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Making Sense of Sense-Breaking

2015; Academy of Management; Volume: 2015; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5465/ambpp.2015.14563abstract

2376-7197

Sierk Ybema, Thijs Willems,

Management and Organizational Studies

A sensemaking perspective usually imagines situations fraught with difficulties which challenge subjects to forge order out of chaos. Viewed from a psychological standpoint 'sensemaking' is an attempt to cognitively order disparate elements of a disorderly world. A social approach sensitive to power sees 'sensemaking' instead as part of a discursive struggle, yet it still envisions meaning-making as a matter of symbolic ordering of, and for, a social world. In this paper, we investigate the more radical implications of a political perspective on sensemaking by exploring instances of sensemaking's uncanny opposites: nonsense, meaninglessness, and silence. To develop the undertheorized concept of 'sensebreaking', we explore the disruptive and deconstructing strategies of police officers at an Amsterdam police station who try to counter the significance of a nation-wide reorganization. Specifically, we describe three 'strategies' which we termed 'absence of sensemaking', 'sense-unmaking' and 'nonsense-making'. Our analysis opens up sensemaking research to new ways of theorizing discursive struggles in organizational settings. We discuss the implications and limitations of bringing meaninglessness, silence, and nonsense into the analysis of organizational change.