This research investigates the extent to which organizational change initiatives may lead to divergent patterns of sensemaking among organizational members. Drawing on the symbolic convergence theory, we performed an in-depth fantasy theme analysis of organization members’ rhetoric around an organizational change at a private university. Our analysis uncovers six fantasy themes and two corresponding fantasy types, which lead to no rhetorical vision. The lack of cognitive convergence between change initiators and change recipients suggests the inherent incompatibility between managerial and employee fantasies around organizational change, barring the exceptions of dual-responsibility change recipients (e.g., faculty members who also assume administrative responsibilities), who tend to adopt the change initiator rhetoric. Overall, this study informs our extant knowledge of change sensemaking with novel theoretical and methodological insights and bears implications for organizational change researchers and practitioners alike.

The objective of this essay is to forge a more explicit link between the “visual turn” and the “practice turn” in entrepreneurship research. Specifically, we explore three key aspects of mobilizing visual methods for studying entrepreneurship-as-practice (EaP), i.e., data sources, collection strategies, and analytical perspectives, highlighting the important theoretical and empirical promises that visual methods hold for said research. This essay bears implications for researchers and educators working at the intersection of entrepreneurship research, the practice theory, and visual methods.