Organizing,changing and learning: A sensemaking perspective on an ongoing ‘soap story’

Abstract

This article adopts a sensemaking perspective to explore changing and learning in an organization that has been making the same product for more than 175 years. Using an insider/outsider methodology, this case provides evidence of dynamic, ongoing processes of changing and learning across time, albeit without formal change intervention. We conclude that organizational becoming, learning and change are found in the juxtaposing of order and disorder, frames of past learning and cues of present action. This balance between the past and emerging present is advanced as a way of seeing organizational learning, which is sensitive to process and time.

Keywords

Becoming changing learning insider/outsider sensemaking

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