Cornelissen et al. (2014): The contraction of meaning: The combined effect of

Question 1

Key message:

Answer 1

How individuals, as part of a collective, commit themselves to a single, and possibly erroneous, frame, as a basis for sensemaking and coordinated actions.

In organized activity, commitment to a frame – as opposed to being open to and exploring alternative framings – has been suggested as an important source of sensemaking failure in the context of novel, unprecedented circumstances that require inferential flexibility and improvised behaviors

Question 2

Organizational frame

Answer 2

Organizations either fail or succeed in their coordinated actions depending on the way in which they, individually and collectively, cognitively frame and potentially reframe their circumstances as a basis for action
- Negative scenario: an over-reliance by individuals on taken-for-granted social labels and common categories as default frames, with sometimes horrible consequences
- But, our understanding of how such commitment is established is limited

Question 3

Framing in sensemaking

Answer 3

Sensemaking has been defined as the attribution of meaning to a target (experiences, events, or other stimuli) via the placement of this target into a mental model or framework, otherwise known as a frame
- Sensemaking aims to understand how the framing of decisions in event sequences guides and directs individual and collective inferences and behaviors

labelling specific cues, as reference points, are seen to point in a relational sense to more abstract frames. Ongoing interaction is important, individuals need to detect the changing background assumptions this is where communication starts playing a role.

A frame creates expectations, frames help individuals understand and predict the behavior of others through stereotypical inference.

Question 4

Commitment to frames

Answer 4

The collective act of building up common ground around a common framing of the situation is crucial to enable coordination between individuals and to ensure that each individual has a sense of what is expected of them
- On the one hand, it creates meaning and purpose and enables coordinated activity, and thus may facilitate sensemaking under pressure
- On the other hand, such commitment to a particular set of meanings can create substantial blind spots that impeded adaptation

Question 5

Conceptual residue

Answer 5

is carried over from previous episodes of communication and affects the subsequent sensemaking
- The action of taking conceptually frames circumstances, which then become ‘preconceptions which partially affect the next episode of talk’ and any future episode of sensemaking

Question 6

Implications

Answer 6

path-dependent nature of this process explains, together with the objectification of a framing, how an overall commitment may escalate, and may blind participants to alternative courses of action.

• How in turn when such gestures and expressions are reinforced and reciprocated by others, they may lead to a heightening of the felt and experienced emotions of everyone involved, and to a joint emotional state of say, fear or panic.
• Like commitment, heightened emotions may act like a double-edged sword; their heightened state in fact facilitates directed and coordinated collective action, whereas more weakly aroused or activated emotions may lead to ‘inertia’ and little action