participants share a common interest in the survival of the system and who engage in collective activities, informally structured, to secure this end" (p. 23). And third, there is the organisation as an open system as is found in the work of Buckley (1968), Boulding (1956), and Katz and Kahn (1966) and defined by Scott as "coalitions of shifting interest groups that develop goals by negotiation; the structure of the coalition, its activities, and its outcomes are strongly influenced by environmental factors" (p. 23). These three definitions are ordered from less to more openness to the environment and from tighter to looser coupling among the elements that comprise the system. This means that organisations depicted as open systems should be most concerned with sensemaking. This expectation derives from the fact that their greater openness to input from the environment means they have more diverse information to deal with and from the fact that their looser system structure means that the entity doing the sensemaking is itself something of a puzzle. As Scott (1987) notes, open systems imagery shifts attention from structure to process and "maintaining these flows and preserving these processes are viewed as problematic" (p. 91). It is those very problems that are the focus of sensemaking, namely, what is "out there," what is "in here," and who must we be in order to deal with both questions? It is the very openness associated with this perspective that makes distinctions between out there and in here inventions rather than discoveries, that results in people creating their own constraints, and that triggers the strange sequence in which outputs become the occasion to define retrospectively what could have been plausible inputs and throughputs. In short, as we move from that which is rational, through that which is natural, to that which is open, we concurrently move from structures, processes, and environments that are less ambiguous to those that are more so. And with these moves comes a greater premium on sensemaking. A different way to talk about sensemaking at more macro levels is to pursue Wiley's (1988) argument that there are three levels of sensemaking "above" the individual level of analysis. In ascending order they are the intersubjective, the generic subjective, and the extra-subjective. He understands these three levels this way. Intersubjective meaning becomes distinct from intra-subjective meaning when individual thoughts, feelings, and intentions are merged or synthesised into conversations during which the self gets transformed from "I" into "we" (e.g., Linell & Markova, 1993). This transformation is not simply interaction in which norms are shared, which would be a connection through social structure rather than interaction. Instead, a "level of social reality" (p. 254) forms, which consists of an inter-subject, or joined subject or merged subject. Wiley (1988) describes the change this way: "Intersubjectivity is emergent upon the interchange and synthesis of two, or more, communicating selves. Only later, logically speaking, do we have still another emergence, in which interaction (or 'interactional representations') synthesises into Durkheim's social structure or collective consciousness" (p. 258). Gephart (1992) is a good example of this level of analysis when he describes sensemaking as "the verbal intersubjective process of interpreting actions and events" (p. 118). The level above interaction, the level of social structure, is where Wiley (1988, p. 259) includes organisations. The distinguishing characteristic of this level is the shift from intersubjectivity to generic subjectivity. "Concrete human beings, subjects, are no longer present. Selves are left behind at the interactive level. Social structure implies a generic self, an interchangeable part- as filler of roles and follower of rules- but not concrete, individualised selves. The 'relation to subject, then, at this level is categorical and abstract" (p. 258). Sensemaking through generic subjectivity is a mainstay of organisational analysis and is clearly illustrated in Barley's (1986) analysis of changes in technology that alter work roles, relational roles, and social networks. In times of stability, generic subjectivity takes many forms, including scripts, which he defines as "standard plots of types of encounters whose repetition constitutes the setting's interaction order" (p. 83). Intersubjectivity is largely irrelevant (unless gaps need to be filled) when artefacts such as standard plots create generic subjectivity and allow people to substitute for one another and adopt their activities and meanings. However, when technology changes, as when a CAT scan machine is introduced into a radiology unit, uncertainty increases because old scripts and generic subjectivity no longer work (p. 84). Inter-subjectivity once again becomes the focus of sensemaking as different views of the meaning of the change emerge to await a new synthesis. Generic subjectivity does not completely disappear when people interact to synthesise new meaning. Instead, synthesising itself may be shaped by scripts (p. 101) that modify earlier understandings. Interactions that attempt to manage uncertainty are a mixture of the inter-subjective and the generic subjective, which is something of a hallmark of organisational sensemaking in general. What varies during times of convergence and stability and times of divergence and turbulence (Tushman, Newman, & Romanelli, 1986) is the relative emphasis on generic subjectivity and scripts that ratify and intersubjectivity and scripts that modify (p. 102). Wiley's (1988) final level of analysis, culture, is extra-subjective. A generic self that occupies roles is now replaced by "pure meanings" (Popper, 1972) without a knowing subject. This is a level of symbolic reality such as we might associate with capitalism or mathematics, each viewed as a subjectless batch of culture. Something akin to the culture level is implied in Barley's (1986, p. 82) discussion of the institutional realm. This realm is conceptualised as an abstract idealised framework derived from prior interaction. Viewed this way, the generic subjectivity of scripts becomes crucial because "scripts link the institutional realm to the realm of action" (p. 83). Although Wiley does not invoke "organisation" as a specific level, I would argue that organising lies atop that movement between the intersubjective and the generically subjective. By that I mean that organising is a mixture of vivid, unique intersubjective understandings and understandings that can be picked up, perpetuated, and enlarged by people who did not participate in the original intersubjective construction. People can substitute for one another in organisations, but when they do, those substitutions are never complete. There is always some loss of joint understanding when the intersubjective is translated into the generic. But not all losses are equally important for effective coordination of action. As we have seen before, simplification and filtering are necessary for people to coordinate in the first place. If we stick with Wiley's analysis, then we argue that there are two big discontinuities in social behaviour, first, when imagined social conduct is converted into face-to-face social interaction in real time, and second, when one of the participants in the interaction is replaced and the interaction continues somewhat as it did before. Both of these transitions involve shifts from relative autonomy to relative control and from relative independence to relative interdependence. And it is the function of the social forms associated with organising to manage these transitions and to keep coordinated action from getting stuck in either of the two forms that it bridges. The active, ongoing management of transitions is the reason why organisations are often viewed as tension systems (e.g., Aram, 1976) and why the dominant tension is often labeled (Hage, 1980; Nemeth & Staw, 1989) as tension between innovation (intersubjective) and control (generic subjectivity). Organisations are adaptive social forms. As intersubjective forms, they create, preserve, and implement the innovations that arise from intimate contact. As forms of generic subjectivity, they focus and control the energies of that intimacy. We see this tension in Barley's (1986) study, where the radiologists control through "direction giving," which is a pure expression of generic structure, yet temper these controlling interventions with "preference stating," which is an invitation to collegiality and an innovation in the traditional relationship of dominance (p. 102). Thus organisational forms are the bridging operations that link the inter-subjective with the generically inter-subjective. And it is these bridging operations that seem to be prominent in those descriptions of organising that fit best with descriptions of sensemaking. This point can be illustrated with three new examples. Smircich and Stubbart (1985) imply organising as bridging when they describe organisation as a quality of interaction: Organisation "is a set of people who share many beliefs, values, and assumptions that encourage them to make mutually-reinforcing interpretations of their own acts and the acts of others" (p. 727) and that encourage them to act in ways that have mutual relevance. This description updates related descriptions of sensemaking in organic systems (Burns & Stalker, 1961, p. 119). There is intersubjectivity in references to interaction, mutually reinforcing interpretations, and beliefs, values, and assumptions. And there is generic subjectivity in references to a set of people, sharing, acts of others, and mutual relevance. The description of organisation as a "quality of interaction" seems especially apt, because it is precisely the quality of susceptibility of an interaction to replacement and substitution of the interactants that is an important defining property of organisation. If the capability to make mutually reinforcing interpretations is lost when people are replaced, then neither organisation nor sensemaking persist. The creative potential of intersubjectivity is precisely what people such as Tom Peters (1992, pp. 432-434) fear will get lost when managers shift from management by walking around (MBWA) to e-mail and management by screening around (MBSA). The richness (Daft & Lengel, 1986) of face-to-face interaction, which facilitates perception of complex events and the invention of innovations to manage the complexity, is reduced when interactions consist of computer screens filled with generic one-way communication, which relative strangers can enter and leave, using relatively mindless routines. Control drives out innovation, organisation becomes synonymous with control, and generic subjectivity becomes sealed off from any chance for reframing, learn-ing, or comprehension of that which seems incomprehensible. A second description of organisation that accommodates sensemaking and coordination places more emphasis on routines and generic subjectivity than did Smircich and Stubbart. Frances Westley (1990) focuses on what precipitates out and is retained from intersubjectivity when she notes that "organisations do not exist and cannot be imbued with action potential: all organisations are in fact only a series of interlocking routines, habituated action patterns that bring the same people together around the same activities in the same time and places" (p. 339). A more recent definition by Czarniawska-Joerges (1992) covers the same ground: "Organisations are nets of collective action, undertaken in an effort to shape the world and human lives. The contents of the action are meanings and things (artefacts). One net of collective action is distinguishable from another by the kind of meanings and products socially attributed to a given organisation" (p. 32). Interlocking routines and habituated action patterns are social constructions that allow substitutability among agents. Because they are social constructions, generic routines and habituated action patterns are often reconstructed, and reaffirmed intersubjectively. Again, there are transitions between inter-subjectivity and generic subjectivity. When the same people show up day after day at the same time and place, their activities are likely to become more mutually defined, more mutually dependent, more mutually predictable, and more subject to common understanding encoded into common language. Generic subjectivity increases. Vestiges of intersubjectivity are evident, how-ever, in the fine-tuning and evolving of these understandings within dyads. If we think of Smircich and Stubbart as investigators who ground their understanding of organisation in the intersubjective and work toward generic subjectivity, and if we think of Westley as an investigator who grounds her understanding of organisation in generic subjectivity and works toward inter-subjectivity, then Schall (1983) articulates the bridge that connects these two social forms. He argues that organisations are entities developed and maintained only through continuous communication activity - exchanges and interpretations among its participants... As interacting participants organise by communicating, they evolve shared understandings around issues of common interest, and so develop a sense of the collective "we"... that is, of themselves as distinct social units doing things together in ways appropriate to those shared understandings of the "we." In other words, the communicating processes inherent in organising create an organisational culture, revealed through its communicating activities... and marked by role-goal- and context-bound communication constraints - the rules. (p. 560) Hints of intersubjectivity are evident in phrases such as exchanges, continuous communication, and interacting participants. But there is also abundant reference to generic subjectivity in the references to shared understanding, issues of common interest, the collective "we," organisational culture, roles, and communication constraints in the form of rules. There is simultaneous reference to the sense that is made and the forms making that sense. Of crucial importance, in the context of Burrell and Morgan's (1979) unease with the conceptualisation of organisation made by interpretivists, is Schall's initial delimiting. She describes organisations as entities developed and maintained only through continuous communication activity. If the communication activity stops, the organisation disappears. If the communication activity becomes confused, the organisation begins to malfunction. These outcomes are unsurprising because the communication activity is the organisation. Only by virtue of continuous communication are the exchanges and interpretations of intersubjectivity, and the shared understandings of generic subjectivity, developed and maintained. When we view organisations as entities that move continuously between intersubjectivity and generic subjectivity, there seems to be a common core that enables us to represent the setting in which organisational sensemaking occurs. Steps toward a composite picture would include highlights such as these: 1. A basic focus of organising is the question, how does action become coordinated in the world of multiple realities? 2. One answer to this question lies in a social form that generates vivid, unique, intersubjective understandings that can be picked up and enlarged by people who did not participate in the original construction. 3. There is always some loss of understanding when the intersubjective is translated into the generic. The function of organisational forms is to manage this loss by keeping it small and allowing it to be renegotiated. 4. To manage a transition is to manage the tension that often results when people try to reconcile the innovation inherent in intersubjectivity with the control inherent in generic subjectivity. Organizational forms represent bridging operations that attempt this reconciliation on an ongoing basis. 5. Reconciliation is accomplished by such things as interlocking routines and habituated action patterns, both of which have their origin in dyadic interaction. 6. And finally, the social forms of organisation consist basically of patterned activity developed and maintained through continuous communication activity, during which participants evolve equivalent understandings around issues of common interest. These six attributes of organising are far from exhaustive. More will be added as the argument develops. Nevertheless, these six are an important start because they introduce a way of thinking about organisation that does something more than simply dismiss it as a mere typified "image of reality" that means different things to different people (Burrell & Morgan, 1979, p. 273). Burrell and Morgan are right when they insist that assumptions about sense-making must be carried to their structural limits to see if participants and observers are playing by a common set of rules. Frequently, we discover that they are not. But this need not mean that such play is impossible. It merely means that we need to be attentive to social forms, right from the start, which is just what Porac et al. (1989) have done. Their study of cognitive oligopolies shows how the fragments we have discussed up to this point can be gathered into a consistent perspective. ## Sensemaking in Hawick So far I have used several different studies to introduce separate ideas about sensemaking and organisations. It is unrealistic to expect any one study to illustrate the bulk of these ideas, but there are some that come close. These exemplary studies allow the reader to see at a glance how some of the ideas fit together and what a study looks like when they do. Porac et al.'s (1989) study is just such an exemplary study. The three investigators interviewed 35 executives scattered among 17 firms manufacturing high-quality cashmere sweaters in the border region of Scotland. In an effort to learn more about how these strategists formed and acted on mental models, which influenced industry structure, Porac et al. (1989) pursued three questions: 1. "What are the consensual identity and causal beliefs constructed by top managers to make sense of transactions within their competitive environment?" 2. "How do such beliefs relate to strategic activities of firms within the sector?" 3. "How are such beliefs maintained or altered over time?" (pp. 401-402) In answering these organisational questions, Poracet al. touched on each of the seven properties of sensemaking mentioned in the introduction. We conclude our discussion of organisational contexts with a brief discussion of each of these seven. The study of the Hawick mind is an especially good example of the importance of identity as a focus for sensemaking. "Beliefs about the identity of the firm are a key part of the mental model" (p. 399). To make sense of their competitive environment, the 17 firms collectively have to set themselves apart as distinct from others who make sweaters, and then individually, they have to differentiate among themselves. Although all 17 manufacturers in Hawick produce high-quality sweaters, they must differentiate among themselves and compete for space in specialty shops and large department stores, on the basis of things such as shape, colour, and knitting design. A great deal of sensemaking in Hawick consists of giving some definition to the competitive space so that strategists can both discover and invent who they are, and who they are becoming, relative to others whose identity may also be in flux. Sensemaking is devoted in part to the development of "socially shared beliefs which define the relevant set of rivals and guide strategic choices about how to compete within this set" (p. 400). Although there is some "intra-cultural variation" around these shared beliefs (p. 405), there are central tendencies in core beliefs, and it is these anchors that enable members to define the competitive space and their place in it. These struggles with identity are important to understand because they appear to involve the root act of sensemaking. Recall that Starbuck and Milliken (1988) define sensemaking as placing stimuli into some kind of framework. That is fine, but where do frameworks come from and how are they formed? Porac et al. have an answer. They suggest that a combination of enactment and selective perception among competitors produces what amounts to a "cognitive oligopoly." The oligopoly takes the form of a "limited set of competitive benchmarks that is mutually defined to simplify and make sense of the business environment" (p. 413). These benchmarks are the frame within which identities and strategies materialise. But in a very real sense, the basic questions, "who am I," "who are they," and "who are 'we'" dominate attempts at sensemaking in Hawick, as well as elsewhere. And once a tentative answer is formulated, sensemaking has just started, because answers need to be re-accomplished, retuned, and sometimes even rebuilt. What the answers never have is a sense of finality. Retrospect as a sensemaking process is implied rather than discussed explicitly in the Hawick study. It is implied by the observation that the mental representations in the mental models used by the strategists are imperfect and simplified versions of the material world (p. 400). I assume that they have this character in part because they are constructed on the basis of hindsight, which conveniently edits out the complex, flawed causal chains by which outcomes were actually produced. Furthermore, the outcomes themselves can only be known after the fact, which necessarily restricts these people to a backward glance. There is a distinct flavour of retrospective sensemaking in Porac et al.'s (1989) discussion of the "focus strategy" of these manufacturers, namely, "to sell premium quality, expensive garments through specialist distribution channels to a limited number of high income consumers" (p. 404). The retrospective quality of this strategy stems from the fact that it "seems more evolutionary than planned, having developed over several decades in response to problems encountered in the market place" (p. 404, italics added). For example, because a pool of skilled workers is readily available in the Hawick area, these firms still use traditional, labor- intensive methods of hand finishing. These methods are not as efficient as more modern techniques (e.g., electronic knitting equipment) that allow competitors in other countries to produce higher volumes at lower cost. However, the continued use of hand finishing has now been reinterpreted by the strategists of Hawick as an intentional "high quality" strategy. People in Hawick have been crafting hand- finished sweaters all along, although the interpretation of those prior actions as the pursuit of high quality did not crystallise until costs became an issue. How can I know what I've made until I see how it's sewn? This shift in meaning from hand finishing as normal procedure to hand finishing as distinctive procedure should not be read cynically. Rather, it is a clear example of the ways in which new interpretations of old actions bubble up in ongoing events. Capitalising on such retrospective re-framings is the stock in trade of strategists, as Mintzberg (1987) and Starbuck (1993) have made clear. The one small flaw is that strategists take credit for their foresight when they are actually trading on their hindsight. A well-developed capability for hindsight is neither a dramatic accomplishment, nor especially rare, which is probably why strategists shun that depiction of their contribution. Porac et al. have as good a discussion of enactment as readers are likely to find in the organisational literature. Whereas other discussions of enactment usually equate it mistakenly with selective perception or with action that meets no resistance, Porac et al. (1989) blend the themes of perception and action. They put the central insight of enactive sensemaking this way. Human activity is portrayed as an ongoing input-output cycle in which subjective interpretations of externally situated information become themselves objectified via behaviour... This continual objective-subjective-objective transformation makes it possible eventually to generate interpretations that are shared by several people. Over time, individual cognitive structures thus become part of a socially reinforced view of the world... The cyclical nature of interpretive activity implies that the material and cognitive aspects of business rivalry are thickly interwoven. (pp. 398-399) When people take their interpretations seriously and act on them, the material world may cohere in a different way than it did before. If it does change, others may notice these changes, interpret them in ways that are at least equivalent to those of the original actor, and then act on these new interpretations in ways that verify the original interpretation. Over time, interpretations become objectified, diffused, and widely internalised into what comes to be called a consensus on what is "out there." The identity beliefs and beliefs about how to manage the business held by Hawick executives affect their strategic choices such as their choice to use agents as distributors. The choice to use agents who sell "classically designed clothes" means that information about the market that flows back to the decision makers will be limited and will basically confirm their beliefs about what that market was like to begin with (p. 412). Agents who project the "classic image" contact shops that sell classic designs to customers who prefer classic designs. The resulting "market" information is heavily filtered, narrow, and limited, and essentially of Hawick's own making. Small wonder that Porac et al. use the phrase "socially reinforced view of the world" to capture the way in which people enact some of what they face. The "transactional network," consisting of producers, agents, retailers, and consumers is literally an environment enacted on the basis of cues that were made salient by earlier enactments. Hawick executives act their way into their strategies, their routines, and their interpretations by enacting circumstances in which portions of the ongoing flow of inputs and outputs recycle and happen predictably, over and over. It should be obvious by now that Porac et al. are mindful throughout that sensemaking is unrelentingly social. This is immediately evident in the first part of the title for their study: "Competitive Groups as Cognitive Communities." Part of the community that arises among these competitors forms because each firm needs a benchmark against which it can compare itself and gain more information about the adequacy of its own skills and abilities (Festinger, 1954). In an uncertain environment, evaluation is difficult unless there are similar others with whom one's own performance can be compared. It is just such a meaningful family of comparisons that is made possible by the cognitive oligopoly of Hawick. The mental models used by executives in the 17 firms also converge for other reasons. The executives themselves communicate often, both formally and informally (e.g., top managers of the competing firms live within walking distance of one another, p. 405). Furthermore, there is both indirect imitation among the firms, as when they all face a common enacted environment, and direct imitation, when competitors exchange ideas (p. 400). Although these mental models begin to form in the heads of individual managers, the convergence across managers that comes about through a combination of enactment and imitation spread among networks of customers, suppliers, and competitors means that intersubjective, generically subjective, and cultural levels of analysis all come into play. This suggests that the phrase "individual sensemaking" is something of an oxymoron. We have already seen that Porac et al. are mindful that sensemaking is ongoing and that people are thrown into the middle of things where projects never seem to start even though they always seem to be interrupted (p. 398). The several flow charts used in the Porac et al. article to depict such things as the reciprocal influence of technical and cognitive levels of analysis (p. 399), mutual enactment processes within an industrial sector (p. 401), and enactment processes through the transactional network (p. 409) all preserve the flow, continuity, and dynamic change that are associated with process models of sensemaking. In our earlier discussion of ongoing sensemaking, we paid a great deal of attention to interruption and its potential to introduce emotion as a basis for sensemaking. Emotion seems to play little role in the Hawick analysis, in part, because the focus is on mental models. But I suspect that emotion also may not be prominent because interruptions are rare and alternative pathways to project completion are plentiful. Nevertheless, Porac et al. are clear about the potential for interruption when they describe the "generic recipe" for market activities among the Hawick manufacturers. That recipe reads, "purchase yarn from local spinners, sell sweaters that will appeal to classically-minded high-income consumers, create a flexible production system that can manufacture garments in small lots, hire exclusive agents around the world to market these products, and temper the aggressiveness of one's approach to pricing" (Porac et al., 1989, p. 414). This recipe is a wonderful example of coordinated action, generic subjectivity (anyone can "run" the recipe), interlocking routines, and habituated action patterns. All of this suggests a kind of over-learned, tightly coupled system, with considerable inertia (Milliken & Lant, 1991). That means it would be hard to interrupt the projects of such a system. Nevertheless, precisely because those projects are so well organised, an interruption that cannot be quickly repaired should be devastating. Porac et al. are especially alert to the importance of extracted cues in sensemaking. It is these cues that are assembled into the mental model. And it is these cues that are indexical and need context if they are to make sense. Cues to market changes are derived from at least four sources. Cues come from agents, directly when those agents place their orders, and indirectly when they discuss trends they think they see. Design consultants provide market cues when they suggest new designs for garments that respond to fashion trends they perceive. A third source of cues is what executives hear when they travel to visit stores and trade shows. And finally, cues arise when the firms of Hawick track one another and describe their own views of what might be happening. Although the use of cues in sensemaking was labeled earlier "extracted cues" in deference to James's usage of the phrase, Porac et al. suggest that we could just as well have called them "enacted cues?" Sensemaking cues are clearly both. Cues are "enacted" in the sense that each competitor makes strategic choices on the basis of its beliefs, and these choices put things out there that constrain the information the firm gets back. What the firm gets back affects the next round of choices. Cues are also "extracted" in the sense that others see these enacted changes and extract them as cues of larger trends. Thus these others come to use the "same" cues for their strategic choices, as does the firm that first enacted those cues and made them available for extraction. Over time the set of firms in Hawick find themselves solving the same problems, signified by a set of cues that have come to hold common meaning. Typically these cues are labeled using common, salient features (e.g., friendly competition, classical elegance, crowd in Hong Kong that manufactures for Ralph Lauren, Scottish quality). The role of plausibility at Hawick is subtle. Earlier we noted that strategic choices made by the strategists of Hawick restricted severely the market information they had about consumer preferences and the competitive structure of the knitwear sector. This restriction was the result of selected agents, who contacted selected stores, who sold to a narrow band of customers, who have little to say about the fate of knitwear in general. The resulting market feedback to the firm is both filtered and relatively uninformative. The information the firm does receive is probably accurate enough. It is just that accuracy does not mean much under these conditions, because so little is being monitored and sampled. A case can be made that a cognitive oligopoly forms in the interest of plausibility rather than accuracy. The quest is for a stable set of transactions that make sense. Stability is achieved by marking out competitive boundaries, consisting of a limited number of "similar" firms, which serve as the frame inside of which interactions now make sense. The transactions within the frame make sense because firms converge on a set of enacted and extracted cues that make common sense and encourage coordinated action. Transactions within a cognitive oligopoly are plausible and predictable, rather than strange and indeterminate. In other words, they make sense. If accuracy is important within an oligopoly, then this is likely to be so mostly for circumscribed projects spanning short periods. There is much more to Porac et al.'s analysis than is suggested here. What I have tried to show is that the generic description of sensemaking we started with fits comfortably into a description of how sensemaking unfolds for executives in a competitive group of firms who occupy a small niche in the textile industry. Part of the reason sensemaking in Hawick fits so nicely with the generic description of sensemaking is that Porac et al. describe the organisations of Hawick using concepts similar to those used to understand the sensemaking process. Thus the organisations of Hawick exist in the mental models actualised by influential strategists. But the organisations also exist in the strategies themselves and the choices that flow from them, in the networks of transactions among producers and suppliers and customers, in the beliefs about identity and causality, in the product that is shipped, in the communications within and between firms, in the definitions of major competitive threats, in the cues that are said to matter, and in the activities that are coordinated. Each of these depictions of "the" organisation is about identity, retrospect, enactment, social activity, ongoing events, cues, and plausibility, just as was true of depictions of sensemaking. Both organisations and sensemaking processes are cut from the same cloth. To organise is to impose order, counteract deviations, simplify, and connect, and the same holds true when people try to make sense. Organising and sensemaking have much in common. We glimpse this possibility in the work of Porac et al. We will see it in the work of others. However, we will not make a great deal of this possibility because to do so forecloses careful thinking about organisations and about sensemaking, thinking that may reveal the limits of such a union.