Making sense of sensemaking: how managers construct their organisation through their talk

Abstract

Organization, as we understand the term, is both socially constructed (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) and a social construction (Searle, 1995). It is accomplished through the discourse of its members. At the heart of the accomplishment is sensemaking (Weick, 1995). Weick, and others (notably Bruner, 1991) see narrative as the basis of sensemaking. In this article, we outline a theory of narrativity originally developed by Algirdas Greimas and his associates. The approach is briefly illustrated by the analysis of two extracts drawn from a corpus of talk involving senior public administrators. The Greimas method is compared with that of comprehensive discourse analysis (Labov & Fanshel, 1977) in order to show how it can be adapted to the analysis of managerial sensemaking.

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