Inquiry, Meaning, and Organizing: A Pragmatist Take on Sensemaking

Like thinking, sensemaking can be understood as an adaptive tool—an evolutionary capacity of the human animal. To survive in changing environments, organisms must adjust; today’s rapidly shifting, interconnected world requires conceptual tools that are equally adaptive. This chapter argues that American pragmatism offers a powerful framework for rethinking and sharpening the sensemaking tool. The sensemaking perspective has often been criticized for privileging cognition while neglecting the embodied, emotional, and situated dimensions of organizational life. Addressing this limitation requires reconfiguring how we understand organizing—challenging entrenched dualisms such as mind/body, thought/action, and individual/society, as well as the reified categories that flow from them (e.g., ‘the organization’, ‘the manager’). American pragmatism provides rich resources for this task. Peirce grounded meaning in practical consequences, James articulated a radically processual view of life, Dewey dissolved the separation of thinking and doing through his theory of inquiry, and Mead developed a relational account of self, society, and meaning. Together, they offer a non-dualistic, processual, and socially situated understanding of sensemaking. In particular, Dewey’s theory of inquiry and Mead’s account of meaning-making refine and extend sensemaking as a conceptual tool, opening new possibilities for understanding and engaging with organizational life.