Future‐oriented Sensemaking: Temporalities and Institutional Legitimation
Future‐oriented Sensemaking: Temporalities and Institutional Legitimation
Sensemaking is the process by which people construct, interpret, and recognize meaningful features of the world. Although retrospective sensemaking is a key property of the Weickian approach, sensemaking can also orient to the future. This chapter explores the social processes and practices of future‐oriented sensemaking to understand how it is accomplished, how it relates to other temporal dimensions, and how it legitimates institutions. To do so, we discuss five sensemaking perspectives relevant to temporality: Weickian sensemaking, post‐Weickian sensemaking, institutional rhetoric, agentivity, and ethnomethodology. We use the ideas in these perspectives as a means to conceptualize future-oriented sensemaking and to understand the potential influence that temporal modalities of sensemaking hold for legitimation. Next, we conduct an ethnomethodological investigation of future‐oriented sensemaking in a public hearing where future‐oriented sensemaking was a primary focus. Our investigation of inquiry discourse finds that the construction of plans, expertise, hypothetical entities, institutionalized sequences, and conventional histories are important practices in future‐oriented sensemaking that produce and sustain institutional legitimation.
Keywords: sensemaking, temporal dimensions, projection, legitimization
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
