Abstract
Organizational life unfolds amid persistent ambiguity. Events rarely announce their own significance, early signals are equivocal rather than decisive, and identities, values, and outcomes must be actively interpreted before they become consequential. Although organizational scholars have long recognized sensemaking and sensegiving as central organizational processes (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991; Maitlis & Lawrence, 2007; Weick, 1995), these insights are dispersed across domains, often examined in isolation and at a single level of analysis. As a result, we still lack integrative process theories that explain how ambiguous signals like early indicators of failure, aspirational organization cultures, emerging identities, or fleeting moments of meaning, travel across actors and audiences to become stabilized, contested, or strategically decoupled as shared organizational realities, particularly under conditions of unequal power. This symposium brings together four empirical projects that place these dispersed process insights into conversation, advancing a process-relational view of organizational meaning. Through a diverse set of methodological approaches including computational text analysis, rich qualitative induction, and mixed-method case study, the papers trace meaning-making dynamics across diverse contexts including entrepreneurial ecosystems, growing startups, and established organizations. Collectively, they examine how meaning is actively constructed through selective sharing, discursive labeling, analogical reasoning, and cultural translation. They reveal the insight that meaning does not simply emerge from events but is negotiated across time, audiences, and interpretive arenas, which consequently brings profound implications for legitimacy, learning, identity, and organizational futures. As such, this symposium advances understanding of how organizational realities are made and why shared understanding remains one of organizations’ most persistent challenges.
Identity Heist: How Startups Construct Identity Through Analogies
Author: Kara Luo; Stanford University
Stories I Tell: The Meaning(fulness) of a Moment
Author: Spencer Harrison; INSEAD
Author: Patricia Caulfield Dahm; University of Kansas
Author: Njoke Thomas; Boston College
Author: Kylie Rochford; The University of Utah
Catalyzing Organizational Culture Change: A Culture Cycle Approach
Author: Megan Chan; Stockholm School of Economics
From Failure Signals to Shared Meaning: The Discursive Construction of Organizational Failure
Author: Jessica J. Santana; UC Santa Barbara