21.sept-organizational cultures and sensegiving

What is sensemaking?

• Sensemaking is the process through which people make sense of what is happening around them.

• Weick uses the term in a more specific way than we normally do in everyday language. It is not simply “understanding” or “figuring something out.” Sensemaking means that people actively construct an understanding of a situation from what they notice, experience, remember, and already know.

• People do not simply receive an objective reality and then interpret it. Instead, they encounter a complex and sometimes confusing world and use previous experiences, knowledge, emotions, bodies, and senses to make sense of what is happening.

• For example, two people can experience the same situation but notice different things because they have different experiences and knowledge.

Sensemaking and embodiment

• Sensemaking is not only cognitive. It is also embodied and sensory.

• De Rond et al. (2019) show that the mind is embodied: people make sense of situations through their bodies, senses, emotions, movements, and experiences.

• We make sense of the world through things such as seeing, hearing, smelling

• This means that sensemaking is influenced by what our bodies have learned to notice.

• For example, someone who has experience working with animals may immediately notice a particular smell, movement, or sound that another person does not recognize as important.

Habitus and sensemaking

Our biography and habitus influence what we notice and how quickly we make sense of things.

• What do I notice quickly that other people might miss?

• What sensory skills have I developed through my experiences?

• What do I automatically recognize?

• What do I often fail to notice?

This connects to the illusion of objectivity. We may feel that we are simply observing reality, but our position, experiences, knowledge, and bodies influence what we actually notice.

Sensemaking vs. Meaningmaking

These concepts are closely connected, but they emphasize slightly different things.

Sensemaking

• “What is happening?”

• It is about creating an understanding of a situation that may initially be confusing, uncertain, or unfamiliar.

Meaningmaking

• “What does this mean?” / “Why does this matter?”

• It is about giving significance or meaning to what we experience.

Sensemaking and meaningmaking are often intertwined and influence each other. They are therefore best understood as entangled processes rather than completely separate processes.

Sensemaking vs. Interpretation

• These concepts are related but not exactly the same.

• Interpretation can suggest that there is an objective reality “out there” that already exists and that people simply interpret it differently.

• Weick's idea of sensemaking goes further.

• People do not simply interpret a finished reality. They actively construct a reality that makes sense to them from the information, experiences, sensations, and knowledge available to them.

• We look, hear, smell, touch, taste, remember, feel, and recognize things, and from this we create an understanding of what is happening.

• This means that there is no completely neutral or objective way of experiencing organizational reality.

• These differences may seem small, but they can create major academic debates.

• If researchers do not make their conceptual assumptions clear, it can become difficult to understand what they mean by terms such as sensemaking, interpretation, and meaningmaking.

What is sensegiving?

• Sensegiving is the attempt to influence how other people make sense of a situation.

• Maitlis (2005) describes sensegiving as attempts by leaders and other stakeholders to influence other people's understandings of an issue.

• In organizations, leaders can use sensegiving to influence how employees understand organizational goals, change, problems

• Sensegiving = trying to influence how someone else makes sense of something.

• Sensegiving is therefore important for leadership and organizational culture, because leaders can try to shape the meanings employees attach to organizational events and activities.

Carton (2018): NASA and Meaningful Work

• Carton (2018) examines how NASA leaders made employees' work more meaningful during the project to put a person on the Moon.

• The important problem was the gap between an organization's large purpose and employees' everyday work.

• NASA had very large and abstract aspirations, such as advancing knowledge and science. But employees were doing very specific tasks.

The paradox of meaningfulness

A large and inspiring organizational purpose can make work meaningful, but it can also be too abstract and distant for employees to see how their everyday work contributes to it.

NASA: Four Sensegiving Actions

1. Focus the organization's aspirations

• Kennedy reduced the number of NASA's ultimate aspirations and created a stronger focus.

• Instead of employees having to think about many different broad goals, attention became concentrated around a common purpose.

2. Shift from an abstract aspiration to a concrete objective

• Kennedy turned the broad ambition into a specific goal:

• Land a person on the Moon and return them safely to Earth before the end of the 1960s.

• This made the goal much easier to understand and imagine.

3. Create milestones or “stepping stones”

• NASA created intermediate goals that showed employees how the organization could actually reach the Moon.

• These milestones created a visible pathway toward the final goal.

• Employees could therefore understand how their present work fitted into a larger process.

4. Connect the concrete goal back to the larger aspiration

• Kennedy connected the Moon landing back to broader ideas such as knowledge, science, and peace.

• The Moon was therefore not just a technical destination. It became a symbol of something larger.

The Five Consequences for Employees

These sensegiving actions helped employees develop a series of understandings:

1. The goal is reachable.

2. There are stepping stones showing how to reach it.

3. My own contribution matters to achieving the goal.

4. My everyday work is connected to something important.

5. The organization's purpose represents something larger than the organization itself.

The important change was therefore not necessarily what employees physically did, but how they understood what they were doing.

This is why Carton talks about changing the meaning of work.

Leader as an “Architect”

• Carton describes the leader as an architect.

• The leader does not have to constantly tell every employee exactly how to understand their work.

• Instead, the leader creates a blueprint that connects:

• abstract aspirations → concrete goals → intermediate milestones → everyday work

• Employees can then use this structure to understand their own contribution.

• So leadership is partly about creating the conditions in which employees can make their work meaningful.

Important Carton concept

• Sensegiving: leaders influence how employees understand the relationship between their everyday work and the organization's goals and aspirations.

Organizational Culture – Alvesson (2013)

• Alvesson argues that organizational culture is important for understanding the richness and variation of organizational life.

• Culture is not simply a list of values written on a company's website.

• It involves:

  • meanings

  • symbols

  • rituals

  • stories

  • myths

• Culture helps people understand what things mean and what is considered normal or important in an organization.

Culture is about meaning

• Alvesson argues that culture is strongly connected to symbolism and interpretation.

• For example, a coffee break may appear to be simply a break from work. But within an organization it can also represent belonging, friendship, teamwork.

• The physical activity itself is not enough. We need to understand what it means to the people involved.

Culture is not simply “inside people's heads”

• An important Alvesson point is that culture is not primarily something that exists inside individual people's minds.

• It exists “between” people through shared symbols and meanings that are expressed in organizational life.

• When studying culture, it is better to give concrete examples of how culture appears in everyday organizational life rather than simply saying, “This organization has a strong culture.”

Culture is not necessarily unified

• One of the most important things to remember from Alvesson is:

• An organization does not necessarily have one single culture shared by everyone.

• For example, managers, nurses, doctors, cleaners, and administrative workers in the same hospital may experience and understand the organization differently.

• multiple cultures, subcultures, contradictions and disagreements.

• Employees can also belong to several cultural groups at the same time.

Culture cannot simply be controlled by management

• Alvesson is critical of the idea that managers can simply design and control organizational culture.

• they can introduce ideas But employees do not necessarily interpret these things in the way managers intended.

• Therefore, management can influence culture, but it cannot completely control culture.

• This is very important when connecting Alvesson to sensegiving.

• Leaders can engage in sensegiving, but employees still actively make sense of what leaders communicate.

Culture and Control

Culture can also work as a form of control.

If certain ideas become taken for granted, employees may begin to think: “This is just how things are done here.”

They may therefore follow organizational expectations without someone having to directly order them to do so.

Culture and Meaningful Work – Donkey Sanctuary Example

• The donkey sanctuary example shows how meaning is produced through everyday cultural practices.

• Drinking coffee together is not simply about drinking coffee. It can create other feelings like belonging Therefore, the coffee ritual has cultural meaning.

• Cleaning animal droppings may seem like a boring or unpleasant task.

  • However, within the organization, it can become meaningful because employees understand it

• If there is not always a lot of work to do, then simply being useful and finding something to contribute can become important.

• Meaningful work does not necessarily mean doing an impressive or high-status job.

• People can also have different reasons for being there.

• Some may mainly care about the donkeys, while others may value the relationships with their co-workers.

Multispecies ethnography

• Multispecies ethnography studies how humans and nonhuman animals are connected and how different species actively shape each other’s everyday environments.

• In Chapter 4, Nadal does not treat macaques as passive objects or simply as a source of danger; she looks at how macaques and humans continuously influence one another through food, movement, urban space and everyday encounters.

Commensalism

• Commensalism describes a relationship in which one species benefits from another without necessarily directly harming it.

• Nadal uses this idea to explain how macaques benefit from living close to humans because humans provide food, garbage, buildings and other resources, allowing macaques to survive successfully in cities.

Human–animal co-production of urban space

• Nadal shows that urban space is not created by humans alone because macaques also adapt to, use and reshape human environments.

• They learn to move across buildings, cables, roofs and roads and to find food in human spaces, meaning that the city becomes a shared environment produced through interactions between species.

Religion and the human–animal relationship

• Religion plays an important role in shaping how macaques are treated because of their association with the Hindu deity Hanuman.

• People may feed and tolerate macaques because they see them as connected to the sacred, showing that human–animal relationships cannot be understood only through biology or public health because cultural beliefs give animals particular meanings.

Food as a connector between species

• Food is one of the main things connecting humans and macaques because people deliberately feed monkeys for religious or compassionate reasons while humans also unintentionally provide food through garbage.

• Nadal shows that food can therefore create close relationships between species but can also increase dependence, conflict and health problems.

The social construction of the “macaque menace”

• Nadal argues that macaques become understood as a dangerous urban “menace” not only because they can actually bite or steal, but also because newspapers, rumours, public discussions and political responses shape how people interpret them.

• This shows that perceptions of risk are socially produced through language, media and collective emotions as well as through direct experience.

Human–animal conflict as a feedback loop

• Nadal shows that human and macaque behaviour continuously influence each other: humans provide food, macaques become less fearful of people, macaques approach or steal from humans, people become afraid and try to control them, and macaques then adapt to these human responses.

• The conflict is therefore not caused by one side alone but develops through an ongoing interaction between humans and animals.

Unintended consequences of intervention

• Attempts to solve the macaque problem can create new problems because interventions often fail to consider the wider system.

• For example, relocating macaques away from Delhi can lead to conflict in the new areas, while feeding them out of religious devotion can contribute to dependence, unhealthy diets and more frequent human–macaque encounters.

Organizational fragmentation

• The management of macaques involves many different actors, including municipal authorities, wildlife departments, scientists, courts, temples, animal organizations and residents.

• Because these groups have different responsibilities, goals and interests, it can be unclear who is responsible for macaques and difficult to create one coordinated solution.

One Health

• The chapter supports a One Health perspective because human health, animal health and environmental conditions are closely connected.

• Nadal shows that rabies and human–macaque conflict cannot be solved by focusing only on the animals because issues such as habitat loss, food availability, waste management, religious practices and urban development all affect health and interspecies contact.

Summarize carton

• Carton (2018) looks at how leaders can make employees see their work as more meaningful. The article focuses on NASA and its goal of putting a person on the Moon. Carton argues that having a big organizational purpose is not enough. The problem is that a large and abstract goal can feel far away from employees’ everyday tasks. Leaders therefore need to help employees see how their small tasks connect to a bigger purpose.

• Carton shows how NASA leaders, especially President Kennedy, did this through four main actions. First, they focused NASA on a small number of important aspirations. Second, they changed the focus from the abstract idea of advancing science to the concrete goal of landing a person on the Moon. Third, they created clear milestones, such as the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, which showed employees the steps towards the final goal. Finally, they connected the Moon landing back to bigger ideas such as knowledge and peace.

• These actions helped employees understand that their own work mattered. Even if someone was doing a small or repetitive task, they could see it as part of the larger Moon mission. This is shown by the famous idea, “I’m not mopping the floors, I’m putting a man on the moon.”

Summarize Alvesson

• Alvesson (2013) discusses what organizational culture means and why it is important for understanding organizations. He argues that culture is not simply a list of values or rules that an organization has. Instead, it is about the meanings, symbols, beliefs and assumptions that people use to understand their organizational life. Culture can be seen in things such as rituals, stories, language, objects and everyday interactions. These things can have meanings that go beyond what we can see on the surface.

• Alvesson also argues that culture is not something that is completely fixed or shared by everyone. People in the same organization can have different experiences and interpretations, and different groups can develop different meanings. Culture is therefore dynamic and is constantly created and changed through interaction between people. This also means that managers cannot simply create and control an organizational culture. They can influence it through things like values, symbols and communication, but employees may interpret these in different ways or even resist them.

• Another important point is that culture can both help and control people. Shared meanings make it easier for people to understand each other and work together, but they can also create taken-for-granted ideas about what is normal or acceptable. People may follow certain ways of working without questioning them