Rethinking our interpretation processes: Some evidence

This chapter reconstructs the research work developed within the volume, with the aim of bringing out new elements. Using the abductive process within this chapter, therefore starting from the facts-understood as the infodemic disorder that afflicted public institutions and citizens during the first period of the Covid-19 pandemic-the evidence is presented. It is therefore a question of inserting the six research into the nested case study. Through the technique of lexical worlds, the views of the crisis have been reconstructed. The chapter also traces the limits of this study by opening new avenues for the analysis of the communication crisis produced by the pandemic. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.

Pandemic sensemaking: How Missouri superintendents made sense of the Covid-19 pandemic

COVID-19 has produced mayhem and uncertainty for educational leaders in charge of organizations. This inquiry sought to provide insight into how superintendents and assistant superintendents made sense of their environments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, sensemaking theory (Weick, 1995) was utilized as the conceptual framework to bring clarity and meaning-making for educational leaders as they led their organizations through local, state, national, and international crises. To this end, the focus of this inquiry was to gather school leader's insights into how they provided clarity to a disordered world, understood how they addressed vulnerable populations during the pandemic, recognized the role emotion played in constructing their realities, and determined if location within the state of Missouri played a role in the sensemaking process of superintendents and assistant superintendents.The researcher interviewed 23 participants in the state of Missouri and collected documents to answer the five research questions of the study. The study concluded participants made sense of the pandemic through a collaborative process using a political framework. Additionally, superintendents and assistant superintendents saw all students as vulnerable during the pandemic and expressed a variety of negative emotions. Finally, little variance occurred in superintendent sensemaking between small, medium, and large school districts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Moral Agency Development as a Community-Supported Process: An Analysis of Hospitals' Middle Management Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis.

This paper investigates the process of moral agency development as a community-supported process. Based on a multimethod qualitative inquiry, including diaries, focus groups, and documentary analysis, we analyze the experiences of middle managers in two Norwegian hospitals during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that moral agency is developed through a community-embedded value inquiry, emerging in three partially overlapping steps. The first step is marked by moral reflex, an intuitive, value-driven, pre-reflective response to a crisis situation. In the second step, the managers involved the community in value calibration, a collective-ethical sensemaking. In the third step, they took active stances to translate values into actions, with an increased awareness of values and an ability to explain and justify their actions. We label the steps, respectively: value inquiry-in-action, value inquiry-on-action and reflective enactment of value. An analysis of the process reveals two aspects critical for moral agency development: it happens through confrontation with uncertainty, and it is relational, that is, embedded in a community. While uncertainty forces an intuitive moral response, dialogical reflection in the community develops value awareness and relationships of mutual care and support.

'And what did you do about my emotions during Covid-19?' Making sense of negative emotions at work through institutional logics and Critical Systems Heuristics

The literature on Covid-19 has demonstrated that frontline workers use different coping strategies and engage in sense-making to address negative emotions. However, we know little about the underlying process of sense-making. Thus, this paper uses institutional logics to investigate how sense-making of negative emotions is enabled and constrained. This analysis draws on a diary written by a nurse at an Italian hospital, which represents an account of the emotions experienced by medical staff. The analysis identifies a set of enablers and disablers of sense-making, as well as, the patterns that alleviate and intensify frontline workers' emotions. Based on these findings and evidence of the Covid-task force at Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital in Bergamo, Italy, this paper illustrates Critical Systems Heuristics as a means to address the disablers of sense-making through participatory conversations that consider different institutional logics.

From strangers to social collectives? Sensemaking and organizing in response to a pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily exposed the inadequacy of established institutions and markets to handle a multidimensional crisis, but it also revealed the spontaneous emergence of social collectives to mitigate some of its consequences. Building upon more than 600 responses from an open-ended survey and follow-up qualitative interviews, we seek to understand the spontaneous formation of social collectives in neighborhoods during the initial global lockdown. Applying the sensemaking lens, we theorize the process that prevented the collapse of sensemaking; motivated neighbors to comply with the pandemic-related restrictions; and inspired the development of collective initiatives and the sharing of resources, experiences, and a feeling of belonging. In doing so, we identify mechanisms that allow distributed sensemaking and organizing for resilience: widely shared and accepted cues and frames, simultaneous enactment of practices, embeddedness, visibility of actions, and sense of community. Contrary to the literature on local community organizing and entrepreneurship, which emphasizes the importance of shared values and beliefs, we reveal how the abovementioned mechanisms enable social collectives to emerge and build resilience in times of crisis, even in the absence of pre-existing ties and physical and social isolation. Implications for sensemaking, resilience, organization studies, and community psychology are discussed.

Coordination in a not-for-profit organisation during the COVID-19 pandemic: organisational sensemaking during planning meetings

PurposeThe authors examine how a not-for-profit organisation (NPO) coordinates NPO's actions during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic to remain focussed on strategic and operational goals.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a live case study of an NPO as the crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. Drawing on a sensemaking perspective that incorporates sensegiving, the authors develop a framework of five types of organisational sensemaking. The authors analyse weekly planning meetings during which managers discussed past performance, forecast performance and the forecast duration of current cash reserves.FindingsThe authors show how three of the five types of organisational sensemaking helped to coordinate actions. The authors highlight how accounting information triggers organisational sensemaking processes;but depending on the type of organisational sensemaking, accounting information has little further role. The authors also show that the stability of decisions depends on the types of organisational sensemaking.Practical implicationsThe authors show how coordination as a management control practice is enabled by organisational sensemaking within an NPO during a crisis. Organisational sensemaking enabled the agreement of actions, which enabled coordination. Accounting practices provided trigger mechanisms to facilitate organisational sensemaking.Originality/valueSince this study is the first to examine sensemaking processes and accounting practices in coordination in an NPO in a pandemic, the authors contribute to the limited research on NPOs during crises and on the management control practice of coordination. The authors extend the accounting literature on sensemaking by showing that, whilst accounting triggers organisational sensemaking, accounting is only implicated in one type of organisational sensemaking and by revealing the different outcomes of the different types of organisational sensemaking.

Mitigating learning disruption: School leadership sensemaking and preparation for blended and remote learning during COVID-19 school closures

School closures resulting from the global COVID-19 pandemic had deleterious effects on student learning requiring continuous school improvement efforts to recover from the learning loss. This study investigated the level of preparedness of K-12 school leaders for the implementation of blended or remote instruction in an online environment during the pandemic. This entailed how principals and assistant principals evaluated teacher pedagogy in their school communities, while using their lived instructional leadership experiences to reduce the uncertainty, chaos, and student learning disruption that was exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. The director of a New York City principal leadership pipeline program for aspiring school leaders and four school leaders were interviewed about their level of preparedness to implement online instruction. Participants reported inconsistent professional learning to support the implementation of online instruction. Asynchronous virtual professional learning modules were designed and disseminated to the participants to strengthen their pedagogies using an online instructional delivery method. In addition, a rubric to gauge non-evaluative online teaching was introduced. The effectiveness of the intervention was evaluated for the online modules, revealing participant satisfaction with the professional learning modules and change agency for the participants and their school communities. These findings can inform school leaders on how to support online instruction in their school communities and approaches to mitigating student learning disruption in an online environment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation of the COVID-19 Response in the Africa Region.

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept throughout the world, it created a demand for information to help understand the public health response and its effects. Limited capacity to see and interpret data-"sensemaking" with measures of progress-affects the use of data for quality improvement. The World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa (WHO AFRO) supported partners from the Member States in using a participatory monitoring and evaluation system to document and systematically reflect on the COVID-19 response at the country level. The WHO AFRO's COVID-19 Response Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) team captured and communicated response activities based on available reports from 35 of the 47 member countries. By reviewing reports and communications, the M&E team documented nearly 8,000 COVID-19 response activities during the study period (January 2020 through July 2021). A "sensemaking" protocol was used to support country partners in identifying factors associated with increases or decreases in both new cases and response activities. This report describes this participatory M&E approach and process of shared sensemaking. We illustrate with a country-level case study of the COVID-19 response in the Africa Region.

Ctrl plus Alt plus Delete in the name of COVID-19: When a reset leads to misrecognition

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world in March 2020, it impacted all areas of society. Most conspicuous were the lockdowns that were quickly imposed in many countries along with other restrictions. These in-terventions into the everyday life of ordinary citizens were, perhaps not surprisingly, often met with resistance by citizens and businesses that felt their rights were being trampled on by governments. In this paper, we analyse reactions towards the far-reaching measures taken by the Danish government to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the fur industry and thereby prevent the development of new mutations of the virus: to cull all minks and temporarily ban mink production in Denmark. We argue that by studying this case, valuable lessons can be learned regarding how a business community reacts when faced with a great reset. Taking the current climate crisis into consideration, it must be expected that emission-heavy industries, like agriculture, will be faced with calls to radically change their mode of production in the near future. In this sense, we propose to view the Danish mink case as an early example of what a great reset could look like, how it is perceived by those who experience it first-hand, and how feelings of resentment and resistance can develop following a logic of (mis)recognition.

Playing the wild cards: Antecedents of family firm resilience

The purpose of this study is to explore how family firms respond to wild cards. We aim to capture the under-standing of family firm owners/managers of what wild cards are in terms of frequency, kind, and impact. We also examine how familiness and entrepreneurial orientation form the resilience and survival of family firms when facing wild cards. The scope of our attention is limited to extreme events so far overlooked in the family firm resilience literature, and the empirical context of our study involves the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings show that the response to wild cards depends on the understanding of those extreme situations that family firms managers/owners develop. Deep time horizon is relevant in developing a useful understanding of wild cards, and generational involvement helps to socially construct it. After developing an understanding, family firm man-agers/owners use decision making preferences in selecting their response to wild cards. Our study offers a behavioral take on family firms resilience, and provides a fine grained view incorporating behavioral constructs.

Professional practices at the heart of the crisis in emergency management: The example of the COVID-19 crisis

Our organisations have been severely shaken by the COVID-19 pandemic and the world of work has not been spared. Only essential activities continued in order to maintain a minimum level of functioning, just like in hospitals or in local authorities. During the first five months of the crisis in 2020 (from March to July), 34 interviews were conducted in these two public service entities in order to examine the management of urgent matters in the light of ``activity'' and at the heart of the crisis. The results show that while the emergency is mainly managed by an improvisation activity based on the intuition of the actors in the field, the crisis is managed by governance in a rational manner leading to the drafting of procedures after the event. This crisis situation pushed organisations to reconfigure themselves in an emergency, allowing the development of new professional practices. The strategies of damage control and proceduralization will be discussed. Perspectives are opened on the questions of training for these crisis situations against a background of developing presumption of ignorance. (c) 2022 AIPTLF. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Sensemaking in the time of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an environment that is dynamically uncertain - routines are upended, normal interactions are disrupted, and risk must be reassessed on an ongoing basis. The pandemic offers the unique opportunity to study sensemaking within a context that is enormously complex, novel, and rapidly changing. At the same time, this pandemic brings to the foreground assumptions and questions about sensemaking theory that have remained largely unexamined. In a field often focused on corporate managers and elite first responders, these organizational actors are neither powerful nor sexy (from a research standpoint). This points to the need to revisit the alignment between where critical sensemaking is currently taking place and where we tend to study it. Sensemaking research can be enhanced by exploring it in a much wider range of organizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of cross-cultural differences on crisis management: A conceptual model of transcultural crisis management

In this paper, leadership tasks and stakeholder response during transboundary crisis management are analyzed based on findings from Hofstede's study, GLOBE Project, and theoretical concepts in cross-cultural management. Accordingly, a conceptual model of transcultural crisis management is proposed. Seven propositions (P) and sixteen sub-propositions (SP) are developed and then tested using the case method. The case of the COVID-19 pandemic is studied to note the effects of cross-cultural differences and intercultural communication in the pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis stages. Cross-cultural differences are found to affect sense-making, decision-making, sense-giving and meaning-making during pre-crisis and crisis management stages. Implications of these findings and further research agenda are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Sociomateriality in Action: Theorizing Change in Sociomaterial Practices of Working from Home

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an enforced ‘big bang' adoption of working from home, involving the rapid implementation and diffusion of digital collaboration technologies. This radical shift to enforced working from home led to substantial changes in the practice of work. Using a qualitative research approach and drawing on the interview accounts of 29 knowledge workers required to work from home during the pandemic, the study identified five sociomaterial practices that were significantly disrupted and required reconfiguration of their constitutive social and material elements to renew them. The paper further shows evidence of the ongoing evolution of those sociomaterial practices among the participants, as temporary breakdowns in their performance led to further adjustments and fine-tuning. The study extends the body of knowledge on working from home and provides a fine-grained analysis of specific complexities of sociomaterial practice and change as actors utilize conceptual and contextual sensemaking to perceive and exploit possibilities for action in their unfolding practice of work. Against the backdrop of the increasing adoption of hybrid working in the aftermath of the pandemic, the paper offers four pillars derived from the findings that support the establishment of a conducive working from home environment. © 2023, The Author(s).

Faculty experiences teaching in an MBA program in the context of COVID-19 a sensemaking approach

The Sensemaking framework is often utilized when disruptive events create ambiguity and force individuals to make sense of things differently, personally and professionally, by "structuring the unknown" (Waterman, 1990, p.41). By way of example, the COVID-19 pandemic was a significant disruptor to the education sector. Institutional decisions driven by the initial crisis kept daily functions and the educational process moving forward in 2020 by faculty members leveraging existing technology to continue teaching their students. The pandemic disrupted the daily routine of brick-and-mortar operations and many institutions' face-to-face delivery of academic content. The implications of the pandemic forced every faculty member to make sense of the health crisis in their own particular way based on their individual situation. Despite the disruptive jolt of the pandemic, it also provided faculty the opportunity for personal and professional growth as they reflected on themselves and the lessons they learned amid the pandemic.After several months of living in the experience of online learning and virtual engagement, faculty and students returned to brick-and-mortar institutions to resume their educational roles (Husserl, 1970). Questions regarding safety, responsibilities, lessons learned, innovation, and sustainability were top of mind as faculty members returned and shared the same space and place with their colleagues and students. As such, to capture the essence of the faculty's interpretation of their pandemic experience, Heidegger's (1962) phenomenological approach was employed to provide context and to help understand the faculty's personal experiences as they tried to reconcile their previous role of teaching and learning with their newfound utilization of technology in their courses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Vulnerable social enterprises: sensemaking of the COVID-19 crisis in the Czech Republic

PurposeDrawing on Weick's sensemaking perspective, this study aims to describe how Czech social entrepreneurs shape the shared meaning of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and what approaches to the crisis the sensemaking process leads to.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on the principles of grounded theory. Through in-depth interviews with 25 social entrepreneurs, it captures the entrepreneurs' experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of their understanding of social enterprise identity. Interviews with experts in the field of social entrepreneurship were also conducted to help achieve a deeper analysis of the entrepreneurial cases.FindingsResults of research show that despite the obstacles, most social entrepreneurs arrive at a positive redescription of the crisis. Enterprises not affected by the pandemic adopt a conventional approach. The most vulnerable enterprises are paralyzed and wait with uncertainty for future developments in their enterprise's situation.Practical implicationsAs knowledge of vulnerabilities is a key prerequisite for crisis prevention, this research can serve as a useful material for business incubators and other institutions that provide mentoring and expertise to start-up social entrepreneurs including focus on crisis management implementation.Originality/valueThis study complements the theory of crisis sensemaking with the level of social entrepreneurship, which is characterized by a dichotomy of social and business goals that results in a specific shared meaning of identity which is tied to perceptions of vulnerabilities. This study describes the influence of perceived identity on coping with a crisis.

Lessons learnt during COVID-19: making sense of Australian and Swedish university lecturers' experience.

This article reports on a study analysing changes in the use of digital technologies and working from home during the COVID-19 crisis and the impact of these changes on the wellbeing of five female university lecturers from Australia and Sweden. Applying collaborative autoethnographical methods, this study employed Weick's sensemaking framework to explore how the academics made sense of these sudden changes. The Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment (PERMA) wellbeing framework was also employed to explore the effect of these changes on the academics' wellbeing. Findings from the reflective narratives show that after the initial experiences of stress, each university lecturer was able to adapt and navigate the online teaching environment during the pandemic. However, the time constraints in preparing and adapting to online teaching, and working from home, were experienced by some of the university lecturers as highly stressful and isolating which impacted their sense of wellbeing. Even so, working from home was recognized as a positive experience, providing time for research, hobbies, and time with family. This study addresses a gap in current knowledge by examining the impact of the sudden transition to online teaching and learning had on academic wellbeing as conceptualised through the PERMA framework. In addition, by applying Weick's sensemaking framework, this study provides a unique perspective around how academics made sense of the sudden switch to online teaching and learning during COVID-19.

Collective sensemaking within institutions: Control of the COVID-19 epidemic in Vietnam.

How people make initial and collective sense under crises remains unanswered. This paper addresses this question using the control of COVID-19 in Vietnam as a case study. Our results suggest that sensemaking under crises is influenced by an institutional propensity for prevention that has developed gradually over time. Local governments play a vital role in fostering collective sensemaking which enables concerted actions in epidemic control. However, biases are inherent in sensemaking, including a delay in access to vaccine and a violation of privacy. For policy makers, this study suggests that developing specific prevention policies and programs, building large-scale coordination capacity, and promoting local initiatives are necessary for coping with epidemics. For theory development, the study explores how institutions condition sensemaking and specifies several mechanisms in which local authorities could facilitate collective sensemaking in crises.

Sensemaking in-between the known and the unknown: Narratives of immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States

In today's hyperconnected, fast-changing environment, where uncertainty is the only certainty, individuals often find themselves in ambiguity, in-between the known and the unknown times and spaces. During ambiguous transitions, individuals deliberately engage in a cognitive process to make sense of their circumstances by generating the stories of who they are and what is happening. These stories ongoingly update a mental map that enacts a more ordered environment under liminality. This qualitative research collected and analyzed the narratives of 20 relatively resourceful immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States to explore their sensemaking during immigration, entrepreneurship, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This purposeful sampling was informed by the concept of the hybrid identity of immigrants and the emerging evidence that some resourceful immigrant entrepreneurs rely on diverse repertoires of approaches to travel across the complexity of multilayered cultural and institutional contexts. By exploring the sensemaking narratives of these immigrant entrepreneurs, the study investigated how they navigated the tensions in-between two spaces (home culture and host culture) and two times (pre-COVID-19 and during prolonged COVID-19). As a result, this study excavated detailed cognitive processes (mental dialogues weaving different elements into a holistic narrative), influencing factors (backgrounds and surroundings), and characteristics (disequilibrium, ambivalence, and randomness) of sensemaking in uncertainty and ambiguity with rich empirical accounts. Furthermore, the investigation resulted in three overarching findings. First, the study detangled multilayered contextual factors at three levels-global/national/regional, community/institutional, and family/individual-dynamically influencing immigrant entrepreneurs. Second, the study found insights into immigrant entrepreneurs' identity and strategies for navigating continuous changes. Identity was constructed with both solid and fluid stories of participants' values/beliefs, self-evaluations, feelings, and sense of belonging. Immigrant entrepreneurs switched on different modes of actions (develop, strive, quest, create, reflect, and retreat) and strategies (hybrid, match & connect, niche, flow, and bricolage) to respond to changing contexts. Intellectual humility facilitated the cognitive process of immigrant entrepreneurs in shifting their approaches. Third, the study highlighted the narrative mode of thinking, allowing participants to resolve identity paralysis and integrate ambivalence using metaphors and dialectical sequences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Critically conscious school leaders' sensemaking of social-emotional learning

A growing number of schools are adopting social-emotional learning (SEL) programs to address students' social, emotional, and academic needs. The proliferation of school-based SEL programs has spurred more research to investigate the ways in which educators enact SEL in schools. However, very few studies have considered the role school leaders have in leading and implementing school-based SEL. Scholars have determined that school leaders play a vital role in deciding how school-based initiatives and policies are taken up. Furthermore, research has determined that a person's sensemaking of policy messages, which involves their prior beliefs and consciousness, influences the ways in which a policy or initiative, such as SEL, is enacted. Using sensemaking theory and critical consciousness as an analytical tool, this study analyzes how critically conscious school leaders make sense of SEL in order to center students' race and culture. I amplify the voices of critically conscious school leaders and their leadership actions to offer a robust theorization of unconventional employment of SEL that centers students experiencing marginalization because of their race and culture. This research inquiry answered three interrelated questions centered on education policy, school leadership, social-emotional learning, and race and culture: 1) What are Washington State's school-based SEL policy messages? a) What was the nature of the development of Washington State's school-based SEL standards? 2) How do critically conscious K-5 school leaders make sense of school-based SEL messages? a) What beliefs and conceptions do these K-5 school leaders have about SEL? 3) What are the school leaders' actions that lead towards centering students' race and culture in SEL?I conducted a critical qualitative multiple-case study to answer the research questions guiding this inquiry. I collected SEL documents from Washington State's Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) website and received copies of OSPI's meeting agendas, notes, and other materials from their SEL Benchmarks Workgroup, totaling 103 documents. Furthermore, I purposefully selected school leaders from two schools in Washington State to interview and observe. During the 2020-2021 school year, I collected data from Iris Elementary and Pine Elementary during the Covid-19 pandemic, when both schools increased their SEL efforts. Iris is a dual-language immersion school, while Pine resides on a federally recognized Native American reservation. Both schools have a majority of students who are marginalized in schools and society because of their race and culture. During the six months of data collection, I conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with thirteen individual school leaders. Due to the pandemic, I could not observe the school leaders in person;however, I observed 64 meetings via video conferencing platforms. The findings from this study show that the ways in which standards are developed send particular messages to the people charged with implementing the policy. Secondly, this study revealed that school leaders' sensemaking of SEL revealed that their prior beliefs, racial and cultural school context, and opportunities to critically self-reflect mattered for how they made sense of SEL. Lastly, this study found that school leaders' actions illustrated how they shaped and shifted their respective schools' culture by focusing on community values and justice to create an anti-racist environment. In short, I found that policy design matters for messaging, school leaders' ideologies and racial and cultural context dictate how a policy is understood, and SEL has the latitude to disrupt the status quo by attending to students' race and culture. These findings have implications for education policy design, school leadership and SEL research, and sensemaking and critical consciousness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)