Abstract
The purpose of this study is to explore the way stories of emotional events in organizations are related to strategic change. Two propositions introduce the apparently paradoxical situation whereby it is presumed that managers take notice of organizational events, developments or trends (OEDTs) in the stories told by other organizational members and that they frame these as strategic issues, while at the same time their own articulated sensemaking directs the attention of their staff and fellow-managers towards OEDTs already noticed, thus giving special prominence to just these issues for storytelling. Weick (1995) calls this enactment, i.e. managers themselves produce part of the environment that faces them. In the light of this, the social sharing of emotion, i.e. the recounting of emotional work events, is introduced as a theoretical concept for studying strategic change in organizations. A triangulation of qualitative and quantitative data collected in a small business venture enabled the matching of interviews, diaries and experience sampling with the special requirements of a study of social sharing at the workplace. The results indicated that various discrete emotions helped to determine the work events that were socially shared and the people with whom they were shared, both inside and outside the organization. This sharing behavior proved to have an effect on managers when it came to noting certain OEDTs. The results allowed for the refining and adjusting of the original propositions to create a local theory indicating a bipolar process of strategic change.