Rights statement: The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Management Learning, 51(3), 2020, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2020 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Management Learning page: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/mlq on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/
Accepted author manuscript, 302 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
<mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 1/07/2020 |
---|---|
<mark>Journal</mark> | Management Learning |
Issue number | 3 |
Volume | 51 |
Number of pages | 19 |
Pages (from-to) | 274-292 |
Publication Status | Published |
Early online date | 24/01/20 |
<mark>Original language</mark> | English |
The aim of this article is to explore sensemaking and learning processes with and through affective atmospheres. We engage with recent research within the ‘affective turn’ across the social sciences and humanities to conceptualize the significance of quasi-autonomous affective atmospheres that emanate from, and also condition, collectives of humans and non-humans. Drawing on this atmospheric scholarship, we propose and elaborate an atmospheric analysis of sensemaking and learning processes to examine how such atmospheres aesthetically transform, and anaesthetically constrain, the potential of bodies, including our own as researchers, to affect and be affected to sense and learn. Through empirical engagement with workplace meetings in a UK housebuilding firm, our analysis contributes by explaining how such atmospheres condition sensemaking that both registers the disorganizing novelty of events and reduces such ambiguity and equivocality to enable purposeful action. While extant research has suggested how the interplay of these two dimensions of sensemaking enables learning, our analysis contributes by drawing attention to how the production, maintenance and transformation of specific atmospheres in workplace meetings imbues affects that condition these two dimensions of sensemaking. Such atmospheres thus constitute vital, yet seldom discussed, phenomena in conditioning learning within organizational life.