| The relationship between activity and communication has long been acknowledged in the study of organizations. However, theoretical trends that privileged the psychological over the social deemphasized both activity and communication as primary variables of study. But, recent work in the area of organizational sensemaking reasserted the importance of activity and communication, where both activity and talk are central to the sensemaking process. Verbs play a specific role in sensemaking by capturing the dynamic aspect of the sensemaking process. However, their role has never been investigated within the context of organizational sensemaking discourse.This study found that participants' organizational sensemaking produced discursive profiles that reflected their engagement with local, situated activities. Specifically, the verbs employed in sensemaking discourses demonstrated both transient and sustained responsiveness to participant engagement with activities and exposure to organizational events. The study provided novel insights into the relationship between activity and communication. Discourse, through use of predicates and the nouns that accompany them, either directly (representation) or indirectly (indication) reflected participant engagement with different types of organizational activities. This finding furthers our understanding of the role of verbs and nouns in the discursive practices of organizational sensemaking, and enhances our understanding of the activity-communication relationship. These results also have implications for understanding mundane organizational settings, where activities appear to be subtle, mediated, and sometimes unobservable.This exploratory case study investigated the sensemaking discourses of members of a software development organization (SDO). An SDO is an example of a mundane organizational context, which is a rare setting for organizational sensemaking studies. Analysis was guided by three research questions: (1) what discursive strategies do participants employ in the communicative accounts of their activities (2) do these discursive strategies differ between participants and, (3) do these strategies change over time, and how? A nine-month sample of participant interviews, organizational documents, and communication network data were culled from an archive of organizational communication data. Discourse analysis was grounded in case grammar theory, a theoretical and methodological framework for the categorization of verbs, and was facilitated by the use of a novel software application. |
