Sensemaking in the time of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

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)