This dissertation is based on four articles, and examines efforts of influence in processes of sensemaking during, and subsequent to, the Swedish police reform. Sensemaking – a process where individuals work to understand what is going on when they encounter confusing events – is of central importance for how organizational change unfolds. Influence in sensemaking refers to activities with capacity to shape persons preferences and perceptions, as they try to make sense. In this dissertation, the overall purpose is to increase the understanding about influence in sensemaking during micro-processes of change. The research questions address how efforts of influence in sensemaking at different organizational levels can be understood, and by which means actors attempt to influence others sensemaking. The research applies sensemaking and sensegiving as its theoretical framework. With a qualitative approach, and ethnographic methods, influence in sensemaking is examined on four levels: Article 1 examines how the strategic level of reform promote change through visual media. The results show how 44 videos function to layer meaning and construct stereotypes in attempts to influence how the sensemaking of change would take place. Article 2 reports an ethnography of middle-managers involving employees in a multivocal process that aims to influence how sensemaking evolves. This process has four features: open-endedness, low control over cues given, several sources of cues, and the encouragement of complexity and ambiguity. Article 3 studies employees working as ‘change’ agents at employee conferences. Results show that these actors exert influence in three ways: drawing on positional power, acting powerless, and by attempts to give power away. Article 4 reports an ethnography of employees enacting a change initiative. The results show how employees’ various enactments involve episodic power, which influence the sensemaking process to varying degrees and towards diverse ends. Overall, the results from the articles outlines three understandings of influence in sensemaking: top-down efforts, reflexive interactions and responsive enactments – each with particular consequences for who can take part in processes of sensemaking, organizing, and change work, when and how. For organizations, the results imply a need for managers and employees to raise awareness of others as well as one’s own influence in sensemaking, as it shapes the way they make sense of, understand, and enact organizational change. In a larger perspective, this has significance for which forms of organizing are stimulated to develop – democratic or undemocratic.
In this paper, we contribute to the understanding of how managers engage in efforts to influence the sensemaking of others without prescribing a specific redefinition of organizational reality, and doing this while trying to empower their subordinates. Through observations of leadership conferences and interviews, we followed an attempt to establish a new management philosophy in the Swedish police. The aim of the initiative was to facilitate the development of independent co-workers with little or no hierarchical support. The results show how managers utilize reflexivity in sensegiving to facilitate participants’ sensemaking. We suggest the following definition for reflexive sensegiving: a multivocal process aiming to influence how the sensemaking and construction of meaning evolves. Reflexive sensegiving has four distinctive features: open-endedness, low control over cues given, several sources of cues, and the encouragement of complexity and ambiguity. Our contribution, which has conceptual and theoretical consequences, is centred around new outlooks on the content, agent(s), and process of sensegiving.
In this paper, we contribute to understanding of how video films were used by change management as a communication strategy to portray and promote the organisational reform of the Swedish police in 2015. Based on a multimodal analysis of 44 video films, we theorise how the Swedish police change management “gave sense” to the transformation and future state of the police service. The findings show how change was motivated through descriptions of contexts, the problematisation of the present situation, prescriptions of the change process, and forecasts of an ideal future status for the Swedish police. These messages were reinforced visually using stereotypical images and by layering multiple modes of communication. The paper contributes to the literature on organisational change and police reform by describing how change can be motivated and legitimised through persuasive portrayals of the present and the future. We conclude that multimodal communication through video is a powerful technique for sensegiving, with the potential to construct credible, but not necessarily accurate, accounts of organisational change.
The present study provides an autoethnographic account of the efforts to gain field access to a police organization, spanning more than 2 years. The aim is to describe a case of gaining access in relation to the professional norms of science put forward by Robert K. Merton. Aided by an organized record of notes, e-mails, and other written communications regarding access (144 memos of various types), the study describes and discusses the negotiations with Mertonian norms that followed from the dissonance between ideals of research and practical reality. Opening up for further scholarly discussion, this article concludes that Merton’s norms are incongruent with both prevailing guidelines of research ethics and with the practical, short-term problems of access negotiations and research bargains.