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    Rights statement: The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Organization Studies, 40 (5), 2019, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2019 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Organization Studies page: http://journals.sagepub.com/home/oss on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/

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On the Making of Sense in Sensemaking: Decentred Sensemaking in the Meshwork of Life

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Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/05/2019
<mark>Journal</mark>Organization Studies
Issue number5
Volume40
Number of pages20
Pages (from-to)745-764
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date11/04/18
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

This paper proposes and argues for sensemaking practices as fundamentally decentred. Sensemaking has been, at least since the late 1980s, an enduring subject for organisation studies researchers, and much longer for organisational practitioners. This research tradition has, however, tended to have a particular understanding of temporality (as divisible), tended to be centred on the human sense-makers, and privileged as more valid that which can be made present, through deliberative sensemaking practices, at the expense of that which is absent, and perhaps ineffable. In short, by locating sensemaking in the deliberative sensemaking practices of humans other significant constitutive conditions of sensemaking became obscured from view. The main thrust of the paper is to develop a notion of sensemaking that is decentred – not simply at the disposal of human subjects – and where sense is always and already given and made simultaneously. That is, where every human attempt at framing is itself already enframed, significantly. We show how this reimagining of sensemaking, as decentred, has the potential to open up new avenues of research in sensemaking practices – avenues that are more sensitive to temporal flow, the more-than-human, immanence, and the precarity of such practices. This shift is significant theoretically but also practically.

Bibliographic note

The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Organization Studies, 40 (5), 2019, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2019 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Organization Studies page: http://journals.sagepub.com/home/oss on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/