informs ® doi 10.1287/orsc.1050.0133 © 2005 INFORMS Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action. In this paper we take the position that the concept of sensemaking fills important gaps in organizational theory. The seemingly transient nature of sensemaking belies its central role in the determination of human behavior, whether people are acting in formal organizations or elsewhere. Sensemaking is central because it is the primary site where meanings materialize that inform and constrain identity and action. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of the concept of sensemaking. We do so by pinpointing central features of sensemaking, some of which have been explicated but neglected, some of which have been assumed but not made explicit, some of which have changed in significance over time, and some of which have been missing all along or have gone awry. We sense joint enthusiasm to restate sensemaking in ways that make it more future oriented, more action oriented, more macro, more closely tied to organizing, meshed more boldly with identity, more visible, more behaviorally defined, less sedentary and backward looking, more infused with emotion and with issues of sensegiving and persuasion. These key enhancements provide a foundation upon which to build future studies that can strengthen the sensemaking perspective.

The present study investigates how chief executive officers in the Canadian telecommunications industry acquire and use information about the external business environment, an information seeking activity known as environmental scanning. Data were collected by a nationwide questionnaire survey and several focused interviews. Of the 113 CEOs in the study population, 67 returned completed questionnaires, thus giving a response rate of 59 percent. Personal interviews were then conducted with eight of the respondents. The chief executives collectively perceive the Technological, Customer, and Competition environmental sectors to have the greatest Perceived Strategic Uncertainty – these sectors were perceived to be the most strategic, variable and complex. For each environmental sector, the Amount of Scanning of the sector is positively correlated with the Perceived Strategic Uncertainty of that sector. Generally, the chief executives use multiple, complementary sources in environmental scanning. Personal sources such as customers and subordinate staff are very important in both scanning and decision making, and they are used more frequently than impersonal sources. Nonetheless, impersonal sources such as publications and reports are also frequently used in scanning. In decision making, environmental information from internal sources is used more frequently than that from external sources. For many of the information sources, the frequency of source use is

Data on Silicon Valley law firms over a 50-year period were used to study the genealogy of organizational populations and its consequences for organizational life chances when a member of an existing firm leaves to found a new firm. Hypotheses and subsequent analysis suggest that the transfer of resources and routines between a parent organization and its progeny decreases life chances for the parent firm and increases life chances for the progeny. The results are contingent on the founder’s previous position in the parent firm and time since the parenting event. Moreover, I find that progeny have lower life chances when the parent is a failing firm, when there are multiple parents, and when the founder is a former senior partner of a large law firm. • 1 Organizational sociologists have long considered the effects of the transfer of resources and routines from old to new organizations. The 1980s featured a relatively brief but active line of research that attempted to establish a framework for understanding new organizations as the progeny of parent organizations. Brittain and Freeman (1980) examined factors that lead organizational members to leave and start new organizations. Other scholars, such as McKelvey

This paper reviews and extends recent scholarly and popular literature to provide a broad overview of how information technology (IT) impacts organizational characteristics and outcomes. First, based on a review of the literature, we describe two of the principal performance enhancing benefits of IT: information efficiencies and information synergies, and identify five main organizational outcomes of the application of IT that embody these benefits. We then discuss the role that IT plays in moderating the relationship between organizational characteristics including structure, size, learning, culture, and interorganizational relationships and the most strategic outcomes, organizational efficiency and innovation. Throughout we discuss the limitations and possible negative consequences of the use of

We explore how interorganizational networks coevolve with technology in the modern flight simulation industry. Since industries characterized by complex technologies, like flight simulation, rely on cooperative groups such as technical committees, task forces, and standards bodies to adjudicate the process of technological evolution, we focus on these groups and term them “cooperative technical organizations ” (CTOs). Focusing on CTOs enables a multi-level examination of interorganizational networks, as individuals represent their employing organizations in CTOs, mapping into overlapping membership patterns which generate community-wide networks. We develop a set of propositions on the emergence, growth and re-formation of CTO networks, and explore how the evolution of these networks both shapes and is constrained by technological outcomes in the flight simulation industry. We argue that varying levels of technological uncertainty between eras of ferment (high uncertainty) and eras of incremental change (low uncertainty) engender fundamentally different modes of network evolution: social construction during eras of ferment, and technological determinism during eras of incremental

All authors contributed equally. The names are arranged in alphabetical order

The term incident command system (ICS) denotes a particular approach to assembly and control of the highly reliable, temporary organizations employed by many firefighters, police, and other public safety professionals to manage diverse resources at a wide variety of emergency scenes. Our inductive study of a fire department’s use of the ICS identified three main factors enabling this distinctively bureaucratic system to produce remarkably flexible and reliable organizations for complex and volatile task environments. In general, this research suggests the possibility of new organizational forms able to capitalize on the control and efficiency benefits of bureaucracy, while at the same time avoiding or overcoming the considerable tendencies toward inertia that are thought to accompany bureaucratic systems. Recent organization science research indicates that an expanding number of organizations are facing increasingly unforgiving socio-political-economic contexts (cf. D’Aveni, 1994). Operational failures resulting in inappropriate, incomplete, laggardly or otherwise mindless organizational responses to unexpected and demanding environmental contingencies (such as major and unforeseen competitive threats, product malfunctions and recalls, supplier collapses, technology breakdowns, etc.) are ever more likely to be immediately

Whereas previous studies have been primarily focused on the structural features of Information Technology governance, this paper describes an exploratory study of IT governance processes. Rooted in competing theories of organizational decision-making, and based on a case study investigation of large complex organizations, this paper examines the design and effectiveness of IT governance processes from both rational and social perspectives. The results indicate that, regardless of the level of environmental dynamism and turbulence, effective IT governance processes are characterized by both methodological comprehensiveness and social interventions, involving strategic integration of business and IT decisions, and building collaborative relationships and shared understanding among key stakeholders. The implications of these results for research and practice are outlined.

Understanding the relative criticality of employees is important in managing turnover and security risks associated with human capital in organizations. Traditional social network analysis measures are based on static, survey-based assessments of centrality and other sociometric aspects of organizations, limiting their effectiveness in fully evaluating human capital criticality, particularly criticality that may be “hidden ” in the non-social dimensions of an organization. We introduce new task- and knowledge-based measures designed to overcome such limitations, and we apply them to a sixteen-person software development team to compare their efficacy to that of traditional social network measures of degree and betweenness centrality. Our results suggest that while each class of measures provides useful insight on criticality of organization actors, knowledge-based measures provide the most robust predictions of each actor’s contribution to organizational performance. Contact:

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