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Research summary: When faced with complex strategic problems that exceed their individual sensemaking capacities, organizations often engage in inter-organizational collaboration. This enables them to pool the participants' different perspectives and to grasp the problem at hand more comprehensively. Drawing on data collected from two longitudinal case studies, we examine how those who participate in inter-organizational sensemaking processes are selected and how the particular selection of participants affects the dynamics of the sensemaking process in turn. In our analysis, we show how the selection of specific problem issues influences who joins or withdraws from the collaboration and we identify a mechanism that accounts for changes in the particular dynamics of the sensemaking process over time. Our findings help explain how the process of inter-organizational sensemaking can yield different outcomes. Managerial summary: The ability to make sense of the business environment is central to strategic management. As the complexity of the environment increases and interpreting it becomes more difficult, organizations increasingly turn to inter-organizational collaboration, which allows them to pool their expertise in order to explore strategic issues. We examine how the participants in projects of joint exploration are selected and how the selection of participants affects the process of exploration in turn. More specifically, we describe how the aspects on which collaborating organizations choose to focus influence who joins and who withdraws from a collaboration. We also identify a mechanism that accounts for differences and changes in the dynamics of the sensemaking process over time. These changes affect how the collaborators come to understand their organization's business environment.

Hindsight bias occurs when people feel that they \"knew it all along,\" that is, when they believe that an event is more predictable after it becomes known than it was before it became known. Hindsight bias embodies any combination of three aspects: memory distortion, beliefs about events' objective likelihoods, or subjective beliefs about one's own prediction abilities. Hindsight bias stems from (a) cognitive inputs (people selectively recall information consistent with what they now know to be true and engage in sensemaking to impose meaning on their own knowledge), (b) metacognitive inputs (the ease with which a past outcome is understood may be misattributed to its assumed prior likelihood), and (c) motivational inputs (people have a need to see the world as orderly and predictable and to avoid being blamed for problems). Consequences of hindsight bias include myopic attention to a single causal understanding of the past (to the neglect of other reasonable explanations) as well as general overconfidence in the certainty of one's judgments. New technologies for visualizing and understanding data sets may have the unintended consequence of heightening hindsight bias, but an intervention that encourages people to consider alternative causal explanations for a given outcome can reduce hindsight bias.

Most research on organization-based identities focuses on a single level of analysis, typically the individual, group, or organization. As a spur to more cross-level identity research, we offer speculative discussions on two issues concerning nested identities. First, regarding the processes through which identities become linked across levels, we explore how identities at one level of analysis enable and constrain identities at other levels. We argue that, for a collective identity, intrasubjective understanding (\"I think\") fosters intersubjective understanding (\"we think\") through interaction, which in turn fosters generic understanding-a sense of the collective that transcends individuals (\"it is\"). Second, regarding the content of linked identities, we suggest that identities are relatively isomorphic across levels because organizational goals require some internal coherence. However, for various intended and unintended reasons, isomorphism is often impeded across levels, and identities tend to become somewhat differentiated.

The experience of simultaneously positive and negative orientations toward a person, goal, task, idea, and such appears to be quite common in organizations, but it is poorly understood. We develop a multilevel perspective on ambivalence in organizations that demonstrates how this phenomenon is integral to certain cognitive and emotional processes and important outcomes. Specifically, we discuss the organizational triggers of ambivalence and the cognitive and emotional mechanisms through which ambivalence diffuses between the individual and collective levels of analysis. We offer an integrative framework of major responses to highly intense ambivalence (avoidance, domination, compromise, and holism) that is applicable to actors at the individual and collective levels. The positive and negative outcomes associated with each response, and the conditions under which each is most effective, are explored. Although ambivalence is uncomfortable for actors, it has the potential to foster growth in the actor as well as highly adaptive and effective behavior.

Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action. In this paper we take the position that the concept of sensemaking fills important gaps in organizational theory. The seemingly transient nature of sensemaking belies its central role in the determination of human behavior, whether people are acting in formal organizations or elsewhere. Sensemaking is central because it is the primary site where meanings materialize that inform and constrain identity and action. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of the concept of sensemaking. We do so by pinpointing central features of sensemaking, some of which have been explicated but neglected, some of which have been assumed but not made explicit, some of which have changed in significance over time, and some of which have been missing all along or have gone awry. We sense joint enthusiasm to restate sensemaking in ways that make it more future oriented, more action oriented, more macro, more closely tied to organizing, meshed more boldly with identity, more visible, more behaviorally defined, less sedentary and backward looking, more infused with emotion and with issues of sensegiving and persuasion. These key enhancements provide a foundation upon which to build future studies that can strengthen the sensemaking perspective.

Background While previously researching the educational impacts of single‐course and cross‐curricular portfolios, investigators noted that student participants described their portfolio activities as positively impacting their growing identities as engineering professionals. These impacts were seen particularly in studies regarding cross‐curricular portfolios.  Purpose (Hypothesis) This study was designed to explicitly investigate identity‐related impacts of cross‐curricular portfolios and to explore the processes students employed during portfolio construction to identify themselves as budding engineers and as future professionals. Design/Mscethod Engineering undergraduate students attended four weekly workshops where they wrote a professional statement, selected artifacts that demonstrated their engineering abilities, and wrote annotations that explained how the artifacts served as concrete examples of their claims for professional standing. Online surveys were administered at each workshop asking participants about their ongoing experiences of creating their portfolios and sharing these portfolios with their peers. Results Analysis of the survey responses revealed that participants had two primary frames of reference for the construction of professional identity during portfolio creation. The external frame of reference focused on students' understanding of the expectations of potential employers and recruiters. The internal frame of reference, which accounted for twice as many responses as the external frame coding, focused on students' emerging realizations of their own values and interests as professional engineers. Conclusions As engineering educators, we often support the external frame of reference in terms of building professional identity. We need to provide students with opportunities to engage the internal frame of reference with which our participants were particularly concerned.

Through a wide-ranging critical review of relevant publications, we explore and articulate what constitutes the sensemaking perspective in organization studies, as well as its range of applications and limitations. More specifically, we argue that sensemaking in organizations has been seen as consisting of specific episodes, is triggered by ambiguous events, occurs through specific processes, generates specific outcomes, and is influenced by several situational factors. Furthermore, we clarify the application range of the sensemaking perspective and identify, as well as account for, the types and aspects of organizational sensemaking that have been under-researched. We critically discuss the criticism that the sensemaking perspective has received so far and selectively expand on it. Finally, we identify the main limitations of the sensemaking perspective, which, if tackled, will advance it: the neglect of prospective sensemaking, the exclusive focus on disruptive episodes at the expense of more mundane forms of sensemaking implicated in routine activities, the ambiguous status of enactment, the conflation of first-order and second-order sensemaking, and the lack of proper attention to embodied sensemaking.

Recent academic articles point to an increased vagueness and overlap in concepts related to business ethics and corporate responsibility. Further, the perception of these notions can differ in the smallbusiness world from the original academic definitions. This article focuses on the cognition of small-business owner-managers. Given the impact of small-business owner-managers on their ventures, corporate responsibility and ethical issues can take a different route in SMEs. The small-business owner-manager is able to shape the corporate culture and to enact values other than profit. Adopting a cognitive perspective, we have identified how the small-business owner-manager makes sense of notions linked to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and business ethics. The concept of sensemaking has recently been applied to CSR (Basu and Pallazzo, 2008; Cramer et al., 2006). Applying a cognitive perspective to small-business owners may help in explaining specific phenomena found within smallbusiness ownership. For this research, the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT) is used, a method that has not previously been widely applied in the business and society field. Our findings to an extent invalidate the confusion in terminology found in the academic literature. Smallbusiness owner-managers, pragmatically and rather clearly, differentiate among the various concepts related to corporate responsibility and business ethics but, at the same time, they recognise the interrelationships and interdependencies of these concepts. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how small-business owners think and integrate corporate responsibility and ethical issues into their decisionmaking.

Many models of (un)ethical decision making assume that people decide rationally and are in principle able to evaluate their decisions from a moral point of view. However, people might behave unethically without being aware of it. They are ethically blind. Adopting a sensemaking approach, we argue that ethical blindness results from a complex interplay between individual sensemaking activities and context factors.

More than a third of students enter higher education at a community college; most aim to earn a baccalaureate. Drawing on sense-making theory and longitudinal qualitative data, we examined how community college students interpret state transfer policies and how their interpretations influence subsequent behavior. Data from 3 years of interviews revealed how students adjudicate between multiple intersecting policies. The higher education context, where institutions provided competing signals about policies, left students to navigate complex messages to achieve their transfer goals. Students' approaches to understanding transfer policies primarily followed one of two patterns: adopting policy signals as step-by-step procedures or adapting and combining policy signals to create a customized transfer pathway. Both approaches had important implications for students' transfer outcomes.