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This article addresses the challenges of sense making in social work practice and presents a descriptive model of peer-aided judgement to facilitate critical debate and knowledge creation. The model is founded in Hammond's Cognitive Continuum Theory and developed in direct application to social work practice. It seeks to expand currently available models of social work judgement and decision making to include processes and outcomes related to informal peer interaction. Building on empirical studies and multiple contemporary literatures, a model of peer-aided judgement is hypothesised, comprising four distinct and interacting elements. By modelling these fundamental aspects of the processes and outcomes of peer-aided judgement, this article provides a tool for illuminating the everyday unseen value of peer interaction in practice and a framework for critical debate of dilemmas and propositions for professional judgement in social work practice. This article concludes by examining some of the implications of the model and its potential use in the further development of theory, methodology and practice.

Background Safe clinical practice for patients hospitalised in mental health care during a suicidal crisis is situated within a dynamic, non-linear and uncertain context. Under such complex conditions, the adaptive capacity is considered vital to handling challenges and changes in clinical care. This study aimed to explore safe clinical practice for suicidal patients hospitalised in mental health wards through understanding healthcare professionals’ (HCPs’) capacities to adapt to challenges and changes in clinical care. Methods This study applied a qualitative design with focus group and individual interviews. Twenty-five HCPs participated in the focus groups, and 18 participated in individual interviews. The study was conducted in open and locked wards in a university hospital in Norway providing specialised mental health services for patients with mental illness. Results HCPs described their adaptive capacities for clinical practice relative to three themes. 1) HCPs used expertise to make sense of suicidal behaviour to support complex decision making. Their strategies included setting aside forms and checklists to prioritise trust and making judgements based on more than just patients’ spoken words. They improved their understanding by seeking others’ perspectives through collaborative sense-making processes involving the healthcare team and patient. 2) HCPs individualised the therapeutic milieu to address the diversity of patients with suicidal behaviour by creating individual clinical pathways, making trade-offs between under- and over-protection and adjusting observations. 3) HCPs described managing uncertainty as necessary for providing safe clinical practice. They managed uncertainty as a team by developing mutual collegial trust and support and creating a shared understanding. Conclusion HCPs’ adaptive capacities are vital to the complex set of practices involved in safe clinical practice for patients hospitalised during a suicidal crisis. By using expertise, individualising the therapeutic milieu, and managing uncertainty, HCPs individually and collectively develop their capacities to adapt to challenges and changes in clinical care. HCPs cannot easily ensure safe clinical practice by following standards; safe clinical practice depends on HCPs’ adaptations. Ward systems that ensure collegial trust and support, as well as arenas that foster shared understanding and situational awareness, are needed.

Dual-earner couples are increasingly prevalent and encounter demands arising from each partner’s commitment to various work and life domains. Unfortunately, there has been little theoretical progress in explaining how dual-earner couples navigate work-life shock events, which we define as disruptive, novel, and critical events that require investment of a couple’s resources. Drawing from identity and sensemaking theories, we develop a theory of work-life shock events to explain how dual-earner couples perceive and respond to these events. We theorize that partners initially make sense of the event as individuals and then engage in couple-level sensemaking. We argue that each individual’s shock intensity perceptions are shaped by the shock event’s characteristics and the identity factors of role salience hierarchy and future self. A subsequent couple-level process of sensemaking ensues, influenced by the salience of the originating domain and partner role, as well as relational identity factors. Couple-level shock intensity perceptions result in the couple’s decision regarding resource investment in the shock event’s originating domain. We discuss implications for future research and for organizations.

The aim of this study is to explore the functions that professional networks could have as sense givers during the process in which professional support staff at higher education institutions make sense of their roles. The empirical data comprise interviews with three categories of support staff at three technical universities in Sweden and a review of home pages and other written sources from ten, both Swedish and international, professional networks. One conclusion is that the networks can serve as sense givers for the professional support staff related either to the professional task or to the relational characteristics. However, these functions are not straightforward. The support staff in focus comprise a new category, with no ready-made scripts for their roles. Given that membership in these networks is voluntary, the networks may face challenges in their functions as sense givers. The networks thus opt for other ways of attracting members. This voluntariness in combination with a plasticity in the roles of the support staff suggests that the functions of professional networks not only will vary, but might also be limited as sense givers in the sense making process of professional support staff at higher education institutions (HEIs). QC 20200225

There is a substantial body of physical education scholarship focusing on movement learning. The question of how pupils themselves make sense of movement learning has however, largely escaped attention. Answers to such a question would seem to be highly germane if educators are to engage in pupil centered pedagogies. In light of this absence, the aim of this investigation was to describe how movement learners made sense of their own movement development. Drawing on theoretical tenets of Gilbert Ryle (2009. The concept of mind. New York, NY: Routledge) and Michael Polanyi (1969. Knowing and being. Essays by Michael Polanyi . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), three cases from an investigation in which movement learning was occurring are presented. The investigation was conducted during a physical education project week with pupils from an upper secondary school. Data were produced using observations, informal interviews, semi-structured interviews, and research diaries as a group of pupils learned to juggle. The results suggest that: the aspects of moving to which learners attend change as they learn; learners have a relatively limited capacity to verbally articulate what they learn, and; learners ’ expectations of ideal ways of moving have considerable impact on how they come to make sense of their own ways of moving. The practical implications of these points are discussed in the final section of the paper.

This thesis aims at exploring stakeholders’ perceptions of management innovation in health care. Rising health care costs due to technological innovation and demographic developments and advanced insights on how health and care could be organized drive the search for new organizational models and technologies that may contribute to better health outcomes for lower costs. Multiple stakeholders across the health care continuum need to collaborate in integrated care networks with multiple interdependent components. The study is based on qualitative exploratory research and consists of a literature review and a case-study at a management innovation in an university medical center. This study explores the vision and perceptions of stakeholders of innovation in healthcare, the innovation process through which management innovations evolve, underlying change and steering mechanisms, critical success factors and results. Management innovations and their implementation are considered complex. It is observed that due to different backgrounds and professional logics, stakeholders have partial and different understandings of integrated care concepts. Awareness of the different understandings explains the importance of an implementation approach of integrated care concepts where these perceptions converge. Sense making, the attribution of meaning to perceptions is essential here. Change does not happen in a vacuum, but emerges in interaction with other actors in the organization and its local context. It is observed in the literature and case-study that sense making processes are at work in the innovation process. Management innovation is merely a spontaneous, unplanned change process that starts with an intrinsic drive and emerges from how people frame what they see, relate it to their values and act upon it in interaction with others. It is a human, subjective, interactive, emergent selforganizing process of sensing and sense making that – if aligned with vision, values and intentions of people – can bring together different stakeholders in joint concepts of integrated care. Leading management innovation processes becomes a matter of guiding and creating room for self-organizing processes in organizations. Examples of management innovation from across the world demonstrate that management innovation can significantly contribute to better health outcomes for lower costs. The willingness, necessity and ability to change determine the pace. Exploring further and investing in the potential of management innovation may be a wise choice to make health systems more sustainable. Esta tese tem como objetivo explorar as percepções dos stakeholders sobre inovação em gestão na área da saúde. Aumento dos custos de cuidados de saúde devido à inovação tecnológica e mudanças demográficas e insights avançados sobre como saúde e cuidados poderiam ser organizados impulsionam a busca de novos modelos organizacionais e tecnologias que podem contribuir para melhores resultados de saúde com menores custos. Múltiplos stakeholders em toda a cadeia de cuidados de saúde precisam colaborar em redes de atenção integradas com múltiplos componentes interdependentes. O estudo é baseado em pesquisa qualitativa exploratória e consiste em uma revisão da literatura e um estudo de caso de inovação em gestão em um centro médico universitário. A tese explora a visão e as percepções dos stakeholders sobre inovação nos cuidados de saúde, o processo de inovação através do qual as inovações de gestão evoluem, mecanismos subjacentes de mudança e direção, fatores críticos de sucesso e resultados. As inovações de gestão e sua implementação são consideradas complexas. Observa-se que, devido às diferentes origens e lógicas profissionais, os stakeholders possuem entendimentos parciais e diferentes dos conceitos de cuidado integrado. A conscientização dos diferentes entendimentos explica a importância de uma abordagem de implementação de conceitos de cuidados integrados nos quais essas percepções convergem. Sense-making, a atribuição de significado às percepções, é essencial aqui. A mudança não acontece no vácuo, mas surge em interação com outros atores da organização e seu contexto local. Observa-se na literatura e estudo de caso que processos de sense-making estão presentes no processo de inovação. A inovação gerencial frequentemente é um processo de mudança espontâneo, não planejado, que começa com uma motivação intrínseca e emerge de como as pessoas enquadram o que vêem, relacionam-se com seus valores e agem de acordo com eles em interação com os outros. É um processo humano, subjetivo, interativo, emergente de auto-organização de sensing e sense-making, que, se alinhado com a visão, os valores e as intenções das pessoas, pode reunir diferentes stakeholders em um único conceito de cuidado integrado. Os principais processos de inovação gerencial tornam-se uma questão de orientar e criar espaço para processos de autoorganização. Exemplos de varias partes do mundo demonstram que a inovação gerencial pode contribuir significativamente para melhores resultados de saúde com custos mais baixos. A vontade, necessidade e capacidade de mudar determinam o ritmo. Explorar mais e investir no potencial da inovação gerencial pode ser uma escolha sábia para tornar os sistemas de saúde mais sustentáveis.

In recent decades, research has increasingly focused on the factors that predispose people to work and on the importance of a positive climate within organisations. Next to the multi-dimensional construct climate, the concept of “work engagement” has recently emerged. This is understood as the ability of individuals to act in order to follow the interests of the organization while feeling committed and enthusiastic. The support of the two dimensions observed within the organisational context in question is interesting when you want to give indications of self and sense making renegotiation of the company. The study involved 62 police officers and 84 penitentiary health workers. The instruments used were the M_DOQ 10 (D’Amato, & Majer, 2005) and the UWES (Schaufeli, & Bakker, 2003; Bakker, & Demerouti, 2007). The results reveal two broad approaches: the organisational climate in relation to communication was central and positive for respondents, although this is primarily a communication directive. The mean scores related to work engagement are below the average, indicating a low commitment on the part of workers.

Teacher educators and student teachers are increasingly expected to reflect together on the student teachers’ image of self as a teacher. To better understand how to deal with occurring tensions, we studied 42 supervision dialogues, audiotaped in a 1-year, post-master, teacher education program. We analyzed in what way student teachers and teacher educators explored both sensed continuity and sensed discontinuity when they discussed development as a teacher. We identified three types of processes in which student teachers and teacher educators outweighed issues of discontinuity: (a) balancing with time, or accentuating specific perceptions of the past in relation to expectations of the future, or vice versa; (b) balancing with content, or elaborating on other self-attributes; and (c) balancing with salience, exploring the relative worth of self-attributes and/or intentions. The results support student teachers and teacher educators in explicitly discussing sense making patterns in the context of teacher education.

Resilience in nuclear power plant (NPP) process control depends, among other things, on balance between operators' autonomy in online decisions and pre-defined guidance for operations. Striking balance between these inherent demands of process control belongs to the strategic decisions by the management, but finally balancing takes place at the sharp end, by the operating personnel. We studied operators' basic assumptions about the role of operating procedures in action. Conceptions of 62 control room operators at two Finnish NPPs were queried. Answers were classified into theory-based categories, i.e., interpretative, confirmative or reactive orientations. Orientation is an epistemic attitude to work that influences the process and content of sense making in situations that require action. In both NPPs, the confirmative orientation, emphasising the importance of acting according to rules, prevails, which corresponds to the expectations set by the organisations. It was also found that orientations reflect the operator roles and their demands: Among turbine operators, the interpretative orientation is significantly more prevalent than among the reactor operators as regards control of action. All operators consider interpretative orientation as a characteristic of a ''good operator''. It is concluded that interpretative orientation represents an epistemic attitude to NPP operator work, in which autonomy based on operators' professional competence and procedure usage is not seen opposite to each other, but intertwined into a practice. Identification interpretativeness as an epistemic attitude relevant in action extends the notion of ''intelligent use of procedures'' proposed earlier, by elaborating the inherent logic and ethos of operators' procedure usage. It is recommended that appropriation of interpretative orientation should be actively supported as a means to facilitate resilience in NPP activity.

The continuation of emotional abuse as a normalized practice in elite youth sport has received scholarly attention, often with the use of a Foucauldian framework. The use of sense-making, a theoretical framework that focuses on how meaning is created in ambiguous situations, may give additional insights into the continuation of emotionally abusive coaching practices. The purpose of this study was to apply the seven properties of sense-making to explore how athletes and parents made sense of coaching practices in elite women’s gymnastics. We interviewed 14 elite women gymnasts and their parents to examine how they made sense of what occurred during practices. The results show how the sense-making of athletes and parents was an ongoing activity that resulted in a code of silence and a normalization of abusive coaching practices.

Purpose– to analyze the process of organizational learning in development of organizational competences in two educational institutions that offer Higher Technological Education Courses in Brazil. Design/Method/Approach. As for the methodology, the nature of the research is exploratory, with a qualitative approach, and a multiple case study method. Findings.The results made it possible to conclude that there was a learning process at the organizational level, as new knowledge and new practices had been institutionalized. Based on the data found in each case, it was possible to certify that some competences can be built and others eliminated, shaping the dynamic character of the process. Theoretical implications.It was possible to corroborate the model used (Patriotta, 2003) and propose advances to it, towards an understanding of organizational learning processes in the development of organizational competences. Practical implications.The manager can see competences in dynamics, changing over time and in the context of the organization, according to the events and changes in their objectives, intentions, and strategies. Originality/Value.We found that organizational learning is the result of the acquisition of a competence that represents this process. Using a metaphor, it was found that the competences of an organization represent the 'DNA' of the organizational learning. Research limitations/Future research.This paper analyzed two cases only and new case studies are needed to characterize more fully on these results. Papertype– empirical.

Connecticut’s Teacher Education and Mentoring (TEAM) program is in its early stages of implementation. This study examined how local school districts implemented TEAM and identified factors that affected implementation. It was based on interviews with twenty-two participants at the state, district, and local school levels. The intentions of the program designers at the state level were compared to district and school level understanding of the program’s intentions and how those understandings influenced implementation. Additionally, factors affecting local understanding and implementation of the new program were described. The findings of this study suggest that there was close alignment of understanding between the state and local implementers on the key provisions of the program related to its role as a professional development tool. The data reveal tacit rather than explicit understanding at the local level of the program’s intention to improve student achievement. Variations in understanding can be attributed to other factors including contextual, structural, cognitive, and affective elements.

There is a need for person-centred approaches and empowerment of staff within the residential care for older people; a movement called 'culture change'. There is however no single path for achieving culture change. With the aim of increasing understandings about cultural change processes and the promotion of cultural values and norms associated with person-centred practices, this article presents an action research project set on a unit in the Netherlands providing care for older people with dementia. The project is presented as a case study. This study examines what has contributed to the improvement of participation of older people with dementia in daily occupational and leisure activities according to practitioners. Data was collected by participant observation, interviews and focus groups. The results show that simultaneous to the improvement of the older people's involvement in daily activities a cultural transformation took place and that the care became more person-centred. Spontaneous interactions and responses rather than planned interventions, analysis and reflection contributed to this. Furthermore, it proved to be beneficial that the process of change and the facilitation of that process reflected the same values as those underlying the cultural change. It is concluded that changes arise from dynamic, interactive and non-linear processes which are complex in nature and difficult to predict and to control. Nevertheless, managers and facilitators can facilitate such change by generating movement through the introduction of small focused projects that meet the stakeholders' needs, by creating conditions for interaction and sense making, and by promoting the new desired cultural values.

International audience; In this paper, we study the changing explanations of success and failure over the course of a firm's history. We build on a discursive approach that highlights the role of narrative attributions in making sense of corporate performance. Specifically, we analyze how the Nokia Corporation was framed first as a success and later as a failure and how these dimensions of performance were explained in various actors' narrative accounts. In both the success and failure accounts, our analysis revealed a striking black-and-white picture that resulted in the institutionalization of Nokia's metanarratives of success and failure. Our findings also reveal a number of discursive attributional tendencies; and thus warn of the cognitive and politically motivated biases that are likely to characterize management literature.

When something unfamiliar emerges or when something familiar does something unexpected people need to make sense of what is emerging or going on in order to act. Social representations theory suggests how individuals and society make sense of the unfamiliar and hence how the resultant social representations (SRs) cognitively, emotionally, and actively orient people and enable communication. SRs are social constructions that emerge through individual and collective engagement with media and with everyday conversations among people. Recent developments in text analysis techniques, and in particular topic modeling, provide a potentially powerful analytical method to examine the structure and content of SRs using large samples of narrative or text. In this paper I describe the methods and results of applying topic modeling to 660 micronarratives collected from Australian academics / researchers, government employees, and members of the public in 2010-2011. The narrative fragments focused on adaptation to climate change (CC) and hence provide an example of Australian society making sense of an emerging and conflict ridden phenomena. The results of the topic modeling reflect elements of SRs of adaptation to CC that are consistent with findings in the literature as well as being reasonably robust predictors of classes of action in response to CC. Bayesian Network (BN) modeling was used to identify relationships among the topics (SR elements) and in particular to identify relationships among topics, sentiment, and action. Finally the resulting model and topic modeling results are used to highlight differences in the salience of SR elements among social groups. The approach of linking topic modeling and BN modeling offers a new and encouraging approach to analysis for ongoing research on SRs.

Using an ethnographic approach, the aim of this study was to explore how social workers learn and make sense of experiences in their daily practices. Five events that took place during an ordinary day of child investigation work are described and serve as the basis for the analysis. The findings imply that investigation work is largely a social rationalization process and that the interaction between different actors in work is a strategy to enhance the level of knowledge and contribute to learning among the professionals. Thus, learning is embedded in daily activities, for example, consulting colleagues, framing problems and building relationships. Furthermore, the findings suggest the possibility of assuming a contextualized view of reasoning, a so-called contextual rationality, which maintains that practitioners need to make judgments in a way that is sensitive to and relevant for their own contextualized settings. Contextual rationality is a reasonable strategy to deal with complex problems in daily practices that cannot be completely analysed or solved. Contextual rationality is thus not about accuracy; rather, it engages individuals to find meaning and order in the complexity of modern organizations where norms, values and expectations provide frameworks for explanations. Besides offering an explanation for the basis of practice, the study identifies a variety of learning opportunities in everyday practice that could potentially be used in efforts to organize a more reflective practice to facilitate improved workplace learning.

This paper argues that being in the Asch situation, where there is a felt need to conform to others' faulty behaviors, poses a social threat to people. Furthermore, participating in a psychology experiment in which you will have to interact with other participants might trigger sense-making processes. The paper proposes that these assumed threats or sense-making processes are likely to activate the behavioral inhibition system, making people respond in more inhibited ways than they normally would be inclined to do. As a result, people's tendency to affiliate behaviorally with persons who are similar to them can be inhibited. The implication is that lowering behavioral inhibition (by experimentally reminding people about having acted without behavioral inhibitions) should lead to more public conformity in the Asch situation and stronger behavioral affiliation with ingroup members than not being reminded about behavioral disinhibition. Findings of four experiments support this line of reasoning. These findings are discussed in terms of behavioral inhibition and behavioral affiliation. Alternative accounts of the data that focus on social belongingness threats and optimal distinctiveness are also considered.

This paper probes into the social process of sense making in changing organizations, trying to observe how participant individuals interpret contextual events and configure their notion of time. This notion of time then interacts with the dynamics of the lives of individuals and contributes to the adaptation to the new reality they are facing. The study was conducted in eight organizations and data were collected by means of 133 in-depth interviews with participants in the change processes. Results indicate that individuals establish a reference to central events in their attempt to make sense out of changes and in their effort to adapt to the new situation. In accordance with Lewis and Weigert (1981), the results also indicate the dominance of institutional time over interaction time as well as over self time. Finally, the results suggest that such configurations of time are influenced by official organizational rhetoric and by actions in change management.

The Strategic Systemic Thinking (SST) framework is presented as a stepping stone towards enabling the refocusing of organizational analysis in Information Systems (IS). The paper introduces some of the fundamental assumptions regarding the objectives of the SST framework; such as sense making as learning processes build upon communicative actions. The main concepts of the SST framework are presented, which are focused on developing a learning organization inclusive of having a constructive dialogue mechanism. The SST framework includes constructive dialogue as a means of gaining access to the existing but unreleased individual and group competencies for improved IS analysis.