Flipping Sensemaking on its Head: From common sense to sensus communis

Abstract

Sensemaking provides a compelling account of how meaning emerges by theorizing the organizational enactment of order. In this paper we question the underlying assumption that making sense is equivalent to ordering. We draw from Hannah Arendt’s work to argue that restricting sense to ordering as a means of addressing practical concerns is limiting, and even dehumanizing, and that the most profound forms of sense may emerge from disrupting rather than restoring order. In questioning the intimacy between sense and order, we also question the commonsense view that organization seeks practical settlements, certainty and reliability. Following Arendt, we pursue the question of what it means to organize for plural opinion-making, a condition she conceptualizes as sensus communis. The upshot is to flip sensemaking on its head: rather than meaning being generated through organizing, and certain types of disruption merely triggering it, sense is made through disruption, with certain types of organizing enabling it.

Sensemaking, described as ‘the logic of organizing’ (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020, p. 17), has become one of the most popular theoretical perspectives in organization studies. Though multi-disciplinary, sensemaking scholars continue to draw from philosophy to provide a sophisticated theoretical basis for processes of meaning emergence. Originally conceived by Karl Weick (1979, 1993), sensemaking theory ¹ assumes that humans organize for predictability and certainty. Disruptions in experience introduce challenges that are subsequently met with order-restoring efforts (Weick, 2006). Hence, sense is made through progressive ordering, involving analytical work via iterative problem-solving activities such as bracketing, categorizing and testing new understandings (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014). In this, as well as social psychology, Weick was influenced by pragmatism, notably William James’ (1890) functionalism and John Dewey’s (1903, 1929) theory of inquiry as a process of recovering habit from disturbance. This philosophical grounding has provided sensemaking theory with sufficient ballast to stabilize its central claim that sense emerges from the settlements of enacted, extended and embodied practice.

More recently, by way of supplementing its pragmatic roots, sensemaking scholars (Guiette & Vandenbempt, 2016; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2015, 2020) have turned to existential phenomenology and especially Martin Heidegger’s (1927/2008) Being and Time – another influence on Weick’s sensemaking theory (Weick, 1995, p. 90) – to argue for a more embodied and immanent type of sense in the service of practical concerns and concrete problem solving. This further engagement with philosophy has resulted in a richer and more complex understanding of how sense can be made by accounting for ‘different ways of engaging with the world’ (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020, p. 3). And yet, what remains unchallenged is the continued association of sense with creating and sustaining habituated, practical practices.

In this paper we return to philosophy to problematize (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011) the direct association of making sense with instrumental and practical ordering, and thereby to widen the criteria of meaning. Heeding Sandberg and Tsoukas’s (2015) call for ‘revisit[ing] the onto-epistemological underpinnings of the sensemaking perspective . . . by scrutinizing its core concepts, constituents, and assumptions’ (p. 7), we, too, follow Heidegger, but engage with his critique of practical relations (Heidegger, 1954/1977). For Heidegger, the organized pursuit of order is predicated on an assumption that what marks the human out is reason: an animal body infused with reflective, self-improving spirit coupled to an instrumental ability to organize means in the service of desired and viable ends. Humans relate to things as equipment used to alter the world in accord with their own design, and where these designs break down, new ones are proposed. Practices emerge from this repeated and sedimented collective effort.

Sensemaking theory, we suggest, shares the assumption but, as Heidegger emphasized especially in his later work, there are alternative ways of relating to things. Heavily influenced by East Asian philosophy (May, 1996), Heidegger argued for the cultivation of a pre-cultural, pre-discursive, end-less form of sense that allows things to appear without already being classified as equipment with potential uses: things need not always be ready-to-hand as tools, and if humans drop their tools they do not cease to be human beings.

Mindful of Heidegger’s critique, but wary of the otherworldly, alternative ‘assumption ground’ (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011) implied in his opening up to the meditation (Besinnung) of Being, we turn instead to Arendt (1958, 1978) to identify ways of freeing sense from the practical maintenance and recovery of order within practices. She, too, questioned the association of sense, practice and instrumentality, but avoided the hostility toward organization to which Heidegger was prone. Instead, she offers an account of how the sense emerging from practical, human concerns can be augmented by the deliberate organization of thoughtful opinion forming, one she framed through concepts of polis and sensus communis. She argued that understanding how to organize for this form of expressive, non-instrumental thought that generates community sense (rather than pragmatic agreements) is central to realizing human potential (Arendt, 1978, p. 56); without it, humans have little experience of the ‘unanswerable questions of meaning’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 62) that enable them to make sense instead of relying on sense being made for them.

Recognizing that sense does not always need to be tethered to ordering and instrumental pursuits helps avoid a narrow understanding of agency, thought and practice that treats all else as senseless. This recognition extends the ontological reach of sensemaking studies. Rather than studying ordering (and recovery), sensemaking scholarship, and organization studies more broadly, might also study how meaning arises from an ‘un-homing’ from the practice world. It is, we suggest, a particular job of philosophy to put human practices on display, to witness them curiously and critically, revealing the work that practices are doing: sense is opened as a subject to itself, and might then be recalibrated (Noë, 2023). There is no stipulation as to where and how these openings might appear – for that would be to pursue the necessary, pragmatic work of practice; but the very experience of revealing the habits, norms and values that prevail in practice, and to do so without having a specific set of interests or problem in mind, begins to flip sensemaking on its head: sense can emerge anew from deliberate, thoughtful attempts to refuse the equanimity of habit long enough to consider just where and how the demands and necessities of practice emerge; the recovery of order is accompanied by the possibilities for disorder.

Without recourse to this form of philosophy, implies Arendt, the capacity to make practical sense also withers. The practice world is then at risk of succumbing to the organized patterns of imitation and repetition that thoughtlessly serve dominant instrumental interests. There is, we suggest, a profound irony besetting modern organizational forms: the greater the emphasis on authoring and authorizing the practical realization of goals associated with specific human interests (e.g. do more with less, pursue organizational growth, improve returns on investment, control for uncertainty, win out over competition), the more senseless organizational life becomes. In her advocacy of sensus communis Arendt was at pains to point this out, wanting to restore to human practice a more robust – because open and multiple – condition of sensemaking. To preserve the potential inherent in difference, sensemaking must be separated from the specific interests served by its generation. It is toward the unpacking of this thesis that our paper is dedicated.

In the remainder of this paper, we first review the core tenets of the organizational sensemaking literature, followed by a discussion of its philosophical foundations to identify possible reasons for its (often implicit) focus on practical coping and instrumentality. We explore alternative philosophical foundations prompted first by Heidegger and then Arendt’s analysis of how instrumental relations to the world can assume a senseless but concealed dominance. We then discuss Arendt’s organizational response, in which she allies an organization form (polis) with the emergence of a collective space of thought-provoking appearances (sensus communis).

The Sensemaking Perspective and its Philosophical Foundations

The practical relevance of recovering order

Summarizing the gist of Weick’s theory, Maitlis and Christianson (2014) liken sensemaking to ‘a process, prompted by violated expectations, that involves attending to and bracketing cues in the environment, creating intersubjective meaning through cycles of interpretation and action, and thereby enacting a more ordered environment from which further cues can be drawn’ (p. 67). The emphasis on recovering order from violation associates sense with what John Dewey (1903), one of the founders of American pragmatist philosophy, calls ‘the maintenance of the integrity of experience’ (p. 52): ordinary experience is largely unreflective until we encounter some form of surprise or obstacle (which in extremis can amount to what Weick (1993) calls a ‘cosmology episode’) disturbing antecedent states of affairs. This unexpected event stalls habit, triggering (experimental) thoughts and actions that facilitate the recovery of settled experience. As per Weick (1995), the feeling of ‘order, clarity and rationality is an important goal of sensemaking, which means that once this feeling is achieved, further retrospective processing stops’ (p. 29).

As noted by Farjoun, Ansell and Boin (2015), American pragmatism has had extensive influence on Weick’s thinking. Notably, Weick has called for sensemaking scholars to ‘brush up on pragmatism’ and follow Dewey’s guidance to assess one’s attention (Weick, 2012, p. 151). Given the wealth and plurality of pragmatist approaches (Parmar, Phillips, & Freeman, 2016, p. 200) and Weick’s attempts to create a ‘mosaic’ (Weick, 2020, p. 1421) from a range of philosophies, his adoption of pragmatism is necessarily selective. ² However, investigating what Weick takes from pragmatist philosophy may help us become aware of, and comprehend, some of the foundational assumptions of sensemaking theory, better enabling us to contrast these with alternative assumptions that could allow us to develop different and ultimately richer conceptualizations. Indeed, as Weick (2020, p. 1423) himself notes, by drawing from Gregory Bateson (2000, p. 314) and James (1992, p. 908), being mindful of our conceptualizations of phenomena is of utmost importance since they guide our behaviour and shape the world accordingly.

Weick adopts from pragmatism the notion that what is true arises from what is practically relevant knowledge, which in turn emerges from competent inquiry into removing the problems or obstacles that hinder the realization of human projects. In place of invariant knowledge (the traditional focus of philosophy), pragmatists elevate concrete practicalities. Dewey’s (1903) Studies in Logical Theory, for example, argues that acquiring knowledge is less a concern with discovering fixed principles than with the effective use of dynamic instruments of experiment to corral and control future experience (Dewey, 1929, p. 84). Rather than eschew change, the experimental method induces it: science proceeds through the active use of tools and routines to create systemic variations in conditions that induce measurable changes in the things made subject to inquiry. ‘The progress of inquiry,’ suggests Dewey (1929), ‘is identical with advance in the invention and construction of physical instrumentalities for producing, registering and measuring changes’ (p. 84), which in turn ‘progressively and securely clothes natural existence with realized meanings’ (Dewey, 1929, pp. 167–168).

Through time each experiment garners what has been learned previously, absorbs it, to the point that earlier knowledge becomes part of the epistemological apparatus for yet further inquiry: the conclusions become instruments, the objects of earlier knowledge become suggestions for new operations (Rheinberger, 1997). Advanced knowledge steadily settles into practice from which new processes of inquiry that gather sense data, objects and conceptions can be proposed. The identification by which knowledge makes its claims is not just a process of classification, it is operational. What something ‘is’ ‘is constituted by continued absorption and incorporation of materials previously external as in the growth of a person, a nation or a social movement. It demands operations that redispose and organize what antecedently exists’ (Dewey, 1929, p. 189). As such, knowledge is an act of converting undirected change into goal-based, directed change (Dewey, 1929, p. 203) which, in the process, transforms the human values and interests associated with its use to ones of instrumental control (Dewey, 1929, p. 199). Pragmatically speaking, under the aegis of experience and experiment, sense arises when ‘a situation undergoes, through operations directed by thought, transition from problematic to settled, from internal discontinuity to coherency and organization’ (Dewey, 1929, p. 232).

This emphasis on the organizational potency of practical inquiry marbles Weick’s sensemaking theory, notably his insistence that ‘people see and find sensible those things they can do something about’ (Weick, 1995, p. 60) and, relatedly, and here quoting James (1890, p. 482), that the ‘whole function of conceiving, of fixing, and holding fast to meaning, has no significance apart from the fact that the conceiver is a creature with particular purposes and private ends’ (Weick, 1995, p. 26). Weick (1995) refers to the ‘basic pragmatic quality of life, life lived in projects, [that] may be all that stands between sense and senselessness’ (p. 105). Anything disrupting order and our ability to pursue predefined purposes is regarded as ‘sensebreaking’ (Schildt, Mantere, & Cornelissen, 2020) and thus, ipso facto, a deviation from sense.

Apart from Weick, few organization scholars explicitly associate the sensemaking perspective with pragmatism (Allard-Poesi, 2005; Baker & Schaltegger, 2015; Czarniawska, 1997; Lorino, 2018; Rylander Eklund, Navarro Aguiar, & Amacker, 2022 are notable exceptions). Yet its core assumptions about practical problem solving and situated meaning-making as forming the basis for understanding how sense is made appear to be generally accepted. Even attempts to link sensemaking to different philosophical traditions rarely question the assumption that sensemaking is a process of (re)gaining order and control, arising when projects are disrupted. For example, Gephart, Topal and Zhang (2010) offer an ethnomethodological account of sensemaking, drawing from the ‘agentivity perspective’ as developed by Emirbayer and Mische (1998) (also inspired by pragmatism), which focuses on interactions and projectivity in the form of ‘imaginative generation by actors of possible future trajectories of action where received structures are reconfigured in relation to the future’ (Gephart et al., 2010, p. 279). Though the emphasis is on change, not settlement, the ground to sensemaking remains the producing and sustaining of institutional legitimation (Gephart et al., 2010, p. 275), and hence is linked to (re-)gaining order and control.

Immanence and practice worlds

Given the popularity of sensemaking theory in organization studies, Sandberg and Tsoukas (2015) highlight a surprising lack of critique thereof. Their review of the literature suggests sensemaking is often: simply equated with interpretation; treated as episodic, individualistic and cognitive; assumed to be solely retrospective; and theorized as occurring in much the same manner across quite different scenarios. Addressing these points as limitations, Sandberg and Tsoukas (2015, 2020) make two important developmental claims.

First, and along with other sensemaking scholars (de Rond, Holeman, & Howard-Grenville, 2019; Höllerer, Jancsary, & Grafström, 2018; Meziani & Cabantous, 2020), they draw attention to immanence: as humans interact with the world, they constantly, although not necessarily consciously, anticipate, judge and respond to developments situationally. Instead of being primarily cognitive-discursive, sense constantly emerges materially and affectively as bodies interact with broader environments (de Rond et al., 2019; Meziani & Cabantous, 2020), setting in train an ecologically sensitive intelligence or skill. Sense is immanent to the situation; it emerges from within an ongoing gathering of memory, anticipation, acquired skill and occurrence. Evading disruption, and achieving ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) – i.e. aligning behaviours with environments in seamless ways – is the aim. A well-known example is the Formula One racing driver Ayrton Senna’s comment on his best racing performance:

And suddenly I realized that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension . . . I was way over the limit but still able to find even more . . . It frightened me because I realised I was well beyond my conscious understanding. (Donaldson, 1990)

As the comment also suggests, relying entirely on instinct or intuition can be dangerous when circumstances arise that cannot be readily absorbed (cf. Colville, Pye, & Carter, 2013). As Senna experienced himself by crashing out of a race after having achieved his best lap times (Salracing, 2017), this can result in disturbances that may force a halt to continued routine enactment – triggering potentially more cognitive-discursive and detached forms of sensemaking in attempts to either overcome hurdles or develop an understanding of how such hurdles may have arisen, and how they may be overcome or circumvented in the future.

While not explicitly mentioned by Sandberg and Tsoukas (2020), the trigger of such deliberate, detached sensemaking need not be an experienced disruption. For instance, studies on prospective sensemaking (Rindova & Martins, 2022; Stigliani & Ravasi, 2012) that investigate the construction of possible futures draw attention to elements that extend beyond the anticipation that occurs in less reflective, immanent processes, while also not being fully captured by restoring, reviewing and explaining problematized activities. An interesting example is Bruskin and Mikkelsen’s (2020) comparison of bank employees’ differential use of metaphors when expressing their thoughts and feelings about past events (which are often trivialized because post-hoc explanations can be readily constructed or threats have passed) versus future scenarios (which, due to perceived uncertainty, are generally associated with more threatening metaphors). Importantly, rather than interpreting existing events by relying on, and perhaps adapting, existing schema, future-oriented sensemaking involves creative acts of imagining futures without disruptions necessarily serving as anchors (unlike, for instance, troubleshooting, in which some kind of problem has been identified that needs to be fixed, or debriefing, in which a critical incident is reviewed), recalling when, for example, advocates of scenario planning suggested that strategies should become loose and multiple, thereby hedging against different futures (Cornelius, Van de Putte, & Romani, 2005).

Following immanence, Sandberg and Tsoukas’s (2020) second development is the distinction between a primary and secondary practice world. They note that providing plausible accounts of organizational experience (i.e. making sense of how others have tried to make sense), such as in public and scientific inquiries, is qualitatively different from trying to maintain or restore order for oneself. Because members of a public inquiry committee or research team themselves have not experienced the problem or issue they are investigating, the inquiry is abstracted from the outset. Drawing from routines, guidelines, frameworks and other resources from within their own (professional or scientific) practice world, inquirers provide representational analyses of sensemaking activity. These secondary analyses may traverse practice worlds in multiple ways: not only do developments in one practice world provide cues to be interpreted in another, but the outputs of such interpretations may inform interpretations beyond those inhabiting the practice world of the inquiry members (such as when researchers present their analyses back to those they have researched). Finally, as new understandings are shared and accepted within and across practice worlds, they become part of agreed routines with each response to (minor, major or imagined future) disruptions, or external inquiries thereof, potentially refining it further.

The insights presented above, developed primarily from Sandberg and Tsoukas’s (2015, 2020) adoption of principles from existential phenomenology (based mainly on Heidegger’s (1927/2008) Being and Time and Dreyfus’s (2017) interpretations thereof), contribute to a much richer understanding of the complexity and plurality of sensemaking processes. Rather than routine punctuated by crisis, sensemaking is also studied as emerging from an almost continual and everyday enactment and embodiment of habits, norms and values that shimmer and stutter as they are extended into novel situations. There is a continual toggling between primary and secondary practice, between doing and consideration, allowing sense the room to breathe. Moreover, the distinction between primary and secondary practice worlds provides theoretical and critical space for habits, norms and values to be questioned and reorganized.

However, the remaining and prevailing pragmatic assumption that sensemaking is a process of dealing with (and eliminating) or preventing disturbances to better enact routines, realize projects and secure resilient organizations, means that sense is always restricted to the interpretation of organizational activity ‘within the practical concerns of [a particular] practice world’ (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020, p. 15, citing Gallagher, 2017, pp. 83–84). Fundamentally, the cues for sensemaking remain those already amenable to agreed organizational response (Introna, 2019). As Rindova and Martins (2022) note, commenting on future sensemaking, ‘continuous or near’ (p. 200) imagined futures typically make the most sense. Interpretations of past developments and stable objectives serve as anchors for constructing plausible futures. Similarly, the secondary practice world remains invested in increasing certainty by reducing risk, which depends on identifying and avoiding future disruptions. Creative, critical and imaginative thinking in organizations is usually (and understandably) deployed to achieve predefined organizational imperatives, such as stability or growth, and hence necessarily constrained.

Is this orientation toward practical control and its theoretical recovery, we ask, the only way to understand sense? Do identified types of sensemaking frame all the ‘different ways of engaging with the world’ and ‘ways of standing separately’ from it (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020, p. 3) that generate meaning? Is there any possibility of making sense beyond: the recovery of order after disturbance; the immanent coping and acquisition of skill within practices; or the use of a secondary practice world to recalibrate primary practices?

Critiques of pragmatic and practical accounts of making sense

The pragmatists’ calls for beginning theorizing using direct experience rather than metaphysical abstractions have contributed great insights to both the natural and social sciences, including organization studies (Parmar et al., 2016). However, building a theory of sensemaking on the sole basis of empirically situated practical concerns, necessity and habit, while perhaps seductive, is limiting. It is worth noting that the pragmatist commitment to meaning as practical use has attracted criticism from philosophers (see for instance Russell, 1945/2016). An especially scathing (and controversial) critique was expressed by Randolph Bourne, a lapsed pragmatist, who, during the First World War, lamented how preoccupations with practical concerns (achieving controlled growth, adaptation, technical efficiency) concealed awareness of more fundamental questions that give life meaning:

We were instrumentalists, but we had our private utopias so clearly before our minds that the means fell always into its place as contributory . . . The defect of any philosophy of ‘‘adaptation’‘ or ‘‘adjustment’,’ even when it means adjustment to changing, living experience, is that there is no provision for thought or experience getting beyond itself . . . An intellectual attitude of mere adjustment, of mere use of the creative intelligence to make your progress, must end in caution, regression, and a virtual failure to effect even that change which you so clear-sightedly and desirously see . . . The allure of fresh and true ideas, of free speculation, of artistic vigor, of cultural styles, of intelligence suffused by feeling, and feeling given fibre and outline by intelligence, has not come, and can hardly come, we see now, while our reigning philosophy is an instrumental one. (Bourne, 1917)

Bourne (1917) went on to call for the ‘allure of the technical’ to be overcome by ‘malcontents’ who ‘have a taste for spiritual adventure, and for sinister imaginative excursions’ and seek to ‘tease, provoke, irritate thought on any subject’.

Bourne’s criticisms echo those made by Heidegger. In the context of sensemaking, Heidegger has been enlisted as an advocate of practical sense. As Sandberg and Tsoukas (2011, 2020) attest, Heidegger (1927/2008) argued that overwhelmingly and primarily we find meaning in the world through instrumental relations with things (i.e. we perceive objects with respect to their use as equipment serving our interests). Forerunning sensemaking theory, Heidegger noticed how, when things break down (i.e. they become useless), they become present-at-hand as the subjects of knowledge, through which a fix is made and equipmentality restored. For example, using a classic case from sensemaking theory, the equipmental use of cognitive frames (language is also a tool) gives immediate, dispositional, collective understanding of a situation that is ‘a “this” or a “that”’ – such as the 10 o’clock fire identified by the smoke jumpers at Mann Gulch (Weick, 1993, p. 635). If events upset the cogency of the frame (e.g. the fire ‘mis-behaves’ and is no longer a fire that will be put out by 10am, but becomes an unruly, unpredictable fire) then disorganization, even crisis, ensues. The tools are dropped, equipmentality breaks down, life is downed. Pragmatically, the job is to recover orderability by subjecting the equipment – including the cognitive frames – to secondary inquiry (what Heidegger called making them present-at-hand), creating an experimental space from which new, more flexible, cognitive frames might emerge: organization becomes resilient, and human projects are better served.

But like Bourne, Heidegger acknowledges and yet deviates from this everyday ordering (Luckner, 2008). Though our equipmental condition began naturally enough (order, control and realizing ends ensure we survive and flourish as a species), under the experimental aegis and potency of science and a subsequent explosion of mechanization, orderability has, Heidegger suggests, become a corrosive process of continually enlisting nature through inquiry to realize projects that serve specific, ostensibly human interests. There is neither pause, nor thought; only chains of extracting entailment animated by a headless search for exploitable surplus (Heidegger, 1954/1977). A one-sided view of the world (equipmentality) becomes an all-sided view; we sense the world through equipmental relations (primary) or their present-at-hand recovery (secondary): meaning is use.

Though complex, Heidegger’s diagnosis employs the analogy of standing (stellen) against (vor), rather than belonging to, the world. Science and technology work with an already projected ground plan (Grundriss) to ‘represent or conceive (vorstellen) the conditions under which a specific series of motions can be made susceptible of being followed in its necessary progression, i.e., of being controlled in advance by calculation’ (Heidegger, 1954/1977, pp. 119–121). Being set forth in advance, human projects are already projections of a technological order in which things can be compared, calculated and certified as being sufficiently repetitive and so stable enough to fit into plans. What is being made sense of is, therefore, always what is average – what can be discerned in its repetitive ordinariness from the flow of appearance – while what is unique and/or idiosyncratic, and so cannot readily fit into projects, is of little sense (Heidegger, 1954/1977, pp. 123, 322).

Things are always being understood as equipment. Even art works made with the intent of questioning use value succumb to the status of objects within an art market: their value as provocations is evaluated as a contribution to artistic status, to the possession of taste, to price levels and the like (Holt, 2023). Yet use value does not exhaust things, and to sense what lies beyond use means experiencing what Heidegger called the unsettling and disorienting experience of ‘Gelassenheit’ (equanimity) in which things refuse to be typecast as ‘this’ or ‘that’; they are just let be (Zundel, 2013). Through Gelassenheit we expand the criteria of sense beyond our practical relations to the world in which, to recur to Weick, we only ‘see and find sensible those things [we] can do something about’ (Weick, 1995, p. 60).

At the same time, however, Heidegger was inherently pessimistic about our ability to resist the seduction of practical use and the convenience and certainties that came with it (i.e. the ‘allure of the technical’), regarding this as a pathology of our current condition (Heidegger, 1954/1977). In other words, Weick was essentially correct in his pragmatically inspired assumptions about the drivers and processes of sensemaking because in our modern technological era we appear to have successfully eradicated alternatives. Even attempts to free ourselves from instrumental ways of being, as popularized by forms of mindful meditation (Weick & Putnam, 2006; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2006), are more often than not in the service of achieving greater order, certainty and control (cf. York, 2001), rather than efforts to sense differently. Indeed, Barry and Meisiek (2010) suggest as much in their paper on sensemaking, mindfulness and the arts, highlighting how in taking people ‘away from their usual instrumental orientation’ art is still being used to meet an organizational imperative for performative creativity (p. 1516).

An Arendtian Account of Sensemaking

A few organization scholars (Holt & Cornelissen, 2014; Introna, 2019) have begun to draw inspiration from Heidegger’s critique of instrumentality and his theorizing of a more unsettled and even poetic form of making sense. In this stream of study of how sense is made beyond practical concerns, Hannah Arendt’s work appears germane. Like Heidegger, she was critical of reducing organizational relations to ones of calculation and position, but avoided Heidegger’s pessimism by looking for organizational responses (Degryse, 2011), notably through the concept of sensus communis (which we elaborate below).

Through Gelassenheit, Heidegger finds a form of abeyant, patient and contemplative ‘sense’ made possible in inward thoughtfulness, which he explicitly separates from organization. It is a form of pre-ordered thoughtfulness that for Arendt (1971) is too isolationist, passive and apolitical. She is not hostile to such contemplation per se, but resists it being understood in preferential opposition to organized, active forms of sense. For Arendt, organization itself is not the problem: as has also been acknowledged by communicative constitution of organization (CCO) scholars (Schoeneborn, Kuhn, & Kärreman, 2019), we can organize for sense using language in ways that not only preserve but enhance our capacity to apprehend them without consigning them to things-of-use. Far from giving up on organization, she cherishes it.

Organizing for sense through labour, work and the oikos

In pursuit of her commitment to organization, Arendt distinguishes two organizational forms: the oikos (an administered space of logistics) and polis (a space of public thought). Relations in the oikos (translated as household) are often practical, habitually structured and familiar. Nearly all organizational forms borrow the quality of an oikos given that they are the upshot of continued efforts to blend sensual experience, organizational forms and practical experiment in the furtherance of order and control over things. For Arendt (1958), ‘The private realm of the household was the sphere where the necessities of life, of individual survival as well as of continuity of the species, were taken care of and guaranteed’ (p. 45). The ‘taking care of’ was undertaken largely through labouring: a means–ends activity of acknowledging and meeting biological needs in human bodies, families and broader populations (sex and procreation, food, safety, shelter, play).

Distinct from labour, but still constitutive of oikos, is work. Through work, humans make objects that persist beyond the span of a single lifetime, and which foster enduring forms of sense whose symbolic encapsulation of meaning helps cement household administration. The socio-material objects made through work lend purpose to projects, for example: the ethical and aesthetic qualities associated with belief systems; the use of art and culture to create prevailing taste and style; or the institution of legal constitutions to cement norms and values. The continued use of such works enhances, rather than exhausts, their influence over the everyday relations of the oikos. They are objects around which people settle upon the question of why it matters to lead sensible lives, not just survive. Work justifies, gilds and sanctifies the oikos and the practices by which it is made and remade; and it distinguishes the makers as having reason, viz. not just the intellectual desire to grasp what is perceived by the senses, but being able to understand meaning (Arendt, 1978, p. 53).

Given their intense interest in organizational performance, the vast majority of sensemaking studies deal with aspects of what Arendt conceptualizes as the labour and work of the oikos. The equivalent of labour would be associated with pragmatic concerns with how best to secure and prolong life; it is an ability to gather forces to cope with exigencies and achieve resilience, in some cases just to survive (e.g. Dwyer, Hardy, & Tsoukas, 2023; Kalkman, 2020; Weick, 1993). Along with studies of legal compliance and regulation, the equivalent of work includes the examination of strategic processes of executing goals and vision that warrant and elevate certain interests (e.g. Nigam & Ocasio, 2010), for example through the sometimes hidden use of emotional force to reproduce and legitimate social and cultural orders (Mikkelsen & Wåhlin, 2020).

Though labour preserves life, and work is civilizing, Arendt remains suspicious of them both: of labour because of its thoughtless, metabolic routine, and of work because, in becoming (potentially) a source of enduring sense, its objects can dominate and stifle life (Arendt, 1958, p. 228). Labour is characterized by managed physical force, whereas work is violent: it intervenes in the world and subjugates it to human values that, once instituted, restrain and even annihilate thought. Once instituted, work generates certainties, whether as unassailable facts, or in the symbolic setting and application of standards by which right and good are established (i.e. justice, equity, fairness, the exemplary, beauty) (Norris, 1996; see also Shymko & Frémeaux, 2022). The sense being made through work can be uplifting and inspiring (laws can defend the weak, art can elicit curiosity and joy), but this very potency exposes it to manipulation by specific interests (law can be bought, art can decorate or hide abuse) (see Arendt, 1958, pp. 153–155). Under the aegis of work allied to labour, these interests can gather both authority and presence, giving the oikos both power to do, and power over, things.

Organizing for sense through the polis

Alongside the oikos, Arendt (1958, p. 177) invokes the polis. Provoked by Heidegger’s Gelassenheit, Arendt wishes to reclaim the importance of thinking and contemplation in human practice. But where Heidegger advocates withdrawal into an inward and passive dwelling with things, she advocates a public space held in common dedicated to a perpetual inquiry into the habits, values and norms by which sense is made (Arendt, 1970, p. 4). Thought, she argues, needs to be organized, otherwise it continues to occupy a subaltern role to practicalities. With the polis, thinking institutes an organizational form through which it takes leave from the demands of practice, imagines alternative habits, values and norms, and unmoors itself from the truths woven into the textures of daily household life. Arendt likens it to a ‘space of appearances’ where humans appear to themselves and others not as members of ‘a household’ defined by roles and procedures, but as beings who are not just in the world, but of it, perceiving (as subjects) and being perceived (as objects) at one and the same time, and never as complete, but always partially undone, or yet to be done, and so replete with possibility. In Arendt’s (1978) words: ‘Whatever appears is meant for a perceiver, a potential subject no less inherent in all objectivity than a potential object is inherent in the subjectivity of every intentional act’ (pp. 8–9). There is nothing grounding this public space of appearances. The thought is active, by which Arendt means it is no longer being employed in service of the facts, agreements and truths that advance human interests (though thought is involved in all these practices). Rather, thought takes leave from the practical and theoretical desire to know and installs itself in the ‘unanswerable questions of meaning’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 56). Instead of agreements and settlements, this active thought simply continues as far as is possible beyond the sensorily experienced and already organized world into which we find ourselves thrown. The thinking subject thinks by taking appearances further, conscious that in doing so the world appears differently; to act thoughtfully is to initiate, to begin, to call a subject into being again and again (what Arendt called natality) as it appears to itself, and others, as an object (Arendt, 1958, p. 231, 1978, pp. 23–24, pp. 30–31). To think is an urge of the inward examining subject to acknowledge and answer the fact of its appearing outwardly as an object set amid other subjects thinking similarly and, equally, appearing as objects within practices (the roles, procedures by which its life is administered) (Gardiner, 2018; Introna, Kavanagh, & Brigham, 2023, p. 494).

The polis occurs in gatherings of people, both rulers and ruled without distinction, who would act out understandings in dialogue, showing or revealing meanings in a kind of expressive, didactic theatre, again and again (Arendt, 1958, p. 199). It is a theatre of opinion, not truth. Arendt is insistent here: the sense or meaning generated through thought is not knowledge and does not contribute to knowledge. Nor is it practical; it does not contribute to the efficacy of the oikos. If theory is produced in the polis, it is in its original guise, as theoria, an active, theatrical display of human life in which the established modes of sense and sensemaking are witnessed by an audience who, in the very act of witnessing, are exposed to alternate ways of being, to different projects, to a plurality of openings:

It is in the very nature of every new beginning that it breaks into the world as an ‘infinite probability,’ and yet it is precisely this infinitely probable which actually constitutes the very texture of everything we call real. (Arendt, 1961, p. 169)

It is this actively thoughtful, pre-known sense of sense that tends to be concealed in the pragmatically grounded concern for order (and its recovery). Sense, from a pragmatic, sensemaking perspective, is associated with knowledge (defined by Dewey as the outcome of competent enquiry) which in turn, through the present-at-hand version of theory, becomes associated with ‘irrefutable truth, that is, propositions that human beings are not free to reject – they are compelling’ (Arendt, 1978, p. 54). To recover the sense made in thoughtful action requires thinking that remains distinct from knowledge. Sense emerges from posing opinions, not truths, shading the thinker in perplexed curiosity:

Thinking as such, not only the raising of the unanswerable ‘ultimate questions,’ but every reflection that does not serve knowledge and is not guided by practical needs and aims, is, as Heidegger once observed, ‘out of order.’ It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop and think. (Arendt, 1978, p. 78, italics in original)

To equate sense with free-flowing opinion is to douse the fixing, overhead illuminations offered by knowledge, and instead to seek one’s way by the unreliable flicker of suggestion: it is to declare habit and theory ‘out of order’. For Arendt, if we only organize for the instrumental senses made through the oikos we demean ourselves by becoming ‘immune to further experiences’ (Arendt, 1970, p. 8); whereas organizing thoughtfully to produce opinions seeds novelty, fluidity and potential into the world, thereby encouraging and provoking subjects to make sense. Opinions move freely, they act by providing perspicuous representations of practices made available for thought. Thinking does not intervene in practical problems; it is not a useful technology for communicating information or meaning. It avers from the conscious and directed use of signs and symbols to realize specific interests; it refuses to manage the rules for assigning values; it resists settling into orders and agreements. All of this is the work or labour in the oikos. The polis produces appearances, period. It poses alternatives rather than reaching solutions, establishing what Arendt called a ‘fermenta cognitionis’ which ‘when scattered into the world were not intended to communicate conclusions, but to stimulate others to independent thought, and this for no other purpose than to bring about a discourse between thinkers’ (Arendt, 1970, p. 10). Amid all this ferment and scattering of opinions, however, how does the polis cohere? Arendt’s response is sensus communis.

Sensus communis

Outside of positions and agreements, but inside the polis, sense appears unaided, without allies. Each opinion is, rhetorically speaking, vying for life with others – each abridging, supplementing, dissolving, resisting the other, restlessly, moving like clouds of beguiling shape, visible and material but unmanageable, without determination or reversibility; the polis is a space outside the primary and secondary practice worlds of the oikos. Loosened from both the grammatical pressure of habitually used concepts delineating one thing as something, and from the directional tether of prevailing (if competing) interests, sensus communis arises from the raw, thoughtful interplay of displays in which subjects appear as objects before one another, and to themselves. By putting habits, norms and values on the stage, so to speak, they lose their assumed authority to speak for themselves, they are opened up to consideration and so appear incomplete, under review, and possibly otherwise. Arendt (1989, p. 43) likened the experience to ‘going visiting’, sensing what it is like to be elsewhere. If the polis is the participatory architecture (Ackermann, Pyrko, & Hill, 2023), then sensus communis is the atmospheric affect that unsettles and redistributes the accepted arrangements of what has been given to the senses. If practice knits the five senses together in an agreed order of reality, then sensus communis unpicks them a little, inviting its exponents to pick up the loose threads, to proffer alternates. To experience the appearance of an object is to consider, also, how it appears and what does not appear, but might. The public nature of sensus communis is two-fold. First, opinions are being represented to others in ways that invite response, and second, in forming opinions, subjects imagine themselves into the imaginative situation of other subjects. In combination it is others’ company that elicits and even demands the thoughtful effort to think anew, to present yet further perspicuous representations. Hence, as Ferrara (2019) argues, sensus communis is more than a bundle of local traditions, more than convention, more than the administration of the household, more than everyday agreements. It is sense emerging through the common experience of exposure resulting from leave taking and going visiting.

There is no pre-formed purpose toward which expression is directed. The dialogue has no objective (such as realizing organizational resilience advocated in Weick’s more pragmatic work), nor is it motivated by a history of lack or disturbance (whether dramatic cosmology episodes or lesser forms of discomfort and disorientation). Rather, it is characterized by an immediate sense of purposive (rather than purposeful) curiosity that animates a collective body of subjects outside of its acquisition and defence of specific bodies of meaning associated with specific practices and projects. Sense appears everywhere, like flowers in a meadow, without justification or direction.

Developing sensus communis, or making sense public, is the process of increasing the actual and possible displays of habits, norms and values by imaginatively ‘going through’ different particulars, one to the next, realizing a reflexive distance by refusing to elevate any one in particular above others (Arendt, 1989). Sensus communis is embodied, enacted and extended in the collective churn of this ‘going through’, expanding awareness, without stipulating how to act or apply this enriched understanding (Arendt, 1989, p. 44).

The coherence of these single and varied perspicuous representations is secured through what Arendt, following Kant (1790/1987, §17), calls ‘images’. Being atmospheric, these hover across particulars and align sensibility, thought and understanding. With this synthesizing capacity of images, particulars can be communicated but they need not be defined as already belonging to a specific practice or set of interests. To display the administrative nature of oikos, for example, and extend this to related meanings of home, or homelessness, requires that an already existing, shared image of a house present itself of which a particular oikos is an exemplar. This is sense in its widest form, an opening up in which ‘house’ can be revealed and be brought about without any actual house being made (Heidegger, 1954/1977, pp. 30–32). In labour and work, a house is organized by accepted use values, resonant symbolism and prevailing interests. In contrast, in the polis – via thoughtful action – one imaginatively represented distinction follows another, again and again (natality), through whose succession of images an already existing image of ‘house’ is being stretched, twisted, taken on in opinionated dialogue. Can language be a ‘house’ for example, or is what makes a house the interior void, and so something more absent than present? Sensus communis is the ongoing, communicative and public struggle to imaginatively represent such particulars again and again, taking them outside of their commonsense order. Being public, these imaginative acts also account for the imaginative representations of others, thereby provoking and accumulating an open multiplicity of opinions which, nevertheless, are woven and held together with images whose persisting and exemplary sameness is sufficient to ground the struggle as an experience held in common (Arendt, 1989, pp. 82–84).

In the polis and via sensus communis Arendt attempts to restore an organizationally sound public space dedicated to thought. What ails the modern world is the unquestioned prevalence of an imperative to fix, improve, secure and order organizational activity to catalyse the cycles of labour and work that structure the distribution of sense. She laments the lack of fallow space set aside from the busyness of the household; a display space; a theatre for the kind of perspicuous representations (übersichtliche Darstellungen) that Wittgenstein (2001, pp. 121–125) argued was the job of philosophy. The job of philosophy – and its institution in the public space of appearances – is to arouse humans to thought, to spur personal opinions (contrasted with common prejudice) and to question what, in the practice world, appears as self-evident (Villa, 2020). In making and experiencing these displays, humans can begin to pursue the unanswerable questions of meaning as well as those of practical fact and formal theory.

As a critique of industrialized, instrumental modernity, Arendt’s polis – the architecture providing an interior for sensus communis – appears to share a similar space to the communicative reason advocated by Jürgen Habermas (1986, 1989) of the Frankfurt School. For Habermas, what ails rationalization is its confinement to the organized pursuit of interests using means–ends logic. A restricted sense of reason has monopolized human relations and understanding. The appropriate theoretical and political correction of this monopoly is to expand reasoning through a commitment to a deliberative, public sphere of communicative dialogue in which advocates of organizational commitment are required to distinguish good reasons for acting from reasons alone. Being set within a sustained programme of critical social research dedicated to rational organizational reform, Habermas’s correction is theoretical, not philosophical. As with the secondary practice world, any critique is immanent. It remains tithed to a grounding commitment to the reason of post Enlightenment Europe (Scherer & Neesham, 2023): the public realm is, for Habermas, a scene of social solidarity realized by the intersubjective agreements of equal, autonomous subjects. It is designed to create more open, egalitarian organizational forms to whose strictures all humans can willingly conform; it is an instrumental connection between theory and practice.

Arendt’s public world, as Villa (2020) argues, is not of the same, consensual quality. Its advocacy of opinion is not solution-driven; it does not yearn for intersubjective agreement, nor does it warrant or encourage action. Rather, being philosophical, it creates an atmosphere of perplexed curiosity in which the naturalness of our habits, norms and values disappears, as does the righteousness and persuasive force of theory. The world is no longer a place of stable rhythms, accepted definitions and reasonable commitments; it is no longer a home, but a place under scrutiny, like a crime scene or newly discovered kingdom in which nothing is fixed as being ‘this way’ or ‘that’.

There is, then, in Arendt a very particular view of sensus communis. It is wound together by a common orientation toward a shared reality that has been unmoored from the standard distributions of sense. With philosophy to the fore, sensus communis generates asymmetric experiences of plurality and natality; philosophy is an attempt to look at theory and practice again, which means acknowledging the ring of soundness in common sense, then going again. Sensus communis does not arise from instinct into a collective habit, nor is it a general object of theoretical design that can be explicitly articulated and imposed (or to recall Kant, neither commonplace nor ahistorical). In Arendt’s texts it hovers elusively as a distinct, yet atmospheric awareness of the inherent civic value of putting practice on display and, upon witnessing that display, becoming aware of how we acquire and acquiesce to practice (and its theoretical recovery). Yet it needs to be organized. Without a polis-like form, philosophy loses out to the administrative instrumentality and theoretical tidiness of household business (and busyness).

Organizing for Sensus Communis

In organizing for the polis alongside the oikos, in organizing for ambiguity, sensemaking is flipped on its head. Appearances ground agreed verities; the perplexed seed certainties; beginning again trumps organizational settlement; the most potent source of resilience becomes fragility; and particular interests give way to an unassigned, collective curiosity. Much as Arendt (1978, p. 337) comments that Nietzsche’s attempts to invert Plato still left the categorical framework for such an inversion intact, and so still left Plato, our flipping sensemaking on its head still leaves us with sensemaking; we do not advocate replacing or dismantling sensemaking, so much as expanding its concerns beyond the practice world. In doing so, a disruption is not just a potential trigger for organizational processes to toggle between primary and secondary practice worlds and seek new settlements (it is not just a potential sensebreaking event as per Schildt et al. (2020)); rather, specific, polis-like forms of organization can foster dislocations from practice that initiate meaning-generating processes, albeit ones of thoughtful consideration rather than practical inquiry. What is revealed and so questioned in the space of appearances is the presumed naturalness of an imperative toward inquiry: the assumed necessity by which sense is located within, and fixed by, the instrumental maintenance of projects, whether through labour or work.

Sensemaking is dedicated to understanding the distribution of the conditions of sense within this instrumental imperative. It does so through studies of the accidental and even cosmological episodes of shock, disorientation and pain as scenes of organizational failure demanding correction, or of everyday struggles to align and settle into multiple activities. Theory frames and distils these experiences of inquiry. It is dedicated to understanding those organizational conditions that best order our natural, equipmental relation to things and thereby the practical interests informing and emerging from these relations. Arendt’s sensus communis reveals the flip side by removing itself from practice (and its theoretical correction) into instead acting ‘out of order’.

So where might we find examples of such acting out of order? Strategy ‘away days’ and retreats may appear to stimulate such action by encouraging ‘blue sky thinking’ and using other tools to generate and discuss ideas, as well as question taken-for-granted assumptions (e.g. Johnson, 2008). However, while potentially generating a plurality of opinions, they typically do so with the intention of developing consensus and commitment around activities that enable organizational growth and resilience. This is not to say that sensus communis cannot emerge in such circumstances but rather that it is as likely to be an unintended outcome that could undermine as readily as realize stated strategic directions – for instance by questioning the very existence of the organization, its growth, or the need of an organizational strategy.

A more compelling example of sensus communis, despite important reservations raised by Barry and Meisiek (2010), and Arendt’s own suspicions about the appropriation of art objects, is found in instances of art practice, notably in what Holm and Beyes (2022) call art’s organizational turn. In part this involves what Barbara Steveni, founder of the Artist Placement Group (1965), called the open brief of an artist intervening within a commercial or public organization to consider the possibilities for producing open, fragmented and multiple forms of value, or for organizing trading relations on the basis of care rather than scarcity. In the spirit of this genre, in the artist Pilvi Takala’s film work The Trainee, we witness her in the Finnish offices of the consultancy firm Deloitte playing the role of a ‘marketing trainee’ (Collins, 2023; Fullerton, 2023). Rather than follow standard work patterns, however, she appears amid her ‘co-workers’ as though passive, quite still, as if doing nothing. Unaware she is an artist, and believing her a new colleague, the co-workers ask her why, for example, she spends an entire afternoon going up and down in the glass elevator, or spending hours gazing out of the large, plate windows of the tax library. Her replies are elusive: ‘brain work’, or ‘thinking in rhythms’. Her ‘colleagues’ become increasingly disturbed, and we witness their emails and phone calls to one another, querying her presence and asking superiors for clarification. That is it: no denouement; no resolution; no objective. Reflecting on the piece, Takala (and seemingly Deloitte too, who commissioned the work and made the company emails and other sources of information available) concludes:

What provokes people about this ‘non-doing’, aside from the strangeness, is the element of resistance. The non-doing person isn’t committed to any activity, so they have the potential for anything. It is non-doing that lacks a place in the general order of things, and thus it is a threat to order. It is easy to root out any ongoing anti-order activity, but the potential for anything is a continual stimulus without a solution. (Takala, 2008)

In Arendt’s terms, as Takala’s thoughtful acting out of order reveals the conceptual grounding of consultancy work, it begins to reorganize a plurality of appearances; it raises questions as to their ‘naturalness’, invoking a sensus communis in which the perplexity and curiosity associated with challenging consultancy habits begin to cohere through shared images of how labour and work can be imaginatively represented. Far from identifying errant habits, norms and values and offering improvements, the display and images create an atmosphere in which they become the object of awareness, eliciting inward and outward speculation in colleagues who hitherto had felt themselves fully appraised of practices such as ‘brain work’ (Jørgensen, 2022). More broadly, art’s organizational turn also involves artists’ experiments with different organizational forms (para-organizations that exist alongside existing ones, goading them, suggesting alternates; or decentralized, autonomous organizations whose members vote publicly to being bound by contracts that are encoded and executed through blockchain).

Another example that approximates Arendt’s conception of sensus communis, as well as being polis-like, this time from religion rather than art, appears in Introna et al.’s (2023) study of business meetings among Quakers: Believers gather as equals, in seated circles, face to face, and often in silence, awaiting through thought the right time to speak, and to listen carefully to all others. The sensus communis lies in ‘the unity of the sense of the meeting’ (p. 497) rather than in forming and agreeing upon common interests. Discussions cover all manner of practicalities affecting the community (the daily businesses of work and labour), but the concern is not with which interests to serve, but with affording space to discern whether the interests are indeed the right interests, and even if so, whether others might also resonate and be attended to. The meeting is not organized to realize a state of consistency between emotions, interpretation and action orientation in order to create a plausible, collectively agreed account of an event. Rather, any account offered provokes further thoughts and accounts. The intent is to reveal to the meeting the sense available to it, to allow the sensible to emerge as a ‘collectively held plurality’ (p. 499), always accompanied by the possibility of its dissolution and renewal (natality).

Though in these cases the views are often vague and scattered, this is not the result of what Alvesson and Jonsson (2022) neatly call ‘organization dischronization’, a state they associate with the continued presence of an institutional form in which, nevertheless, divergent meanings co-habit loosely, sometimes in confusion and even in tension. In sensus communis the ambiguity is the subject of explicit, organized attention, and sense is made only as a felt consequence of its leaving its own boundaries, so to speak, and going ‘visiting’.

Discussion and Implications

Sensemaking theory, we argue, assumes that sense emerges from ordering experience in ways that satisfy the practical needs and interests agreed upon within particular practice worlds. It is a reasonable assumption which has sustained elaborate and often refined revisions from multiple studies. In addition, however, and what has been overlooked, sense can also emerge outside, though in the company of, the practice world. It is here that philosophy comes to the fore; the kind of philosophy advocated by Wittgenstein (2001), and which more recently has been championed by Alva Noë (2023), which dedicates itself to providing ‘perspicuous representations’ of practices. Under scrutiny, these displays have the effect of disabling the naturalness of habits, norms and values otherwise taken for granted. They also reveal the limits to normative theoretical commitments dedicated to posing and responding to the question of how better to enact, embody and extend practice. The sense being made through display is an unhomely, speculative form of sense animated by perplexity and curiosity. Being considered in relation to sensemaking theory, our particular concern has been to investigate how to organize for this non-pragmatic, non-instrumental sense, and here we turn to Hannah Arendt. She conceptualizes the organizational experience of this philosophical display of practices as belonging to a sensus communis, a holding in common and without prejudice of the myriad ways in which humans relate to the world of their making, and to continually re-present those ways.

Organizationally, sensus communis is secured through the form of a polis, in contrast to the oikos or household. Though Arendt has no wish to restore the Ancient Greek city states from whose operations she takes these terms, she uses them as a provocative reminder of what she diagnoses as a steady decline in the presence of a public space, a space produced through the interaction of disinterested citizens engaged in thoughtful consideration of the alternatives to and possibilities for their everyday lives. It is a space in which the practical problems of inquiry yield to the unanswerable questions of meaning. What emerges is a community of sense organized through collective exposure to a plurality of opinions and judgements expressed for and in themselves, rather than their possible utility for and allegiance to practical interests. Sensus communis expands the criteria of sense, encouraging in sensemaking, we argue, a willingness to continually re-evaluate existing orders of sense (what Arendt called natality, or beginning again). Rather than a struggle toward coherent, agreed-upon perspectives that eliminate disturbance and ‘noise’, sensemaking comes to generate and cherish them. Not because they are demonstrably useful, but because without them, the thoughtful following of rules of practice give way to thoughtless falling in with instruction, command and demand. Through sensus communis sense is enlarged as humans develop a sense for a plurality in other perspectives, other views, other potentials, without attempting to then act and organize these into already existing practices (Degryse, 2011). Without plurality and natality, sensemaking dries up into repetition without difference.

An Arendtian perspective has the potential to induce a paradigm shift with several implications for sensemaking theory. It suggests that sensemaking scholars should study how sense is grounded in an expansion of perspectives – not to arrive at answers, but to encourage potential. Arendt points to conditions and mechanisms that may enable and foster this kind of community sense, sensitizing sensemaking scholars to sense that transcends the necessities of a practice world. According to her, the development of sensus communis transpires in the plurality and natality of the polis (rather than the confines of the oikos) through thoughtful acting out of order, as distinct from managed (labour) or authorized (work) forms of making dedicated to establishing and furthering practical projects. Building on these ideas, and given increasing interest in understanding and counteracting worker alienation, also within sensemaking theory itself (Browning & McNamee, 2012; Manolchev, 2020), sensemaking scholars may wish to examine precisely how polis-like forms (i.e. realms of interest-free exchange and forming of opinions) can be organized to support thoughtful acting out of order and the development of sensus communis.

One obvious place for us to look for the organization of the polis is in higher education, which ostensibly has as its goal to enrich society by cultivating plurality and critical thinking (regardless of practical consequences) rather than to strive for consensus and certainty (Dunne, 2015). And yet, as existing sensemaking studies highlight (Degn, 2015, 2018; Mills, Weatherbee, & Colwell, 2006), it has largely succumbed to encroaching instrumental demands of preparing students for lucrative, useful careers (often measured by employment rates and mean income levels), attracting financial resources (grant size) and performing well in institution rankings for research and teaching.

If it does not question its basic assumptions, sensemaking theory limits its awareness of sense to an imbricated blend of habituated routines and skills and theory-backed knowledge claims. There is in sensemaking theory an acclamation of the practical and intellectual (a hybrid form of labour and work) which, no matter how impressive the resulting practices, incurs an organizational ignorance, notably in relation to the growing senselessness of a world increasingly ordered through the technological imperative of ceaseless productivity (cf. Burrell, 1997). Invoking Arendt’s sensus communis punctures this practical imperative by putting it on display, giving it air, becoming perplexed as to why and how it could ever amount to an imperative, given that no matter how plausible, any necessity is always shadowed by alternatives (Canovan, 1992).

It is here that we flip sensemaking theory on its head: the sensus communis is a setting where the coherency and organization of everyday life becomes subject to unsettling discontinuities in the service of sense itself. To be clear, we are not arguing against studying processes of ordering, adjustment, prediction and organizational resilience. But for sensemaking to focus exclusively on such matters risks hollowing out meaning and reinforcing the notion that little meaning is to be found outside of the practical, knowledgeable concerns of particular practice worlds – thereby contributing to the senselessness of a world circumscribed by cycles of what Arendt calls labour (producing for biological necessities) and work (authorizing and legitimating particular interests in the furtherance of those necessities).

Beyond sensemaking theory, our argument has implications for practice and process theory, as well as communicative constitution of organization (CCO) studies. For example, recent process and practice studies have shown the virtue of organizing flexibly, such as when Reinecke and Lawrence (2023) advocate the development of ‘ambitemporality’ to allow organizations to operate effectively across different global settings, with differing constituencies and projects. Questioning the prevailing order of a single temporality exposes practices to different ways to sense time, enhancing its operational capacity. Under the aegis of sensus communis, however, the construction of an organizational problem as one of surfacing and reconciling multiplicities is itself under display. Perhaps the problem is not one of operating effectively in different global settings, but the organized colonizing ambition to do so? Likewise, Ackermann et al. (2023) make a compelling case for carefully designed participatory architectures to better manage multiple points of view across a plethora of practices to better foster a common direction while accepting diversity. Here, too, the naturalness of consensus and agreement can be considered anew: are these preferable to agonistic experiences, and why? Can harmony not be seeded in discord and tragedy? These may appear as beside the point because they are impractical, unanswerable questions, but that is precisely how they expand the criteria of sense.

In CCO, the concern has been with studying organizations as processual entities (Schoeneborn et al., 2019) constituted in reiterating communicative acts that struggle continually for both meaning and authority (Kuhn, 2008): how and by whom is sense being authored and through which structural routines and manoeuvres? The recent turn in CCO toward the adverbial quality of organizationality has meant that the communicative acts being studied are often of a nascent, elusive form. Using the term ‘organizational’ allows studies to be undertaken using a low threshold for what constitutes an organization. This allows for studies of looser, partial organizational forms, in which materiality, spatiality and communication cohere almost atmospherically. Here sense takes form in perpetual, dynamic oscillations of language and structure instituted through variable agreements and commitments (Vásquez & Schoeneborn, 2018). Arendt’s sensus communis might almost be such an organizational form. If so, because of the distinction it makes between, on the one hand, communication through the issuing of perspicuous representations, and on the other hand, the pragmatic and theoretical communications of practice worlds, it enriches the concept of organizationality. Moreover, it also brings to the fore the question of an accompanying need for the presence of a polis-like interior with a high threshold of commitment and distinction that protects and encourages the incipient and open generation of meaning attributed to organizationality. It is, then, not just a case of lowering the threshold of organization, but of accepting the mutual dependency between different intensities of organizing and different organizational forms. Above all, what Arendt’s sensus communis offers any study of sensemaking is an awareness that sense grounds its own terms and it does so not in perception, behaviour, control, certainty or truth, but in the continual organization of its own unsettlement.

Finally, the Arendt-inspired view of sensemaking that we propose somewhat counters studies that argue that the field might extend its concern to the full range of senses and their distribution through practices (e.g. de Rond et al., 2019; Meziani & Cabantous, 2020). While emotion and affect are integral to sensus communis, Arendt is adamant that plurality and natality emerge from active and conscious thought; to make sense requires conscious and repeated efforts at questioning the existing agreements of practice, which extends to critique of prevailing atmospheres and affective desires, such as the feelings of novelty and intensity being lauded through what Reckwitz (2017) calls the ‘creativity dispositif’. As such, and following ethnomethodological studies of communicative interaction (Bencherki, Sergi, Cooren, & Vásquez, 2021; Neyland & Whittle, 2018), we have argued that authorizing this struggle means questioning whether open and fluid experiences of sensing cross the threshold into sense. The turn toward flowing, morphing and varied sensory materialities in continual states of chance becoming, toward what Galloway (2022) calls the ‘gerund sublime’, will not save us from reason’s force. Indeed, on Arendt’s terms, equating the rhizomic immediacy of sensory experience to a state of ‘making sense’ exposes organizational life to politically dubious contagions that corrode rather than enhance our capacity to make meaning anew.

Arendt’s commitment to thought, however, also elicits criticism. Why, asks Judith Butler (2015), is sensus communis only possible within a refined, exceptional organizational form, polis, and why is the oikos a lesser space dedicated to the needs of metabolism (labour, subsistence) and normative (work, institutions of civilization) order? Moreover, is Arendt not simply replaying the well-worn distinction between rough bodily life and refined human thought, the kind of distinction that so irritated Dewey and against which pragmatism (and by implication sensemaking) marshalled its democratic impetus so effectively, and which, as Lechte (2018) suggests, implies that autonomy is only possible in a clearing reserved for those living within distinctly western political frameworks?

Yet, as Butler (2015) readily admits, Arendt’s interleaving of action into labour and work makes for a subtle topographical distinction between the oikos and polis: they do not constitute distinct mental constructions (idealizations of space) or material locations (structures with boundaries). Arendt desires the polis to be distinct from labour and work (it is pre-cultural), without however asserting it being naturally determining (it remains anthropological, and so organized). The polis is a topographical space being written into action by thought, but not to then assert the primacy of an innate, inner autonomy to each sensemaking subject, but instead to provoke an exemplary, performative and organized constitution of mutual recognition. The topography (what Marshall (2010) equates to a spatial concentration of judgements) emerges not because the space has been delineated by formal boundaries, or membership qualifications, but from repeated attempts at narrating experience again and again. Arendt is not arguing that the polis creates freedom (nor the oikos unfreedom). As much as it fosters action, the polis is constituted by it: it is only as people appear in public and act as a community that the polis is being performed (Arendt, 1970, p. 52). To reiterate somewhat, the polis emerges as ‘the organization of people as it arises out of acting and speaking together’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 198). The borders of the polis are not fixed (sanctified) thresholds (which would be to make them more like temples, and so spaces of work), but opportunities for appearing publicly, first one way, then another, then another. It is the performative aspect that exposes the polis to the discord from which novelty can grow. ‘Action, moreover, no matter its specific content, always establishes relationships and therefore has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 190), including those of class, ethnicity, race, gender and wealth: sensus communis organizes a community of sense, neither more particular, nor more essential than this.