‘Sensemaking’ is an extraordinarily influential perspective with a substantial following among management and organization scholars interested in how people appropriate and enact their ‘realities’. Organization Studies has been and remains one of the principal outlets for work that seeks either to draw on or to extend our understanding of sensemaking practices in and around organizations. The contribution of this paper is fourfold. First, we review briefly what we understand by sensemaking and some key debates which fracture the field. Second, we attend critically to eight papers published previously in Organization Studies which we discuss in terms of five broad themes: (i) how sense is made through discourse; (ii) the politics from which social forms of sensemaking emerge and the power that is inherent in it; (iii) the intertwined and recursive nature of micro-macro sensemaking processes; (iv) the strong ties which bind sensemaking and identities; and (v) the role of sensemaking processes in decision making and change. Third, while not designed to be a review of extant literature, we discuss these themes with reference to other related work, notably that published in this journal. Finally, we raise for consideration a number of potentially generative topics for further empirical and theory-building research.

This paper contributes to the timely debate on research into boards and their effectiveness by focusing on context, process and time, which are crucial to understanding board dynamics. It also explores key principles of board process research, and advocates the need to strengthen its theoretical and methodological foundations in order to challenge the analytically particular assumptions of agency theory. The paper concludes that there is still much more to be researched in this area and encourages work that explores variation in board process and director effectiveness in different organizational contexts, as well as seeking to go beyond the board to address their impact and effectiveness in the broader organizational and external context.

Simplexity is advanced as an umbrella term reflecting sensemaking, organizing and storytelling for our time. People in and out of organizations increasingly find themselves facing novel circumstances that are suffused with dynamic complexity. To make sense through processes of organizing, and to find a plausible answer to the question 'what is the story?', requires a fusion of sufficient complexity of thought with simplicity of action, which we call simplexity. This captures the notion that while sensemaking is a balance between thinking and acting, in a new world that owes less to yesterday's stories and frames, keeping up with the times changes the balance point to clarifying through action. This allows us to see sense (making) more clearly. Keywords change, organizing, sensemaking, simplexity, storytelling, WeickThere is currently a great deal of retrospective sensemaking regarding recent unprecedented events of rioting and looting in London and other English cities. Unprecedented events challenge organizing and sensemaking in as much as they instigate a search for

This article aims to challenge some of the assumptions which we make in our understanding of leadership, through empirical illustration from a large organization where a chief executive endeavours to ‘lead’ global change. The continuing search for the Holy Grail, which seems to characterize interest in leadership, implies that research efforts are perhaps being directed at ‘solving the wrong problem’. Leadership as a form of social influence is hard to distinguish from many other influences in relationships between people yet, it is argued, its emphasis on moving towards future action encourages a conception not dissimilar to organizing. The case analysis developed in this article goes on to reframe leadership as an example of sensemaking. It concludes that while sensemaking will never replace leadership as a focus or topic of interest, to understand leadership as a sensemaking process helps illustrate more clearly what happens in the daily doing of leading.

A B S T R AC TBuilding on a previous conceptual article, we present an empirically derived model of network learning -learning by a group of organizations as a group. Based on a qualitative, longitudinal, multiplemethod empirical investigation, five episodes of network learning were identified. Treating each episode as a discrete analytic case, through cross-case comparison, a model of network learning is developed which reflects the common, critical features of the episodes. The model comprises three conceptual themes relating to learning outcomes, and three conceptual themes of learning process. Although closely related to conceptualizations that emphasize the social and political character of organizational learning, the model of network learning is derived from, and specifically for, more extensive networks in which relations among numerous actors may be arms-length or collaborative, and may be expected to change over time.