Unpacking the Conceptual Linkages Between Organizational Attention and Sensemaking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Further examining the relationship between sensemaking and attention may provide additional insights because sensemaking is particularly consequential when rare or critical events make top-down attention insufficient.” (Ocasio, 2011) The purpose of the symposium is to openly debate the relatively unexplored but critical relationship between organizational attention and sensemaking (Ocasio, 1997; Weick, 1995) and to describe contexts and approaches for empirical work most likely to yield further insights. Challenges to this conversation include bridging the multiplicity of perspectives and language in the field of attention (Ocasio, 2011), crossing levels of analysis between attention and sensemaking approaches (Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010; Weber & Glynn, 2006), and defining where attention ends and sensemaking begins (or vice versa) and whether the two constructs intersect, interact, or operate in parallel. We present three case studies of rare events that cross levels of analysis and temporal contexts, and highlight both structural and processual aspects of organizational cognition and action. Rerup, Zbaracki and Porac unveil the complex collective macro processes of meaning construction that unfold at the field level before and after the sinking of the Estonia ferry in 1994. Eberhard describes a police team tasked with finding missing prostitutes, hampered by an organization unwilling to admit to itself or the public that a serial killer might be at work. Christianson and Waller portray the minute-by-minute events of the Northeastern Air Defense Sector team during 9/11, and how the team and individuals within it undergo transitions in shared understandings of what the event is. Disaster Sensemaking as Hall of Mirrors: Social Construction of Error in the Estonia Ferry Accident Presenter: Claus Rerup; Western U. Presenter: Mark J Zbaracki; The U. of Western Ontario Presenter: Joseph Porac; New York U. Reconciling Conflicting Accounts and Taking Action: Interplay of Sensemaking and Attention on 9/11 Presenter: Marlys K. Christianson; U. of Toronto Presenter: Mary J. Waller; York U. Vancouver's Missing Women and Serial Killer Robert Pickton Presenter: Jeannette A. Eberhard; The U. of Western Ontario
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".