Taking off the rose-colored glasses: the influence of crises on employee relationship management

Purpose The central aim of this research is to deepen the analysis of the influence that crises have on employee relations by using the stakeholder relationship management model (SRM) to analyze organizational employee relationship management (OERM).Design/methodology/approach This study uses a questionnaire distributed in two organizations (UK-based public sector and private sector) that were experiencing a crisis at the time of data collection. Respondents identified whether they believed the organization was in crisis, if they defined it as in crisis classified what type of crisis it was, and then responded to questions about their relationship to the organization, the organization's post crisis stability and their own behavioral intentions.FindingsThe findings verify the applicability of the SRM in employee relations with three critical findings: (1) employees with higher income in the private sector were significantly less likely to believe their organization was in crisis; (2) the more ambiguous the blame for the crisis, the greater the damage on the relationship between organizations and employees; and (3) collective sensemaking in organizations is essential, but less likely when a crisis has damaged the relationship between employees and organizations.Originality/value In the last 40 years of Employee Relations, the role of crisis in influencing OERM has not been meaningfully explored in the journal. Therefore, the piece makes an original contribution.

Sensemaking of University and District Stakeholders in Implementing a Teacher Residency Policy in Louisiana

A growing body of research has identified teacher residency’s potentials for improving and sustaining preservice teacher learning through a stronger district–university partnership. Drawing on sensemaking perspectives on education policy implementation, this qualitative case study examines how a variety of university and district stakeholders make sense of and implement a state-mandated teacher residency in Louisiana. Findings reveal that stakeholders are primarily making sense of the residency in isolation, leading to incoherent understandings and varied implementation practices. Opportunities to improve stakeholders’ collective sensemaking and collaborative implementation and to optimize the benefits and potentials of teacher residency partnerships are discussed. This study has implications for teacher education policy implementation and continuous inquiry into the complexities of teacher preparation.

Elementary students learning science in an MR environment by constructing liminal blends through action on props

Purpose This paper aims to show how collective embodiment with physical objects (i.e. props) support young children’s learning through the construction of liminal blends that merge physical, virtual and conceptual resources in a mixed-reality (MR) environment.. Design/methodology/approach Building on Science through Technology Enhanced Play (STEP), we apply the Learning in Embodied Activity Framework to further explore how liminal blends can help us understand learning within MR environments. Twenty-two students from a mixed first- and second-grade classroom participated in a seven-part activity sequence in the STEP environment. The authors applied interaction analysis to analyze how student’s actions performed with the physical objects helped them to construct liminal blends that allowed key concepts to be made visible and shared for collective sensemaking. Findings The authors found that conceptually productive liminal blends occurred when students constructed connections between the resources in the MR environment and coordinated their embodiment with props to represent new understandings. Originality/value This study concludes with the implications for how the design of MR environment and teachers’ facilitation in MR environment supports students in constructing liminal blends and their understanding of complex science phenomena.

Can Workplace Tracking Ever Empower? Collective Sensemaking for the Responsible Use of Sensor Data at Work

People are increasingly subject to the tracking of data about them at their workplaces. Sensor tracking is used by organizations to generate data on the movement and interaction of their employees to monitor and manage workers, and yet this data also poses significant risks to individual employees who may face harms from such data, and from data errors, to their job security or pay as a result of such analyses. Working with a large hospital, we developed a set of intervention strategies to enable what we call "collective sensemaking" describing worker contestation of sensor tracking data. We did this by participating in the sensor data science team, analyzing data on badges that employees wore over a two-week period, and then bringing the results back to the employees through a series of participatory workshops. We found three key aspects of collective sensemaking important for understanding data from the perspectives of stakeholders: 1) data shadows for tempering possibilities for design with the realities of data tracking; 2) data transducers for converting our assumptions about sensor tracking, and 3) data power for eliciting worker inclusivity and participation. We argue that researchers face what Dourish (2019) called the "legitimacy trap" when designing with large datasets and that research about work should commit to complementing data-driven studies with in-depth insights to make them useful for all stakeholders as a corrective to the underlying power imbalance that tracked workers face.

Competition as sense making

At the root of the conceptual difficulties in determining the competitive structures that underpin markets is the fact that firms and their product offerings can be described along a large number of attributes, and so be viewed as more or less similar depending on the attributes used for comparison. Our chapter exposes the multi-level cognitive embeddedness of competition among restaurants in New York City. Using field interviews and archival data on restaurant evaluations, categories, pricing, and menus, we employ qualitative counterfactual analysis to address fundamental issues concerning competitive boundaries that cut across categorical, organizational, and transactional perspectives of competition. We argue that conceptualizations of competition are only loosely coupled across different perspectives, and we contend that competitive judgments are better construed as a collective sensemaking process where different actors interact and competitive boundaries are constantly defined, contested, and redefined. Thus, we propose a heuristic framework for understanding the cognitive embeddedness of competition as part of a broader sensemaking perspective of competition.