Making Sense of The Sensemaking Perspective: Its Constituents, Limitations, and Opportunities For Further Development

The IRIOP Annual Review Issue
Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. (2014)

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.1937
Making sense of the sensemaking perspective: Its

constituents, limitations, and opportunities for
further development
JÖRGEN SANDBERG1* AND HARIDIMOS TSOUKAS2,3
1
University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
2
University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus
3
University of Warwick, Coventry, U.K.
Summary Through a wide-ranging critical review of relevant publications, we explore and articulate what constitutes the
sensemaking perspective in organization studies, as well as its range of applications and limitations. More
specifically, we argue that sensemaking in organizations has been seen as consisting of specific episodes, is
triggered by ambiguous events, occurs through specific processes, generates specific outcomes, and is
influenced by several situational factors. Furthermore, we clarify the application range of the sensemaking
perspective and identify, as well as account for, the types and aspects of organizational sensemaking that have
been under-researched. We critically discuss the criticism that the sensemaking perspective has received so
far and selectively expand on it. Finally, we identify the main limitations of the sensemaking perspective,
which, if tackled, will advance it: the neglect of prospective sensemaking, the exclusive focus on disruptive
episodes at the expense of more mundane forms of sensemaking implicated in routine activities, the ambig-
uous status of enactment, the conflation of first-order and second-order sensemaking, and the lack of proper
attention to embodied sensemaking. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Keywords: sensemaking; sensemaking perspective; organizing; process
Originally developed by Karl Weick, the sensemaking perspective (hereafter: SP)1 has had an enormous influence
on organization studies (Anderson, 2006; Colville, Brown, & Pye, 2012; Hodgkinson & Healey, 2008; Maitlis &
Christianson, 2014; Miner, 2003; Oswick, Fleming, & Hanlon, 2011; Ramos-Rodriguez & Ruiz-Navarro, 2004):
It has inspired the advancement of the social-constructionist, interpretative, and phenomenological perspectives in
the field (Holt & Sandberg, 2011); has been a driving force in the emergence of process organization studies (Hernes
& Maitlis, 2010; Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, & Van de Ven, 2013; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002; Weick, 2010); and has
had a noticeable impact on the organizational practice literature (Colville, Waterman, & Weick, 1999; Coutu, 2003;
Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001).
However, despite its huge influence, or perhaps because of its deserved impact, surprisingly little scholarly
critique has been directed to SP (Anderson, 2006; Gioia, 2006; for an exception, see Holt & Cornelissen, 2013).
As Anderson (2006, pp. 1684–1685) observed in his citation analysis of Weick’s (1969, 1979) classic The Social
*Correspondence to: Jörgen Sandberg, UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, Australia. E-mail: j.sandberg@business.uq.edu.au
1
Although, as Maitlis and Christianson (2014, p. 62) noted, sensemaking, as a particular approach to the study of organizational phenomena, has
been variously described as a “theory,” a “lens,” or a “framework,” here, we follow Weick (1995) and use his term “sensemaking perspective,”
which is also consistent with several other writers in the field (e.g., Drazin, Glynn, & Kazanjian, 1999; Schultz & Hernes, 2013; Vaara, 2000).
According to Google Scholar, the term “sensemaking perspective” is also most frequently used in the field (“sensemaking perspective” received
88 hits when searched “in the title of the article,” “sensemaking theory” 15, “sensemaking framework” 13, and “sensemaking lens” 3). Strictly
speaking, it may be doubted whether sensemaking is a theory proper, rather than a perspective or a framework. As Weick (1995: xii) noted, “the
sensemaking perspective is a frame of mind about the frames of mind that is best treated as a set of heuristics rather than as an algorithm.” As
Weick (1995) further noted, seeing sensemaking as a perspective also allows considerably latitude in its application (which is probably an important
reason for its huge popularity and, as we will show here, ambiguities and contradictions in the use of its key concepts).
Received 27 September 2013

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Revised 17 April 2014, Accepted 23 April 2014
J. SANDBERG AND H. TSOUKAS
Psychology of Organizing, only a handful of researchers have critically engaged with SP, and even fewer have
sought to further develop it by mapping its uses and pointing out likely omissions, inconsistencies, and confusions
(Costanzo & MacKay, 2009; Engwall & Westling, 2004; Gioia & Mehra, 1996).
Admittedly, some reviews of sensemaking research have been conducted (Holt & Cornelissen, 2013; Maitlis &
Christianson, 2014; Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010; Mills, Thurlow, & Mills, 2010; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld,
2005), informatively clarifying the key concepts used, mapping out the empirical topics researched, summarizing
key findings, and offering suggestions for further research. However, useful as such reviews undoubtedly are, they
have largely refrained from simultaneously: (i) critically evaluating the core concepts of SP and their development in
the context of Weick’s entire opus; (ii) conceptually accounting for the gaps in SP (rather than merely highlighting
them); (iii) exploring the tensions and ambiguities inherent in SP; (iv) identifying and evaluating the assumptions
underlying SP; and (v) offering suggestions for further research that do not merely extend SP as it has currently been
developed but help develop it in a new direction. In this paper, we intend to undertake such a comprehensive critical
assessment of the sensemaking perspective.
We contend that, unless the core concepts, constituents, and assumptions of SP are systematically reviewed and crit-
ically scrutinized, it is unlikely for SP to be creatively advanced. Although, as we will show later, further development
of SP will certainly come from exploring currently under-researched topics (we will point out later in the review what
such topics are); it will also, and perhaps more crucially, come from conceptually accounting for why certain topics and/
or approaches in sensemaking research have been privileged over others. As we demonstrate later, the cognitivist and,
later, the discursive slant in mainstream SP, growing out of Weick’s earlier work, have made it difficult for SP but to
adopt a predominantly intellectualist approach to sensemaking (cf. Weick, 2012, p. 146), thus privileging cognition
and language, at the expense of other related topics, such as the body, perception, and emotion. Although it is useful
to point out the importance of integrating such underexplored topics in SP, as Maitlis and Sonenshein (2010) and Maitlis
and Christianson (2014) did, such integration will not be coherently achieved, unless (i) we understand why these topics
have been neglected in the first place and (ii) revisit the onto-epistemological underpinnings of SP, so that such topics
are not seen as mere supplements to sensemaking but as coherently integrated into it.
In other words, underexplored topics in sensemaking research are not merely “under-researched” (in a statistical
sense of the term) but represent also conceptual challenges. To accommodate such challenges, we need to re-work
SP by scrutinizing its core concepts, constituents, and assumptions. This is what we aim to do in this paper. More
specifically, the aims of this review paper are to identify and critically evaluate the major constituents of SP, that
is, the components and assumptions that underlie it. Such an examination will provide a sharper articulation of what
SP stands for, its contributions, and its limitations. Furthermore, it will point to how SP can be further advanced and
how it can extend its application range.
The structure of the paper is as follows. First, as a background to the actual review, we explore the intellectual affinity
between SP and Weick’s early work on organizing. Such an exploration is important because it will reveal the intellec-
tual roots of SP. Second, in order to identify and evaluate the major claims and constituents of SP, we critically review
the sensemaking literature in three steps, with a particular focus on investigating: (i) in what areas of organization studies
SP has been most frequently applied, (ii) the major constituents that define SP, and (iii) the critique that has been
directed to SP. Importantly, we critically assess that critique and expand on it. Finally, we discuss ways in which SP
can be further advanced and identify a range of new areas in which it may potentially be applied.
Sensemaking and Organizing: Exploring the Links
As a background to our main review, in this section, we briefly describe the origins and development of SP. We
focus especially on the close links between sensemaking and organizing, as it enables us to clarify how sensemaking
has been framed in Weick’s work, with what implications.
Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. (2014)
DOI: 10.1002/job
MAKING SENSE OF SENSEMAKING PERSPECTIVE
Sensemaking has been intimately connected to organizing throughout Weick’s work. Through adopting a
process-oriented language (Langley et al., 2013; Langley & Tsoukas, 2010), Weick made us see that “organization”
is an outcome of an evolutionary process of organizing and directed attention to the sensemaking roots of this
process. Such a conceptual shift has opened up a new way of thinking about how organizations are constituted
(Taylor & Van Every, 2000).
More specifically, in his classic The Social Psychology of Organizing (Weick, 1979), Weick argued that
organizing is a process in which individuals interactively undertake action (enactment), the results of which
they subsequently confront as their “environment,” which they then seek to make sense of by retrospectively
chopping their lived experiences into meaningful chunks, labeling them, and connecting them (i.e., selection).
This sense made is retained in their minds in the form of cognitive “cause maps,” indicating what is crucial
for carrying out their tasks and how they are interconnected (retention). Through sustained interaction,
individuals interlock their behaviors over time, and, in so doing, they deal with residual equivocality, which
they seek to remove through negotiating a consensus about their common task and how it ought to be
handled. Thus, a group of individuals become organized when their cause maps converge (Weick, 1979).
In other words, sensemaking is homologous to organizing: The latter is achieved to the extent that the former
is accomplished.
As Weick’s emphasis on reflection, cognition, and cause maps shows, sensemaking is co-extensive with cogniz-
ing: A collective entity becomes organized insofar as a shared cause map emerges. As Weick and Bougon (1986,
pp. 102–103) noted, “organizations exist largely in the mind, and their existence takes the form of cognitive maps.
Thus, what ties an organization together is what ties thoughts together.” It is no accident, therefore, that The Social
Psychology of Organizing is widely seen as having significantly contributed to the cognitive turn in organization
studies (Eden, Jones, & Sims, 1979; Hodgkinson & Healey, 2008; Huff, 1990; Meindl, Stubbart, & Porac, 1996;
Narayanan, Zane, & Kemmerer, 2010; Sims, Gioia, & Associates, 1986).
However, since the publication of The Social Psychology of Organizing, Weick has further developed the notion
of sensemaking by gradually removing it from its strong cognitivist origins and embedding it into a more explicitly
social constructivist (bordering at times to quasi-phenomenological) perspective. Sensemaking research has reflected
this shift, as shown in a relatively recent stream of studies that have taken language, rather than cognition, to be the
locus of sensemaking (cf. Maitlis & Christianson, 2014; Colville et al., 2012; Weick, 2012). Indeed, over time, and
especially since the publication of the Sensemaking in Organizations in 1995, sensemaking for Weick has been
taken to mean making something sensible, in ways that are not purely cognitive. Sensemaking is now seen as a
constructive practice, which includes how
people concerned with identity in the social context of other actors engage ongoing events from which they
extract cues and make plausible sense retrospectively while enacting more or less order into those ongoing events
(Weick, 2001, p. 463).
In other words, sensemaking is social, retrospective, grounded on identity, narrative, and enactive. Below, we briefly
expand on these features.
The perhaps most counter-intuitive feature of Weickian sensemaking is its retrospective character. Drawing on
American pragmatist philosophers such as James and Mead, and European phenomenologists such as Schutz, Weick
argued that people can know what they are doing only after they have done it (Weick, 1995, p. 26). This is best
captured in Weick’s well-known question “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” (Weick, 1979,
p. 133, 1995, p. 18, 2009, p. 143). The retrospective character of sensemaking and the forward character of action
account for the “strange loops” (Hofstadter, 2008) that Weick posited:
people make sense of things by seeing a world on which they already imposed what they believe. People discover
their own inventions, which is why sensemaking understood as invention, and interpretation understood as
discovery, can be complementary ideas (Weick, 1995, p. 15).
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Weick’s notion of enactment helps us to understand the “strange” sensemaking loop of forward action and retro-
spective deliberation. He argued that sensemaking
is usually thought to involve activities of negotiations between people as to what is out there. Less prominent in
these analyses is the idea that people, often alone, actively put things out there that they then perceive and nego-
tiate about perceiving. It is this initial implanting of reality that is preserved by the word enactment (Weick, 1979,
p. 165; emphasis added).
In other words, by undertaking action, which is necessarily grounded on hitherto taken-for granted beliefs, individ-
uals enact their reality, which they, then, retrospectively seek to make sense of and, on the basis of the provisional
sense made, individuals act on again, retrospectively making sense of their new action, and so on. It is this unending
dialogue between partly opaque action outcomes and deliberate probing that is at the heart of sensemaking.
As well as sensemaking being retrospective, it is social and concerned with preserving identity: It is influenced by
the real or imagined presence of others as well as by a person’s sense of self. Moreover, sensemaking is grounded on
the ability to bound the continuous flow of human experience—the ability to put some boundaries around a portion
of the flow into which one has been thrown when engaging in an activity or project. It involves focusing on salient
cues of an unfolding situation and developing them into a plausible narrative for what is going on. As Weick (1995)
noted, sensemaking collapses when identity is unclear, the social context and cues become ambiguous, retrospect
becomes more difficult, ongoing events become resistant to bounding, plausibility is strained, and probing action
becomes more constrained.
To sum up, examining Weick’s work in total, one notes the persistent use of sensemaking as a process for ac-
counting for the emergence of organization. The latter is not taken to mean an entity but an always-emergent order,
continually arising out of human interaction as people attempt to make sense of an ambiguous situation at hand.
However, tracking the conceptual trajectory of “sensemaking” in Weick’s work, it becomes clear that this concept
has been given different layers of meaning over time. It started out being used within a primarily cognitivist perspec-
tive, although, over time, it has acquired more constructivist nuances. Whereas in the cognitivist version,
sensemaking leads to the formation of shared mental cause maps, in the constructivist version, sensemaking leads
to actionable intersubjectivity constructed through language. What is common in both versions is the retrospective
character of sensemaking. Where they differ is how sensemaking develops: In its cognitivist version, sensemaking
develops in actors’ minds through interactively forming convergent cause maps of a common situation; in its con-
structivist version, sensemaking develops by socially embedded actors enacting a world through language use, as
they engage with a puzzling situation at hand. The tension between the cognitivist and constructivist strands within
SP has led to contradictions in how sensemaking has been studied, which will be explored later in the paper.
Unraveling the Major Constituents of the Sensemaking Perspective
Having briefly described the origins and development of SP, through focusing on Weick’s work, in this section, we
identify and assess the main components of SP, by critically reviewing the relevant literature in three steps: (i) the
areas of organization studies SP has been most frequently applied, (ii) the constituents that define SP, and (iii) the
major critique that has been directed to SP.
Investigating in what areas of organization studies SP has been most frequently applied is important for two
reasons. First, it will map out the possible areas of over- or, crucially, under-representation in the application of
SP and will therefore show areas for further research. Second, it will help map out the way SP has been received
in organization studies. This is particularly important for this review, as empirical studies are not mere “applications”
of a theoretical perspective in a specific area but, often, provide occasions to extend, modify and, more generally,
reshape a particular perspective (Hacking, 2002). This is because a theoretical body of work is usually complex
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enough to lend itself to several interpretations, in the context of diverse empirical projects, over time. Therefore, in
so far as social scientific fields evolve, exploring how a particular theoretical perspective is taken to guide empirical re-
search over time, brings to light both conceptual tensions within the perspective itself and critical onto-epistemological
assumptions entrenched in the field (Joas & Knobl, 2009; Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Sahlin-Andersson & Engwall, 2002;
Tsoukas & Chia, 2011).
Thus, as we will show later, despite Weick’s (1995, p. 16) explicit claims that sensemaking is different from
interpretation, the fact that most studies of sensemaking have taken sensemaking to be equivalent to interpretation
reveals both the conceptual tensions within SP and the dominance of “scientific rationality” in organization studies
(and the representationalist epistemology that underlies it) (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011, p. 340; Tsoukas, 2005, p. 382).
A critical assessment of SP ought to pay attention to both of these issues—the tensions within SP and the way the
latter has been “applied” in the field. Such a critical appraisal of SP has not been undertaken so far, and we aim to
fill in this gap here.
Methodology of the review

In order to identify relevant research texts to be included in the review, we first carried out a database search (in the
databases EBSCO, Sage, and Wiley) of nine leading journals in organization and management science (Academy of
Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Human Relations, Journal of Management, Journal of
Management Studies, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Organization, Organization Science, and Organization
Studies)2. The main reason for choosing these journals is that they offer the breadth needed for being able to identify
both in what areas SP has been most frequently applied and its main constituents. In particular, they provide the nec-
essary breadth in that they (i) are considered as leading journals within organization studies, (ii) provide a good rep-
resentation of both European and U.S. journals, and (iii) publish a wide range of different types of research within
organization studies. In order to identify articles to be included in the review, we searched for the term
“sensemaking” in the title, abstract, or as a keyword in the entire database for each journal. The database search
recorded a total of 147 articles in which SP had been applied within organization studies, up to the end of 2013.
In addition to the studies identified in the database search, we also carried out a more targeted review of
sensemaking studies within organization studies to identify and describe in more depth the major constituents that
make up SP and their specific features. The selection of the sensemaking studies for the more targeted review
was based on the following criteria: (i) studies that explicitly aim to contribute to the development of SP (Hernes
& Maitlis, 2010; Maitlis & Christianson, 2014; Weick, 1979, 1995, 2009), (ii) studies that explicitly apply SP in
their research (Blatt, Christianson, Sutcliffe, & Rosenthal, 2006; Cornelissen, Clarke, & Cienki, 2010), and (iii)
sensemaking studies that have had a widely acknowledged influence in organization studies (e.g., Gioia &
Chittipeddi, 1991). The way in which we identified in what areas SP has been applied, and its major constituents
are described below.
Areas in which the sensemaking perspective has been most frequently applied
In order to identify in what areas SP has been most frequently applied, we focused mainly on the following: (i) the
first part of the articles in which the authors normally relate their study to a particular topic area, such as strategy or
change, and (ii) the discussion section in which the authors typically try to connect the findings of their study to the
particular topic area first identified in the beginning of the article. Most of the time, the studies reviewed had a clear
application area, but some studies had multiple application areas. In those cases, we categorized the study in
2
As we searched the entire database for each journal up to the end of 2013, the search period for “older” journals such as Administrative Science
Quarterly is longer than for “newer” journals such as Organization. Note that the frequency numbers in the text are based on 147 studies identified
in the database search and not on the entire literature review.
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question in regard to its main area. For example, Gioia and Thomas’s (1993) study, although related to several areas
such as strategy, identity, and issue selling, we interpreted its main area to be strategy, as this is the core phenom-
enon under study.
The investigation of the articles identified in the database search suggests that SP has been applied broadly in
organization studies, comprising 37 different areas. Interestingly, it has been most frequently applied in strategy and
organizational change (23 percent), organizational crises and accidents (12 percent), organizational identity (8 percent),
and organizational learning and knowledge (5 percent), which comprise almost 50 percent of the sensemaking studies in
the review. Given the emphasis of SP on studying situations that cause organizational members some “cognitive disor-
der” (Balogun & Johnson, 2004, p. 524; Luscher & Lewis, 2008, p. 221), following a major organizational change or
disruption (Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010), the domination of the aforementioned areas of application should be expected.
However, it was somewhat surprising that SP had only been applied once (i.e., one study) in half of the areas identified
in our review. So, for example, among the 147 articles reviewed, we identified only one study that had applied SP in the
area of recruitment, one in trust, one in organizational commitment, and so on. This suggests that the application of SP is
currently significantly under-represented within several areas in organization studies.
Identifying and articulating the major constituents of the sensemaking perspective

As said earlier, examining the application of SP does not only reveal in what areas it has been most frequently ap-
plied (and in what areas it has been little or not applied at all) but, more importantly, shows also the major constit-
uents making up SP. In order to identify and articulate the main constituents making up SP, we carefully investigated
how SP had been applied in each article reviewed, that is, how SP had been used to study topics such as strategy,
change, learning, and crises in organizations. We specifically searched for what the research texts had in common,
regarding (i) their ways of applying and using SP and (ii) their key assumptions about SP. As stated earlier, although
we reviewed the entire research text, the main foci were the first part of the text, method section, and discussion. The
first part of the text was central to focus on, as it is here that authors normally describe what theoretical perspective
they use and how they conceptualize the subject matter in question, such as strategy or learning. However, the main
area of focus was the methodology section, in which the authors describe in more detail how the theoretical perspec-
tive is applied, such as how it governs their research design, data collection, and analysis. Finally, we also carefully
examined the discussion section, as authors often here try to spell out the contributions of the study, by highlighting
what is unique with the chosen perspective and how it enabled the researcher to generate the claimed contributions.
Our review enabled us to identify five basic constituents of SP, namely sensemaking (i) is confined to specific
episodes, (ii) is triggered by ambiguous events, (iii) occurs through specific processes, (iv) generates particular
outcomes, and (v) is influenced by specific situational factors. As a way to confirm and also to further identify
and articulate the main constituents underlying SP, we thereafter closely studied Weick’s seminal texts and other
texts in the more targeted review that explicitly focused on developing SP. How each of the identified constituents
is making up SP is summarized in Figure 1 and elaborated below.
Sensemaking is confined to specific episodes

Perhaps the most distinctive constituent of SP, in its fully developed form, is the conceptualization of “sensemaking”
as something confined to the specific episodes that occur from the moment some ongoing organizational activities
are interrupted until they are satisfactorily restored (or in some cases permanently interrupted). Weick and others
frequently emphasize this in discussing SP (Weick, 1979, 1995, 2009, 2010; Weick et al., 2005) and is also a
running theme in the way SP was used in all the studies reviewed.
For example, in strategic change, the use of SP has been delimited to the study of specific episodes, such as the
sensemaking efforts “during an imposed shift from hierarchical to decentralized organization” (Balogun & Johnson,
2004, p. 523), or the managerial sensemaking endeavors “in the midst of an (corporate) extensive restructuring”
(Luscher & Lewis, 2008, p. 221). Similarly, in organizational crises, the use of SP is confined to studying either
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Figure 1. Major constituents of the sensemaking perspective
episodes of sensemaking endeavors that take place during the unfolding of a crisis, such as the Bophal crisis (Weick,
1988), or to studying the episodes of sensemaking efforts that take place during the inquiry following a disaster, such
as the inquiry into the collapse of Barings Bank (Brown, 2005). Equally, sensemaking studies in the area of orga-
nizational learning focused on specific episodes, such as the sensemaking processes involved when learning through
rare events (Christianson, Farkas, Sutcliffe, & Weick, 2009).
Although this most distinctive constituent of SP shows that sensemaking is confined to specific episodes, the other
four major constituents identified define SP more precisely, as follows: events that trigger the sensemaking episode
in the first place; processes through which actors try to make sense of the interrupted activity; outcomes of the
sensemaking efforts; and factors that influence both the processes and the outcomes of sensemaking efforts. Below,
we elaborate how these four constituents make up SP and its applicability.
Ambiguous events trigger sensemaking in the first place

According to SP, the genesis of organizational sensemaking lies in “disruptive ambiguity” (Weick et al., 2005,
p. 413). It is triggered by an equivocal event that interrupts actors’ ongoing activities, “forcing” them to retrospec-
tively make sense of the disrupted activity in order to restore it (Weick, 2001, Chs. 4–6). It is important to note that
these triggering events not only unexpectedly emerge but also may be of one’s own making (i.e., constructed by the
actors themselves by noting or failing to note certain things; Weick, 1995, pp. 83–105). Although there is an infinite
number of events that can potentially set off organizational sensemaking efforts, our review suggests that it is pos-
sible to distinguish five broad event categories within existing literature: (i) major planned events, (ii) major
unplanned events, (iii) minor planned events, (iv) minor unplanned events, and (v) hybrids of major/minor
planned/unplanned events. It is important to note that these categories should not be seen as dichotomous but rather
continuous, sitting on two continua—from unplanned to planned events, and from minor to major events.
Major planned events. This type of events is mostly prominent in sensemaking studies of topics in the areas of strat-
egy and organization change, such as various forms of deliberate strategic change initiatives that affect most of an
organization’s activities. Deliberate change initiatives usually interrupt common ways of accomplishing things and
therefore force most organizational actors into significant sensemaking efforts concerning how to carry out their
work stipulated by the planned change initiative. For example, the event that set off the sensemaking episode studied
by Stensaker and Falkenberg (2007) was a major corporate change initiative, which gave rise to considerable
sensemaking efforts by those organizational actors most affected by the initiative. Similarly, the event that triggered
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the sensemaking episode studied by Luscher and Lewis (2008) was a major corporate restructuring plan by Lego.
Moreover, as Balogun and Johnson’s (2005) study show, major planned changes can also easily lead to a range
of major unplanned events.
Major unplanned events. This type of events severely interrupts organizational activities and triggers intensive
sensemaking efforts, sometimes even leading to the collapse of sensemaking and, thus, of ongoing organizational
activities (with, typically, devastating consequences). Major unplanned events triggering sensemaking efforts are
particularly salient in sensemaking studies in the area of organizational crises, such as the Bophal (Weick, 1988)
and Columbia shuttle (Dunbar & Garud, 2009) disasters, as well in sensemaking studies of post-crisis analyses of
major disasters, such as the Santa Barbara disaster (Gephart, 1984), the collapse of Barings Bank (Brown, 2005)
and the failure of a counter-terrorism operation in the UK (Colville, Pye, & Carter, 2013). For example, the starting
point for the sensemaking efforts during the Columbia shuttle disaster was a series of unexpected technical failures
that had occurred in the Columbia shuttle when it re-entered into the Earth’s atmosphere. Those technical failures
triggered intensive sensemaking efforts among NASA’s personnel about what was going on and how to rescue
the Shuttle and its crew (Dunbar & Garud, 2009).
Minor planned events. Contrary to the occasional major planned and unplanned events, minor planned events fre-
quently interrupt organizational activities in various ways, triggering actors into sensemaking efforts to restore the
interrupted activity. Examples of minor planned events can be introduction of a new policy or adjustments of an
existing policy, upgrading of a software program, or a designated task to solve a specific problem or request. One
type of planned minor events, commonly focused on in sensemaking studies, are meetings in which a group of peo-
ple is brought together, each one with his or her own view of the specific task at hand. A diversity of views triggers
sensemaking efforts to overcome the ambiguity about what the task is about (e.g., Abolafia, 2010; Malsch,
Tremblay, & Gendron, 2012; Vlaar, Van den Bosch, & Volberda, 2006). For example, Patriotta and Spedale
(2009) studied a series of meetings among a group of experts from different organizations with a designated task.
The experts initially entered into intensive sensemaking efforts in order to develop a shared sense of what the task
was about before they were able to carry it out. Examples of other minor planned events are various forms of devel-
opmental initiative, such as Bolden and Kirk’s (2009) study of leadership developmental initiatives with the aim to
change leaders’ understanding of leadership and employee support programs (Grant, Dutton, & Rosso, 2008).
Minor unplanned events. Although major unplanned events rarely occur, minor unplanned events frequently
emerge. These events vary from glitches in the day-to-day ongoing activities, such as a small misunderstanding
between actors about how to carry out an activity, to events that trigger more severe interruptions of a smaller part of
organizational activity, which require more intense and longer sensemaking efforts to be restored satisfactorily. An ex-
ample of a relatively minor unplanned event that triggered sensemaking efforts is Bartunek, Huang, and Walsh’s (2008)
study of collective turnovers in organizations. The actual event that triggered the episodes of unfolding collective turn-
overs and the subsequent sensemaking efforts was when “two or more members of an organizational group experience
unresolved dissatisfaction with some aspect of their organization” (Bartunek et al., 2008, p. 5). However, if the triggered
sensemaking efforts fail to restore the interrupted activity, a minor unplanned event can grow into a major unplanned
event and, thus, trigger a more significant sensemaking effort among organizational actors (Barton & Sutcliffe, 2009,
p. 1328). The Blatt et al. (2006) study of sensemaking in reliability of patient care offers an example that includes minor
events and the subsequent sensemaking efforts and explores how some of these sensemaking efforts lead, in turn, to
major unplanned events, triggering more significant sensemaking efforts.
It is important to note that although almost half of the studies (49 percent) in the database search studied
sensemaking efforts triggered by major planned/unplanned events, only 17 percent of the sensemaking studies
reviewed have taken minor planned/unplanned events as their point of departure for investigating specific
sensemaking episodes. This stark difference in frequency is somewhat surprising, given that daily kinds of minor
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planned/unplanned events are much more common triggers for sensemaking efforts in organizations than major
planned/unplanned events.
Hybrids of triggering events. Although a large majority (66 percent) of the sensemaking studies reviewed typically
investigated a sensemaking episode that has been set off by a specific event (e.g., major or minor planned/
unplanned), over one third (34 percent) of the studies investigated sensemaking episodes triggered by hybrids of
events, such as minor planned/unplanned events and minor planned/major unplanned events. For example, the sev-
eral episodes studied by Maitlis (2005, pp. 21–22) are triggered by a hybrid of minor planned and unplanned events.
And the various episodes of micro-practices of strategic sensemaking among middle managers, studied by Rouleau
(2005), are triggered by both major and minor planned events.
Sensemaking occurs through specific processes

As well as events triggering an interruption in ongoing organizational activities, another major constituent of SP pos-
tulates that the actual “making” of sense occurs through specific processes that actors are engaged in when trying to
restore their interrupted activities. Drawing primarily on Schutz’s (1967) social phenomenology, Weick proceeds
from the idea that we have only access to our world through our lived experience of it. This entails that “actions are
known only when they have been completed, which means that we are always a little bit behind or our actions are al-
ways a little bit ahead of us” (Weick, 1995, p. 26). In other words, as noted in the previous section, sensemaking is seen
as retrospective (Weick, 1969, p. 64, 1995, p. 24). The various retrospective processes of sensemaking in which actors
are engaged to restore an interrupted activity are also a key focus in the studies reviewed.
Overall, our review shows that the sensemaking efforts that follow from the moment an ongoing organizational
activity is disrupted until it is satisfactorily restored, consisting of three interrelated processes: creation, interpreta-
tion, and enactment (Weick, 1995, pp. 1–62). That these three processes are involved in sensemaking is gleaned
from Weick’s (1995, p. 8) account:
the process of sensemaking is intended to include the construction and bracketing of the text-like cues that are
interpreted, as well as the revision of those interpretations based on action and its consequences.
In other words, actors first create what they subsequently focus on for interpretation and act on those interpretations;
the cycle is ongoing.
Looking more specifically, the creation process involves bracketing, noticing, and extracting cues from our lived
experience of the interrupted situation—creating an initial sense of the interrupted situation, which people then start
interpreting (Weick, 1995, p. 35, 2001: Ch. 7). The interpretation process involves fleshing out the initial sense
generated in the creation process and developing it into a more complete and narratively organized sense of the
interrupted situation. Finally, the enactment process involves acting on the more complete sense made of the
interrupted situation, in order to see to what extent it restores the interrupted activity. As the initial actions already
taken by the actors become part of the environment with which they now engage, enactment (i.e., the further actions
taken by actors) may lead to further iterations of the three processes, until the interrupted activity is satisfactorily
restored—that is, when sense and action are in sync again.
Although these three processes of sensemaking are evident in the sensemaking studies reviewed, only a handful of
the studies reviewed (1 percent) take into account all of them. Instead, a large majority of the studies reviewed
(84 percent) do not seem to make a distinction between the “creation” and the “interpretation” process but treat them
as one and the same. In this way, processes of sensemaking become synonymous with processes of interpretation,
which often end up taken as processes of cognition. However, a few of the studies reviewed (15 percent) investigate
the specific interpretive processes actors carry out to generate a specific sense and the actions taken on the basis of
the sense already made of the interrupted activity for the latter to be restored.
A typical representative for the dominant focus on interpretation is Balogun and Johnson’s (2004) study of how
middle managers make sense of strategic change initiatives. Explicitly adopting a sensemaking perspective, the
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researchers investigated a privatized utility in the UK, exploring especially the interpretive schemata used by middle
managers before and during a major organizational restructuring, in which an integrated hierarchy was replaced by a
decentralized structure. Balogun and Johnson’s (2004, p. 525) “guiding premise” was that structural change “will
challenge existing middle manager interpretive schemes, leading to cognitive disorder.” The authors postulated that
the middle managers will engage in active sensemaking as they try to resolve the ambiguity and uncertainty that
result from the tension created by the need to be differentiated from other middle managers by work goals, yet
achieve coordination.
This and similar studies, such as Luscher and Lewis’s (2008) study of a major restructuring at the Danish Lego
Company, exemplify the cognitivist understanding of sensemaking: Major organizational change is thought to create
“cognitive disorder” (Luscher & Lewis, 2008, p. 221), which middle managers need to “make sense” of.
Sensemaking, therefore, is taken to be synonymous to restoring cognitive order. Moreover, it is worth noting that,
although in both studies it is reported that cognitive disorder created anxiety, frustration, and tension among the
managers studied, these emotions were not included, in a conceptually significant and coherent way, to the theoret-
ical accounts arising from the studies (Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010).
Outcomes of sensemaking processes

A fourth constituent of SP is the particular outcomes generated by the sensemaking processes during an episode,
namely, the specific sense (or non-sense) and the restored organizational activities (or further interrupted activities) that
ensue. The specific sense generated is seen as a springboard for the actions actors take to reinstate an interrupted activity.
However, according to SP, the specific sense produced does not primarily need to be an accurate account of an
interrupted activity but, rather, a plausible account that helps the sensemaker to create a narrative to act out, in order
to restore the interrupted activity (Weick, 1995, pp. 55–61). But as Winch and Maytorena (2009, p. 195) observed, ac-
curacy should perhaps not be abandoned completely, as “some representations can be more helpful than others.”
Moreover, outcomes are largely dependent on what forms of sensemaking efforts are involved in the processes of
sensemaking. For example, coordinated organizational sensemaking efforts tend to produce rich and unitary ac-
counts, whereas fragmented sensemaking efforts tend to generate accounts that lack integration and cohesion
(Maitlis, 2005, pp. 35–39). Furthermore, in some instances, the sensemaking outcomes are non-sense, and no restored
activity ensues, often with fatal consequences, such as in Dunbar and Garud’s (2009) study of the shuttle disaster and the
Mann Gulch disaster (Weick, 1993). However, similar to the processes of sensemaking, a large majority of the studied
reviewed focused on the sensemaking outcome as a restored sense and significantly less looked at both restored sense
and action, whereas only a handful looked at the outcome of non-sense/no restored action.
Sensemaking influenced by situational factors

SP postulates that sensemaking efforts never take place in isolation but are always shaped by a variety of factors
implicated in the sensemaking situation. A large amount of sensemaking studies specifically focus on what situa-
tional factors are critical and how they influence sensemaking efforts in organizations. Although the types of situa-
tional factors that potentially influence sensemaking efforts are almost endless, the literature review suggests that the
main factors are context, language, identity, cognitive frameworks, emotion, politics, and technology. Before con-
sidering each one of these factors below, it is important to note that these factors do not merely happen to influence
sensemaking efforts but that they, in many instances, are deliberately used as resources to influence sensemaking in
organizations. This is particularly prominent in the area of sensemaking in leadership (e.g., Pye, 2005; Smircich &
Morgan, 1982) and in the areas of strategy and organizational change (Dunford & Jones, 2000).
Context. According to SP, sensemaking never takes place in isolation but always in specific contexts. The impor-
tance of context when studying sensemaking is evident in our review in that 46 percent of the studies in the database
explicitly took into account context in various ways in their investigations of sensemaking in organizations. The
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immediate action context, in which an activity has been interrupted heavily, influences the processes of
sensemaking, particularly how actors bracket, notice, and extract cues from their lived experience, as well as how
the extracted cues are interpreted (Weick, 1995, p. 43–49). In a similar way, the immediate social context is crucial
for sensemaking efforts “as it binds people to actions that they must justify, it affects the saliency of information,
and it provides the norms and expectations that constrain explanations” (Weick, 1995, p. 53; see also Balogun &
Johnson, 2005; Maitlis, 2005; Patriotta & Spedale, 2009, p. 1228). Not only proximate but, also, broader institutional
contexts (historical, cultural, epistemic, industrial, etc.), within which the particular interrupted organizational
activity takes place, influence the sensemaking processes and their outcomes (Nigam & Ocasio, 2010; Riley,
2000; Weber & Glynn, 2006; Weick et al., 2005, p. 417). However, although the influence of the institutional
context has been acknowledged, very few empirical studies have empirically investigated how this influence
may occur.
Language. Linguistic factors include discourse, narratives, rhetoric, tropes, and stories (Abolafia, 2010; Boudes &
Laroche, 2009; Brown, 2005; Cornelissen, 2012; Cornelissen, Oswick, & Christensen, 2008; Heracleous & Jacobs,
2011; Morgan, 1980, 1986, 1993), which, in various ways, affect sensemaking efforts. They do so because
sensemaking is performed via individuals producing discursive accounts (Cornelissen, 2012) that organize their
thoughts and actions (Colville et al., 2012; Eisenberg, 2006; Taylor & Van Every, 2000; Weick, 2009, p. 5). For
example, narratives enable actors to organize confusing cues into more holistic and coherent interpretations of what
is going on and how to act (Boudes & Laroche 2009, p. 337; Cornelissen, 2012), whereas “metaphors connect
realms of human experience and imagination and guide our perceptions and interpretations” (Cornelissen et al.,
2008, p. 8). Metaphorical language is often invoked to enable people to cope with novel experiences by creating
links between familiar and new experiences (Cornelissen, 2005, 2012; Riley, 2000, p. 361; Tsoukas, 1991).
Although linguistic factors have always been a focus in sensemaking studies, the literature review suggests that such
a focus has increased significantly during the last two decades, probably because of the linguistic turn in the social
sciences (Grant, Hardy, Oswick, & Putnam, 2004; Maitlis & Christianson, 2014). A quarter of the studies in the
database search explicitly investigated how linguistic factors influence sensemaking efforts. In so far as the linguistic
turn is increasingly embedded in organization studies, the discursive (as opposed to the cognitivist) approach to
sensemaking is expected to gather force.
Identity. The sense actors make of an interrupted activity is strongly influenced by the particular identity they have
developed (Weick, 1995, pp. 18–24). As Weick put it:
what the [interrupted] situation means is defined by who I become while dealing with it or what and who I rep-
resent. I derive cues as to what the situation means from the self that feels most appropriate to deal with it, and
much less from what is going on out there (Weick, 1995, p. 24).
Quite a few studies from the database search (10 percent) also explicitly investigated the way identity is involved
in sensemaking. For example, how sensemaking is influenced by identity is richly illustrated in Dutton, Dukerich,
and Harquail’s (1994) study of identity construction in organizations, and Patriotta and Spedale’s (2009) study of
sensemaking in an expert group. However, the majority of the reviewed studies seem to have focused more on
how sensemaking is implicated in identity work (that is, in how identity is constructed through sensemaking) rather
than on how identities influence sensemaking (e.g., Kjærgaard, Morsing, & Ravasi, 2011; Korica & Molloy, 2010;
Lutgen-Sandvik, 2008; Watson & Bargiela-Chiappini, 1998).
Cognitive frameworks. At the most basic level, cognitive frameworks can be defined as “abstract representations” of
things or events (Bogner & Barr, 2000, p. 213). As Weick (1995, p. 37) put it: “the enacted world […] has its ‘origin’
in mental models of causally connected categories that carved out artifacts in the first place.” Looking more specif-
ically, cognitive frameworks influence what cues actors notice and extract, how they combine them and create a
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more coherent interpretation of an interrupted activity, and what actions they take to restore the interrupted activity.
Cognitive frameworks can be general or specific. Examples of more general frameworks are various cultural
templates (e.g., corporate, industrial, regional, and national) and ideologies (e.g., political, gender, industrial, and
professional). More specific cognitive frameworks are certain “this-is-how-we-do-it-here” formulae and particular the-
ories of action actors have internalized, in the form of tacit knowledge, as a result of their socialization into particular
practices (Riley, 2000; Spender, 1989; Weick, 1995, pp. 109–132). Several of the studies reviewed (8 percent) focused
on how cognitive frameworks affect sensemaking in organizations. For example, Bogner and Barr’s (2000) study
examined how managers’ cognitive frameworks affect their way of making sense of emerging conditions in
hyper-competitive environments (for further examples, see Balogun & Johnson 2005; Cornelissen, Mantere, &
Vaara, 2014; George & Jones, 2001; Luscher & Lewis, 2008).
Emotions. Although initially ignored, it is now increasingly acknowledged that emotions influence sensemaking
(Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010; Maitlis, Vogus, & Lawrence, 2013; Weick et al., 2005, p. 146), and the range of studies
of sensemaking and emotion is gradually expanding (Bartunek, Balogun, & Do, 2011; Maitlis & Christianson, 2014).
Nevertheless, in our database search, only 5 percent of the studies explicitly addressed how emotion affects
sensemaking efforts. Negative emotions are likely to be frequently involved in sensemaking, as the latter
typically occurs when routine activities are interrupted, and, therefore, the certainty and “ontological security”
(Giddens, 1999) routines offer are broken. Negative emotions are particularly salient in crisis situations and in
organizational change (Dougherty & Drumheller, 2006, p. 223; Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010, pp. 567–568). In such
situations, negative emotions such as fear, desperation, anxiety, and panic can significantly hamper sensemaking
efforts in that they reduce individuals’ cognitive information processing capacity and their ability to notice and
extract important cues (Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010, pp. 566–567; Stein, 2004). Exploring two cases of near-disaster
(Apollo 13 and The Mile Island), Stein (2004) has argued that the ability to tolerate anxiety is crucial for successful
sensemaking. For other researchers, emotions are important not so much for the way they impact on sensemaking efforts
but for providing the disruption necessary for sensemaking to be initiated (Dougherty & Drumheller, 2006, p. 223).
Moreover, it has been noted in the literature that some cases of planned change tend to generate more positive emotions,
which can facilitate actors’ efforts to make sense of the change initiative (Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010, p. 567).
Politics. As people in organizations draw on different areas of expertise and/or are located at different levels in the
organizational hierarchy, it is common that conflicting interpretations (what Brown, Stacey, & Nandhakumar (2008)
call “discrepant sensemaking”) about one and the same event occur, which tends to create political struggles (Weick,
1995, p. 53). This is particularly evident in instances of major change initiatives, when several departments try to
control and direct the sensemaking efforts to their advantage (Balogun & Johnson, 2004). This happens through
participants attempting to control the definition of the situation at hand (Cast, 2003; Dionysiou & Tsoukas, 2013,
pp. 194–195). An example of such control is the Bhopal crisis, in which the supervisor ignored and replaced the
workers’ interpretation of the situation with his own, with fatal consequences (Weick, 1988, 2010). As the change
literature shows, it is often common that the top managers’ interpretation of a situation takes precedence over other
group’s interpretations in the organization (Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010, p. 571). The way politics influence
sensemaking is perhaps mostly studied in the area of leadership (Maitlis, 2005, p. 30; Rouleau & Balogun, 2011;
Smircich & Morgan, 1982). However, as Maitlis and Sonenshein (2010) noted, very few studies have examined
more closely the politics of sensemaking, which is confirmed by our review in that only 4 percent of the studies
in the database research explicitly investigated how politics may influence sensemaking. Having said this, a
promising sign of the discursive turn in sensemaking research is the increasing recognition of the competing
accounts vying for legitimacy in sensemaking. As Maitlis and Christianson (2014, p. 98) noted, it is more common
now to see sensemaking analyses that explore the political processes through which some accounts are rendered
more plausible and earn greater legitimacy than others. Given the importance now placed on how sensemaking is
created through language, we would expect this trend to intensify in the future.
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Technology. Still another situational factor that influences organizational sensemaking is technology, particularly
various information and communication technologies (e.g., Gephart, 1984; Griffith, 1999; Korica & Molloy,
2010; Orlikowski, 2000; Weick, 1985, 2001, ch.6). For example, Griffith’s (1999) study shows how various
technologies introduced in organizations trigger sensemaking about what the new technology is about and how to
respond and engage with it. And Korica and Molloy’s (2010, p. 1879) study shows that the introduction of new
technologies influences how actors make sense of their “intra- and inter-professional relationships, and professional
identity as a whole.” Similarly, as the explosion of Challenger showed, the very medium of communication, such as
various forms of virtual communication (and the degree of “richness” of those media), through which organizational
actors interact, clearly influences sensemaking. Although there are some studies investigating how technologies
influence organizational sensemaking, the literature review indicates that they are relatively few in comparison with
other sensemaking studies (less than 3 percent of the studies in the database search explicitly addressed technology
in regards to sensemaking), something also confirmed more broadly in Orlikowski and Scott’s (2008) review of
studies of how technologies influence organizations.
A critique of the sensemaking perspective

In this section we review, assess, and expand on the existing critique of SP, in order to further scrutinize the latter’s
assumptions, contradictions, and ambiguities, and suggest potential areas of future development. As noted in the
beginning of the paper, surprisingly little systematic critique has been directed to SP. Instead, various fragments
of critique are scattered in the literature, which coalesce on the following five points: (i) dismissal of prospective
sensemaking, (ii) the notion of “process” remains relatively vague, (iii) the concept of “sense” is insufficiently
developed, (iv) SP overlooks larger contexts in which sensemaking takes place, and (v) SP reduces reality to subjective
understanding. Below, we discuss each one of them.
1. Dismissal of the possibility of prospective sensemaking. One of the most common critiques, primarily raised by
researchers in the area of strategy and organizational change (who explicitly focus on the future), is that current
SP enables the study of retrospective sensemaking only, at the expense of studying prospective sensemaking as
well (e.g., Bolander & Sandberg, 2013; Engwall & Westling, 2004; Gephart, Topal, & Zhang, 2010; Gioia,
Corley, & Fabbri, 2002; Gioia & Mehra, 1996; Gioia, Thomas, Clark, & Chittipeddi, 1994; Kaplan & Orlikowski,
2013; Mackay, 2009; Stigliani & Ravasi, 2012). It is important to note that although Weick admits that people’s
actions are guided by future-oriented thoughts, such as plans, he nonetheless claims that they are, essentially,
derived from retrospective sensemaking. This is so because, “when one thinks about the future,” notes Weick
(1969, p. 65), “this thinking is not done in future tense, but rather in the future perfect tense” (italics added). What
Weick aims to convey with the notion of “future perfect tense” is that the meaning of the planned actions
necessary for carrying out an activity can only be “discovered because they are viewed as if they have already
occurred” (Weick, 1969, p. 66), that is, through retrospective sensemaking. A similar argument has been
advanced by Dougherty and Drumheller (2006), and Gioia et al. (2002): Although the notion of prospective
sensemaking is not denied, its significance tends to be diminished, in so far as prospective sensemaking is seen
as being derivative from retrospective sensemaking.
Other researchers doubt this claim. MacKay (2009) questioned the view that when we make sense about the fu-
ture, we do so in future perfect tense. Drawing on developments in cognitive psychology, especially on the notions
of counterfactual thinking and prefectural mental simulations, MacKay (2009, p. 91) argued that the future perfect
idea is particularly “inadequate in order to understand prospective sensemaking processes,” in circumstances where
complexity and uncertainty are predominant. Likewise, Stigliani and Ravasi (2012, p. 35) argued that
thinking in future perfect tense […] may be less appropriate to explain prospective cognitive work when
expectations or aspirations about the future is ambiguous or unclear—as often occurs in product development
and strategy making.
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In a similar vein, but drawing on ethnomethodology, Gephart et al. (2010, p. 285) contended that future-oriented
sensemaking occurs when people seek “to construct intersubjective meanings, images, and schemes in conversation
where these meanings and interpretations create or project images of future objects and phenomena.”
2. The notion of “process” remains relatively vague. Some researchers, such as Decker (1998), Gioia and Mehra
(1996), Hong-Sang and Brower (2008), Magala (1997), Mills and Weatherbee (2006), and O’Connell (1998),
have argued that the actual process of sensemaking remains relatively vague. For example, in a review of Weick’s
(1995) Sensemaking in Organizations, O’Connell (1998, p. 207) noted that it lacked details about the actual
process of sensemaking (e.g., “interact,” “double interact,” and “triple interact”), which would have “given a
stronger rubber-meets-the-road feel to his discussions of sensemaking in this volume” (see also Hong-Sang &
Brower, 2008, p. 224).
Although such criticism sometimes lacks precision, in that it does not expand on those aspects of “process” that
give rise to confusion or are not sufficiently explored, it does point in the right direction. As mentioned earlier, the
“creation” and “interpretation” processes are often conflated in sensemaking studies, despite Weick’s persistent
claim that sensemaking is not synonymous to interpretation (Weick, 1995, p. 6–16). What adds to the confusion
is that the notion of “enactment” in SP is notoriously slippery, as enactment, sometimes, is thought by researchers
to be involved in all sensemaking processes—that is, in the creation process (i.e., in the initial sense of a disrupted
activity), in the interpretation process (i.e., in the clearer assessment later of the initial sense made), and in the
enactment process itself (i.e., in the action taken on the interpretation made)—and, yet, at other times, only in the
enactment process proper. In other words, it is not clear in current SP whether “enactment” is confined to one pro-
cess or is implicated in all three processes of sensemaking.
Such confusion of what enactment stands for stems partly from the occasionally linear structure of Weick’s argu-
ment, which portrays “sense” and “action” as two different categories that inter-act. However, in enactment, “sense”
and “action” are not distinct from each other but inextricably interwoven. As Thompson (2007, p. 158) emphatically
observed, “sense-making = enaction.” Weick, at times, alludes to the symbiotic nature of “sense” and “action” when
he noted: “people act their way into sense” (Weick, 2009, p. 130). At other times, however, the circularity of sense
and action in enactment tends to be obscured, in preference of more linear arguments, as in “sensemaking is about
the interplay of action and interpretation” (Christianson et al., 2009, p. 132), implying two distinct processes that
inter-act. As the defining feature of enactment is that “people often produce part of the environment they face”
(Weick, 1995, p. 30), human action is constitutive of the sense that is made at any point. Sense and action do not
so much inter-act as “intra-act” (Barad, 2007, p. 139; Shotter, 2013, p. 33)—they are bound together in a broader
flow. The object of sense and the subject of sense are entwined in a relational totality: “[people] act and in doing
so create the materials that become the constraints and opportunities they face” (Weick, 1995, p. 31).
To properly capture the circularity of “sense” and “action” in enactment is not merely a question of putting for-
ward a less linear argument but also of adopting a more complex ontology than the one that conceives of the world
as a collection of objects with specific properties (Dreyfus, 1991; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011). The circular relation-
ship between “sense” and “action” in enactment highlights the fundamental mode of human existence—that of be-
ing-in-the-world, namely that we are always already entwined with others and things in specific sociomaterial
practice worlds (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011). We are immersed in such worlds without being aware of it. Thus, there
is always some opacity, an awareness deficit, in human action. People act habitually, shaped by the identity they
have historically developed, without fully knowing the meaning of their actions, until the latter have been responded
to (Blumer, 2004; Weick, 1995, 2009).
Hence, it is not so much that purposeful actors, equipped with articulated plans, deliberately re-shape their actions
by obtaining explicit feedback as they go on with their tasks, as that actors habitually act on the basis of who they
historically have been (Sandberg & Targama, 2007, Ch. 4), observe the “backtalk” of their actions (Schon, 1987;
Yanow & Tsoukas, 2009), and obtain a clearer sense of what is going on and who they are, spontaneously adjusting
their actions accordingly. “Sense” and “action” are bound together in enactment insofar as individuals are simulta-
neously concerned with two questions: “What’s the story? Now what?” (Weick, 2009, p. 195). The critical question
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is how the interweaving of sense and action is preserved rather than broken up for the sake of analytical conve-
nience. Insofar as existential phenomenology helps preserve the unity of thought and action, eschewing the separa-
tion of subjects from objects, it furnishes us with a promising ontology, which we will further elaborate in the section
on Discussion: Ways Forward.
3. The concept of sense insufficiently developed. A similar and intimately related, but less frequently raised,
critique is that the concept of “sense” within SP remains vague and imprecise (Bakken & Hernes 2006; Decker,
1998; Gioia & Mehra, 1996; Magala, 1997; Munro & Huber, 2012; O’Connell, 1998; Pfeffer, 1995). This critique
is quite telling, especially as, despite his prolific writing on sensemaking, Weick has been reticent in defining
“sense.” When he uses the term “sense,” he attaches several different meanings to it, such as the following: sense
as intellectual grasp of a disruptively ambiguous situation, as perception, as meaningfulness, as understanding,
and as reflection (Weick, 1995, p. 24–25). The ambiguity of “sense” in sensemaking is evident in most of the
sensemaking studies reviewed, with most of them treating “sense” as the outcome of actors’ interpretation/cognizing
of an interrupted or new activity. Cornelissen et al. (2010), for example, in their study of sensegiving in entre-
preneurial ventures, have defined sense as a “cognitive process.” Moreover, it should be noted that, despite
the apparent centrality of “sense” in “sensemaking,” there is very little in sensemaking studies on the use
of the senses, namely on how the experience of a disrupted activity is shaped by the bodily senses. The
neglect of the body, more generally, is an important gap in sensemaking research (for a notable exception,
see Cunliffe & Coupland, 2011).
4. Larger contexts in which sensemaking occurs are overlooked. Another critique, although less frequently
stated, is that SP neglects the larger institutional context (Magala, 1997, p. 335; Taylor & Van Every, 2000, p. 251;
Weber & Glynn, 2006, p. 1639), as well as the underlying epistemic context of sensemaking (O’Leary & Chia,
2007). Concerning the institutional context, Weber and Glynn (2006, p. 1639) noted that SP tends to neglect the “role
of larger social, historical or institutional contexts in explaining cognition” (see also Taylor & Van Every, 2000,
p. 251), although, recently, there has been a noticeable surge of studies focusing on sensemaking and institutions
(Maitlis & Christianson, 2014). In a similar vein, Magala (1997, p. 335–336), in his review of Weick’s Sensemaking
in Organizations, argued that Weick “displays a fairly surprising disregard of macro-actors—particularly when he
approaches the institutional constraints which only apparently assume the ‘micro-interactional’ appearance.” The
neglect of the broader institutional context in ST is also something that has been acknowledged by Weick himself
(i.e., Weick et al., 2005, p. 417).
Concerning the epistemic context, although there is an extensive literature on how sensemaking efforts create or-
der in ongoing activities, O’Leary and Chia (2007, p. 393) noted that SP is largely ignorant “about how structurally
such various kinds of ordering are rendered possible.” Drawing on Foucault, they argue that organizational
sensemaking is always underpinned by different epistemes (i.e., an underlying system of rules for forming knowl-
edge) that enable sensemaking efforts to achieve coherence and plausibility in the first place. In particular, how
we notice and extract cues from our lived experience and form those cues into a more coherent interpretation is
always “governed by the established rules of formation for a particular episteme” (p. 395). Although less developed,
Mullen, Vladi, and Mills (2006) provided a similar line of critique.
A good example of how sensemaking is always shaped by particular epistemes is Thomas Kuhn’s well-known
account of his immense initial difficulty to understand Aristotle’s writings on motion and mechanics through the lens
of Newtonian mechanics, into which Kuhn had been socialized through his science education (Kuhn, 2000:15–19).
As Kuhn noted, concepts gain their meaning within a particular “ontological hierarchy” (Kuhn, 2000:17). Thus, a
particular episteme, such as Newtonian mechanics, trains people’s perceptions and expectations. Exploring how dif-
ferent cultural assumptions (in the broadest sense to include epistemic ones) shape sensemaking efforts (what people
notice, how, and how they account for it) should therefore be an important focus in sensemaking research.
5. Reality is reduced to subjective understanding. Another fairly common critique is that SP is too subjectivistic,
in that it claims that people in organizations “enact” their environment to their own wishes (e.g., Child, 1997;
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Clark, 2004; Whittington, 1988). For example, Child (1997, p. 54) has criticized the strand of enactivist research
generated by Smircich and Stubbart (1985) for viewing the strategic environments of organizations as “wholly
enacted through the social construction of actors.” According to Child (1997, p. 55), “environments have properties
which simply cannot be enacted by organizational actors”—properties that significantly constrain what and how
environments are enacted. Following Whittington (1988, p. 528), examples of such environmental properties are “the
social institutions of capitalism—firms, markets and a state guaranteeing the rights of property.”
This critique, however, seems misplaced. To argue that environments are enacted, as SP researchers do, does not
mean that environments are fabricated at will. Phenomenologically speaking at least, it rather means that environ-
ments are brought to actors’ awareness—are disclosed in particular ways. As Thompson (2007, p. 15) remarked,
the environment is disclosed—namely it is made available to experience—thanks to the intentional activities of con-
sciousness. “Things show up, as it were, having the features they do, because of how they are disclosed and brought
to awareness by the intentional activities of our minds” (see also Spinosa, Flores, & Dreyfus, 1997). Thus, although
the institutions of a market economy may appear as given to economic actors at any point in time, they are contin-
ually re-shaped by actors, albeit often in imperceptible ways, and new institutions are created in the ongoing
unfolding of socio-economic life (Chiles, Bluedorn, & Gupta, 2007; Chiles, Meyer, & Hench, 2004; North,
2010; Sarasvathy, 2001). The notion of “enactment” makes the “discretionary acting” (Weick, 2009, p. 197) people
engage in visible. To act with “discretion” does not mean that people necessarily have a clear idea of what they are
doing but that they have latitude in what they do, which stems from the inescapably situational and inherently
creative character of human action (Blumer, 2004; Boden, 1994; Dionysiou & Tsoukas, 2013; Joas, 1996; Sawyer,
2003; Strauss, 1993).
Discussion: Ways Forward
Having identified the major constituents making up SP and summarized and assessed the main critique of SP, in the
reminder of the paper, we discuss how SP can be further developed. We do this in two steps. First, by relating the
major constituents of SP (summarized in Figure 1) to the sensemaking studies reviewed and, second, by relating its
constituents to the major critique directed at SP. Several of the ambiguities, gaps, and contradictions found in SP
emanate from the tension between the cognitivist and constructivist strands found in it. As we will argue here, con-
sistently re-working SP from a phenomenological perspective (especially drawing on enactive cognitive science)
will enable SP to remove inconsistencies, expand its scope, and make fresh conceptual connections.
1. Looking first at the major constituents of SP in conjunction with the sensemaking studies reviewed here, it
becomes clear that SP has been most commonly applied to study organizational sensemaking in episodes, triggered
by either major planned events or major unplanned events. Yet significantly fewer studies have utilized SP to study
sensemaking in episodes triggered by minor planned or unplanned events. In one way, this may not be surprising,
as major sensemaking episodes are typically seen as highly significant for organizational survival. However,
given that the bulk of ongoing organizational accomplishments emerges from sensemaking efforts triggered by
smaller disturbances in ongoing routine activities (Feldman, 2000; Turner & Rindova, 2012), this imbalance is
somewhat surprising and needs to be redressed in future research.
Another issue brought to light here is that, although several studies have been carried out about how sensemaking
efforts take place in each specific category of sensemaking episodes (i.e., major planned/unplanned and minor
planned/unplanned), very few studies have tried to (i) systematically compare sensemaking efforts triggered by dif-
ferent events within a specific category (e.g., major planned events) and (ii) even fewer to systematically compare
sensemaking efforts triggered by similar events across categories. Such comparisons (within and between different
types of sensemaking episodes) seem essential in order to further refine our understanding of how sensemaking takes
place in organizations. This is because events, occurring in different contexts, may have critical features that impact
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on the sensemaking process, just like organizational change, strategizing, or the performance of routines are shaped
by the contexts in which they occur (Dionysiou & Tsoukas, 2013). In other words, the more diverse contexts within
which sensemaking are studied, the more likely it is for SP to be enriched.
Moreover, it should be noted that the heavy emphasis by mainstream SP on studying sensemaking in terms of
distinct episodes (as sensemaking is triggered by particular disruptive events) is in tension with calls for approaching
sensemaking as a “continuous” or “ongoing” process (Gephart et al., 2010: 281; Maitlis and Christianson, 2014, p. 67;
Weick, 2012, p. 146). Although Weick is aware of this tension and emphasizes the need to see sensemaking as
“continuous process,” he nonetheless conceives of the latter as a series of several, rapidly moving “distinct
episodes” (Weick, 2012, p. 146). In other words, the tension is resolved by privileging an episodic ontology.
Yet for sensemaking to be seen as an ongoing process, the underlying episodic ontology of sensemaking needs
to be replaced with another that sees sensemaking as ubiquitous rather than exceptional. Later in the Discussion,
drawing on existential phenomenology, we introduce the notion of “immanent sensemaking” in order to allow for
non-episodic ongoing sensemaking.
Another finding emanating from the review is that a large majority of sensemaking studies seem to have mainly
investigated the interpretation process in sensemaking, rather than focusing on all three distinct sensemaking
processes (creation, interpretation, and enactment) stipulated by SP. There is therefore a need for sensemaking
studies that focus more specifically on the creation process as well as the enactment process, but perhaps more
importantly, studies that take into account all of the three processes when studying organizational sensemaking.
Moreover, even more radically, the very distinctions between these three processes may be questioned, because,
as argued earlier, carving out sensemaking in three distinct processes risks reifying them, thus isolating features of
sensemaking that should be bundled together. The holistic and relational character of sensemaking is likely to be missed
or downgraded if “sense” is split from “action,” and “creation” from “interpretation.” Noe (2004) made a similar argu-
ment in his defense of an enactivist view of perception. In so far as perception is intrinsically active, involving skillful
probing and sensorimotor movement, perception cannot be dissociated from thought and action. “Perception and per-
ceptual consciousness,” notes Noe (2004, p. 3), “are types of thoughtful, knowledgeable activity.” One of the great
promises of (phenomenologically inclined) enactivist cognitive science is the effort to relinquish analytical distinctions
that preserve unhelpful dualisms, in favor of other distinctions that help maintain the holistic nature of mental phenom-
ena (Noe, 2004; Radman, 2012; Stewart, Gapenne, & Di Paolo, 2010; Thompson, 2007).
This is a way forward for organizational sensemaking research too. Although analytical distinctions are certainly
needed for sensemaking to be understood, the distinctions should not carve out the phenomenon at hand into dual-
isms but capture its holistic, dynamic, and self-producing character (Tsoukas, 2005). Developing such distinctions
requires a particular ontology for properly understanding sensemaking, that is, an ontology that will do justice to
the paradoxical character of sensemaking rather than reduce it to a sequence of stages or a set of itemized features.
Phenomenologically inclined cognitive and life scientists are well aware of this challenge when they elaborate on the
self-producing nature of living beings as follows:
Sense-making is viable conduct. Such conduct is oriented toward and subject to the environment’s significance
and valence. Significance and valence do not pre-exist ‘out there’, but are enacted, brought forth, and constituted
by living beings. Living entails sense-making, which equals enaction (Thompson, 2007, p. 158).
Thus, to avoid treating organizational sensemaking as synonymous to cognition and interpretation, fresh analyt-
ical distinctions are needed that place enactment (or “enaction”—a term preferred by phenomenologically oriented
cognitivist scientists, see Hutto & Myin, 2013; Noe, 2004; Stewart et al., 2010; Thompson, 2007) at the center of
sensemaking, rather than treat enactment as a stage of sensemaking. Thus, the analytical focus should be on (i)
the constitution of sensemakers, namely their identity and the “background” they are embedded in (Taylor, 1993),
as well as the kinds of tacit knowledge they habitually draw upon in action (Tsoukas, 2011); (ii) sensemakers’
embodied nature, focusing on the sensorimotor bodily skills necessarily involved in perception (Noe, 2004); and
(iii) the situationally shaped “interactional” engagement of sensemakers with one another (Di Paolo, Rohde, &
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De Jaegher, 2010, pp. 61–63, pp. 71–72) and with the events, objects, and artifacts around them (Carlile, Nicolini,
Langley, & Tsoukas, 2013). In other words, we need to pay close attention to the historically shaped identity and
habitual responses of embodied actors, and to the process through which actors’ interactive coupling with others
and the world at large brings forth significance in a meaningful relational domain. This is the conceptual challenge
for sensemaking research, if the holistic and relational nature of sensemaking is to be preserved.
When relating the sensemaking studies reviewed to the constituents of SP, it also becomes evident that the micro-
contexts, cognitive frameworks, and linguistic factors that influence sensemaking have been relatively well
researched, whereas how larger contexts (institutional and epistemic), emotions, politics, and technology influence
sensemaking efforts in organizations have been under-researched. For example, a situational factor that has received
surprisingly little attention is how sensemaking is influenced by, and takes place in, virtual settings. Furthermore, as
Marshall and Sandberg (2011, p. 2–3) noted, a major drawback of those few studies that have studied sensemaking
in virtual settings, such as Berente, Hansen, Pike, and Bateman (2011), Faraj, Kwon, and Watts (2004), and Myers
(2007), is that
they impose Weick’s real world theory of sensemaking on the virtual environment, failing to acknowledge and
address the unique challenges of the virtual environment and the potential consequences for how sense is made
in those environments.
Further studies in those areas seem particularly urgent given the enormous use of information and communication
technologies in organizational life and that more and more organizational activities are taking place in virtual
settings.
Finally, the literature review highlights that SP contains two important foci that are currently not clearly differen-
tiated, namely first-order and second-order sensemaking. To date, the largest part of sensemaking research has
focused on first-order sensemaking, which refers to the efforts at meaning creation individuals undertake in the face
of disruptive events. However, as mentioned earlier, increasingly more studies, influenced by the linguistic turn in
philosophy and the social sciences, tend to focus on second-order sensemaking, most notably in the area of
organizational crises. In second-order sensemaking studies, the main focus tends to be not on how individuals in orga-
nizations make sense of disruptive events but, rather, on how public inquiry reports—exploring the genesis, unfolding,
and handling of organizational crises—make sense of the sensemaking of particular organizational members.
It is important to differentiate between first-order and second-order sensemaking, as the phenomenon of
sensemaking is constituted differently in either case: First-order sensemaking deals with agents embedded in
unfolding, primary empirical contexts of action, in which they need to undertake effective action to restore order,
whereas second-order sensemaking deals with how policy makers or inquiry teams make sense of primary
sensemakers. This kind of second-order sensemaking tends to be textual, devoid of the primary empirical context
of action that prompted it in the first place. However, the use of the same term (“sensemaking”) masks important
differences concerning the phenomenon at hand. Distinguishing the two types of sensemaking will help bring clarity
to a proliferating literature.
2. Relating the main constituents of SP to the major critique directed at it highlights three important limitations in
mainstream SP, which point to several avenues for how SP can be further developed: (i) a limited understanding of
temporality; (ii) ignorance of the immanent sensemaking inherent in the ongoing accomplishment of organizational
activities; and (iii) the neglect of embodied sensemaking. Below, we briefly expand on each.
(i) Limited understanding of temporality. One important limitation pointed out in the critique of SP is that it does
not satisfactorily enable us to investigate different kinds of prospective sensemaking. In order to rectify this
shortcoming, Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991) added the concept of “sensegiving,” which has been used widely in the
sensemaking literature (e.g., Hill & Levenhagen, 1995; Maitlis & Lawrence, 2007). According to Gioia and
Chittipeddi (1991), sensegiving is future-oriented, and it occurs when managers try to communicate what an
organizational change means to other stakeholders, such as employees and investors. More specifically, top executives
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are first involved in making sense of what an organizational change initiative implies, but once they have
made sense of it, they then get involved in sensegiving, in their attempts to communicate the new sense of
the organization to its stakeholders. Weick himself also endorses this refinement of SP, insofar as sensegiving
is seen as a way to influence sensemaking (e.g., Christianson et al., 2009, p. 853; Weick, 1995, p. 69; Weick
et al., 2005, p. 416).
However, although the notion of “sensegiving” may appear to make existing SP more complete (as sensemaking
is supposed to be retrospective, whereas sensegiving prospective), it does not remove the limitations that mark out
the way time is approached in SP. There are two main problems.
First, sensegiving is couched in terms of “the conduit metaphor” of communication (Lakoff, 1995, p. 116),
whereby sense is something that is first made and then given to someone else. Just like in the case of enactment,
an analytical distinction of questionable value is created. Sense is not an object to be passed on but a skillful activity
to be engaged in. Splitting “sensegiving” from “sensemaking” makes it difficult to see that “givers” and “makers” of
sense do not interact but intra-act: Both are involved in the broader flow of sensemaking, whereby individuals are
coupled with one another and the world, creating sense out of whatever material are available to them (including
each other’s utterances). A “sensegiver” is also a “sensemaker,” and vice versa; the two cannot be separated. A
change agent who “gives sense” to employees has “made sense” out of sense “given” to him by others. And an em-
ployee who “makes” sense of a change initiative by attending to her superiors also “gives” sense to them through her
reactions. In so far as this language must be used, the “making” and “giving” of sense are simultaneously implicated
in the process of sensemaking. Phenomenologically oriented cognitive scientists are aware of this, and that is why
they write of “participatory sense-making” (Di Paolo et al., 2010, pp. 71–72). The latter involves social agents who
“intertwine their sense-making activities, with consequences for each other in the process, in the form of the inter-
actional generation of new meanings and the transformation of existing meanings” (Di Paolo et al., p. 72).
Second, even if the distinction between “sensemaking” and “sensegiving” is accepted, it does not alter
the intrinsically retrospective character sensemaking is thought to have but merely adds to the latter a
future-oriented activity. Moreover, (retrospective) sensemaking is regarded as the background activity
out of which (prospective) “sensegiving” is thought to be derived. As people only have access to the world through
their lived experience, actions can be known only after they are completed or interrupted. In the words of Weick
et al. (2005, p. 416):
In the sensemaking recipe “how can I know what I think until I see what I say?” sensegiving corresponds to the
saying. However, notice that the saying is problematic, you do not really know what you think until you do say it.
When you hear yourself talk, you see more clearly what matters and what you had hoped to say.
Hence, even the supposedly future-oriented saying/sensegiving is still viewed retrospectively—sense is derived
after the activity (the saying) is completed. A future-oriented activity is seen through the future perfect lens.
In other words, adding the notion of “sensegiving” to existing SP does not seem to be enough to enable us
to investigate more genuine forms of prospective sensemaking, such as strategic discussions about the future
(Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013; Stigliani & Ravasi, 2012; Tsoukas & Shepherd, 2004) or various forms of an-
ticipation actors experience, while carrying out ongoing organizational activities (Bolander & Sandberg, 2013).
For example, a crucial aspect of the “practical sense” (Bourdieu, 1990), namely the sense practitioners mani-
fest through their engagement with the social practices they regularly take part in, is knowing how to go on
(Shotter, 2006). Anticipating what may come next is a distinguishing aspect of the temporality of human
existence, which stems from actors’ immersion in a particular practice. For example, as Blatt et al. (2006)
noted, a hospital resident typically anticipates a supervising physician’s reaction to her voicing her concern
about a medical mishap (see Klein (1999, 2004) for more examples). To be immersed in a practice is to have
a sense for how it will unfold—to practice is to anticipate. Yet, the importance of anticipation is missing from
SP. As SP’s heavy emphasis has been on retrospect, it tends to underestimate the inherently forward looking,
anticipative stance that practitioners adopt in their practices (Shotter, 2011). Challenging the idea that
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sensemaking processes are by necessity retrospective seems crucial for being able to further advance SP to
include a more genuine form of prospective sensemaking.
(ii) Immanent sensemaking. Perhaps the most significant limitation of current SP is that it confines the study of
sensemaking to those episodes when some ongoing activities have been interrupted and need to be restored. This
limitation is problematic, as such specific episodes form only one aspect of organizing, not necessarily the most
central. Rather, organizing is not so much characterized by interruptive episodes as by routine action (March &
Simon, 1993) involving “absorbed coping” (Chia & Holt, 2006; Dreyfus, 1991; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011;
Tsoukas, 2010): That is, people go on doing the things they routinely do without deliberately thinking about how
they do them. Just because actors are absorbed in their ongoing activities does not mean that they are sense-less
or mind-less. Instead, they are more likely to be involved in a kind of immanent sensemaking, which has been
ignored in SP. As Sandberg and Tsoukas (2011, p. 344) noted, “absorbed coping is a mode of engagement whereby
actors are immersed in practice without being aware of their involvement: they spontaneously respond to the
developing situation at hand.”
Dreyfus (2002) has observed that, for absorbed coping to take place, one does not first need a mental representa-
tion of what one does. Instead, in absorbed coping, “acting is experienced as a steady flow of skillful activity in
response to one’s sense of the situation” (Dreyfus, 2002, p. 12) (what Bourdieu (1998, p. 25) called “practical
sense”), something that is particularly evident among experts in that they are often “as one” with their work (Benner,
1984; Benner, Tanner, & Chesla, 1996; Bourdieu, 1998; Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986). For example, in their absorbed
coping of flying an aircraft, expert pilots experience themselves as flying rather than flying an aircraft (Dreyfus &
Dreyfus, 1986, p. 30–36).
What these studies suggest is that sensemaking does not only take place in episodes when ongoing activities
have been interrupted but is immanent in absorbed coping: It takes place simultaneously with actors’
responses to a situation as it unfolds. This kind of immanent sensemaking is likely to be both more basic
and more common than the various forms of retrospective sensemaking traditionally focused on in SP. As
Heidegger (1962, §74) observed, it is only when we encounter some form of interruption in our absorbed
coping that we start to single out and thematize aspects of a sociomaterial practice, thus entering into various
modes of retrospective sensemaking. The immanent mode of sensemaking points both to the possibility to sig-
nificantly extend existing SP and, through such an extension, to open up a whole new range of application
areas for SP.
(iii) Embodied sensemaking. Finally, a third limitation is that SP primarily permits us to investigate deliberate forms
of sensemaking. More specifically, by conceptualizing sensemaking as deliberate, it limits the investigation of
sensemaking efforts related to the cognitive or linguistic sphere, thus making it difficult to investigate various forms
of embodied sensemaking that constitute a significant part of organizational life (Cunliffe & Coupland, 2011;
Yakhlef & Essen, 2013). In its current formulation, SP finds it difficult to incorporate the body in its accounts.
If, however, SP were to be developed from a phenomenological perspective (Holt & Cornelissen, 2013; Sandberg
& Dall’Alba, 2009; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011; Yanow & Tsoukas, 2009), the body would be accorded an
important place in sensemaking, through the emphasis on perception, speech, and the emotions (Merleau-Ponty,
1962; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991).
As enactive cognitive scientists point out, perception is constituted by the possession of particular sensorimotor
bodily skills (Noe, 2004; Thompson, 2007). Moreover, people orient to the speaker partly depending on how utter-
ances are intoned during a conversation. Stressing the embodied nature of human communication, Shotter (2011,
p. 27) noted: “as speakers shape at least some aspects of the unfolding time-contour of their utterances in pursuit
of their intentions, listeners can be continuously ‘moved’ or ‘touched’ in one way or another.” Yakhlef and Essen’s
(2013) and Cunliffe and Coupland’s (2011) studies show that the bodily entanglement with the world furnishes or-
ganizational members with responsive forms of understanding that arouse felt expectations and a vectored sense of
where the situation might go (Shotter, 2011, p. 26–28). All in all, theorizing embodiment is an important challenge
for further developing SP.
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Conclusions
This study makes four interrelated contributions to the development of SP. First, we have identified the areas in
organization studies SP has been most or least frequently applied. This finding is important as it shows in what areas
SP is possibly over- or, more crucially, under-represented. Thus, it points to several new areas in organization
studies that SP could potentially be applied.
Second, we have specified the five main constituents making up SP: specific episodes, ambiguous events,
processes, outcomes, and situational factors (Figure 1). This mapping out of the sensemaking literature makes SP
considerably more transparent than previously. In particular, through the articulation of its constituents, it becomes
clear how SP conceptualizes and defines sensemaking in organizations, namely that sensemaking is confined to
specific episodes (in which some organizational activities are interrupted until they are satisfactorily restored), is trig-
gered by ambiguous events (major planned/unplanned events and minor planned/unplanned events), occurs through
specific processes (creation, interpretation, and enactment), generates specific outcomes (a specific sense on which
actors act), and is influenced by several situational factors (contexts, cognitive frames, language, identity, politics,
emotion, and technology). Identifying the constituents making up SP further clarifies the application range of SP, as
it enables us to see what types and aspects of organizational sensemaking have been most frequently studied or
under-researched or neglected.
Third, our review, assessment, and expansion on the existing critique of SP makes an important contribution
to SP, in that it further clarifies the assumptions, limitations, and ambiguities inherent in SP. In particular, the
review identified the following inherent problems with SP that need to be addressed: (i) the dismissal of
prospective sensemaking, (ii) the notion of “process” remains relatively abstract, (iii) the concept of “sense”
is insufficiently developed, and (iv) SP overlooks larger contexts (institutional and epistemic) in which
sensemaking takes place.
Finally, we have explored four limitations in SP, which if tackled, will advance it. First, we have argued that con-
ceiving of sensemaking process as consisting of creation, interpretation, and enactment is misleading. Sensemaking
is co-extensive with enactment. Fresh analytical distinctions are needed that preserve the self-producing relational
totality that constitutes sensemaking, without reifying its specific aspects. Second, we have made a case for the im-
portance of prospective sensemaking, which has been downplayed in SP. Third, we have questioned the exclusive
focus on disruptive episodes at the expense of more mundane forms of sensemaking implicated in routine activities,
calling for a shift of attention to immanent sensemaking. And fourth, we have suggested that the mainstream
cognitivist origins of SP have prevented it from taking the body more seriously and called for paying closer attention
to embodied sensemaking by drawing on phenomenologically oriented enactive cognitive science.
In conclusion, we have shown that the roots of the two main approaches to sensemaking—the cognitivist
and the discursive—are to be found in Weick’s work. By situating SP within Weick’s opus, we have been
able to trace its development over time. Starting with a strongly cognitivist orientation, conceiving of
sensemaking as occurring in the mind, SP, following similar trends in organization studies and the social
sciences at large, has moved on to adopt a constructivist-discursive orientation, conceiving of sensemaking
as occurring primarily in language. As our review has shown, cognitivist understandings of sensemaking still
dominate, but the discursive trend is clearly discernible and is expected to grow. Although discursive
sensemaking studies have so far mainly focused on second-order sensemaking, thus privileging written texts,
there is ample room for expanding on first-order sensemaking by exploring how spoken language is implicated
in the making of sense in situ. Studies in discursive psychology have provided a wealth of insights into how
such an exploration may proceed (Harre & Stearns, 1995; Hepburn & Wiggins, 2007; Whittle & Mueller,
2011, 2012). Moreover, we have suggested that another possible way for SP to develop is to follow recent
developments in phenomenologically oriented enactive cognitive science, which aims to provide a holistic-relational
account of mind, perception, and sensemaking that seeks to overcome unnecessary dualisms that have hitherto plagued
mainstream cognitivism.
DOI: 10.1002/job
Author biographies
Jörgen Sandberg is Professor in the School of Business at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research
interests include competence and learning in organizations, practice-based research, qualitative research methods,
theory development and philosophy of science.
Haridimos Tsoukas (www.htsoukas.com) holds the Columbia Ship Management Chair in Strategic Management at
the Department of Public and Business Administration, University of Cyprus, and is the Distinguished Research
Environment Professor of Organization Studies at the Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. His research
interests include knowledge-based perspectives, organizational becoming, practical reasoning, and epistemological issues
in organizational research.
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Making Sense of The Sensemaking Perspective: Its Constituents, Limitations, and Opportunities For Further Development

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Making Sense of The Sensemaking Perspective: Its Constituents, Limitations, and Opportunities For Further Development

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The IRIOP Annual Review Issue

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. (2014)

Making sense of the sensemaking perspective: Its

Received 27 September 2013

Sensemaking and Organizing: Exploring the Links

Unraveling the Major Constituents of the Sensemaking Perspective

Methodology of the review

Identifying and articulating the major constituents of the sensemaking perspective

Sensemaking is conﬁned to speciﬁc episodes

Figure 1. Major constituents of the sensemaking perspective

Ambiguous events trigger sensemaking in the ﬁrst place

Sensemaking occurs through speciﬁc processes

Outcomes of sensemaking processes

Sensemaking influenced by situational factors

A critique of the sensemaking perspective

Discussion: Ways Forward

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