Rethinking Sensemaking: Critiques and Lines of Flight

Despite—or perhaps precisely because of—Weick’s complex and careful theorizing, the sensemaking perspective has become increasingly fragmented. Scholars have interpreted and applied the concept in divergent ways: is sensemaking primarily cognitive or social, retrospective or prospective? Are its outcomes coherence, action, identity, or simply ongoing ambiguity? These tensions reflect the evolution of Weick’s own thinking and deeper ambiguities within the concept itself. As Sandberg and Tsoukas (2015) note, unless the core assumptions and foundations of sensemaking are systematically reviewed and critically scrutinized, its further development will remain diffuse. Without such scrutiny, there is a risk that sensemaking collapses into conventional cognitive models of interpretation, ill-suited to address the fluid and emergent character of organizational life. In this chapter, we respond to that call by reviewing prominent critiques of the sensemaking perspective. These critiques do not reject sensemaking but expose its limits, blind spots, and under-theorized dimensions. From this review, four themes emerge: the meaning of sense, the treatment of process and time, the role of power, and the ‘missing body’. Beneath these lie deeper concerns: persistent dualisms and implicit logocentrism. Together, these themes open promising lines of flight for rethinking sensemaking as an evolving, contested, and philosophically rich terrain.