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Introduction
In 1995, Weick developed, what he called, "sensemaking" as an alternate approach for the understanding of the process of organizing. Instead of a focus on organizational outcomes, sensemaking provided insights into how individuals and organizations give meaning to events. Over time, sensemaking has been refined and explicated so that in addition to being a stand-alone theoretical framework, it has now started being used as a method of analysis. In this paper, we will explore the trajectory of sensemaking from "a set of explanatory ideas" ([39] Weick, 1995, p. xi) to what we suggest is a heuristic that operationalizes sensemaking to analyze a number of organizational events, which takes into account elements initially missing from Weick's original framework ([11] Helms Mills, 2003; [29] Thurlow, 2007). We will discuss this research and demonstrate the value of both Weick's sensemaking framework and subsequently critical sensemaking, which takes into account issues such as power and context that were missing from Weick's framework, as a method of organizational analysis.
The trajectory of sensemaking
In 1995, Weick published his book Sensemaking in Organizations ([39] Weick, 1995), in which he proposed a framework that offered an explanation for how individuals and organizations make sense of their environment. His approach moved the study of sensemaking beyond the individual experience and into the realm of organizations and organizing. He discusses sensemaking and organization as phenomena that are mutually constituted ([36] Weick et al. , 2005). [5] Brown et al. (2008, p. 1055) further describe sensemaking and organization as essentially the same process:
To make sense is to organize, and sensemaking refers to processes of organizing using the technology of language - processes of labeling and categorizing for instance - to identify, regularize and routinize memories into plausible explanations [...]
While [39] Weick (1995, p. 18) explicitly lays out "seven characteristics", each being "a self-contained set of research questions that relates to the other six" sensemaking has its roots in his earlier work, The Social Psychology of Organizing ([32] Weick, 1979), and his subsequent research on loosely coupled systems and organizational disasters ([33] Weick, 1990). In these, Weick demonstrates the importance of organizational shocks in initiating a sensemaking event and interlocking behaviours and structure on making sense of situations. Two of his studies...