Sensemaking as a Racialized Implementation Process

• In Event: Predictable Patterns: An Approach to Bridging Policy-Implementations Gaps in Service of Educational Equity

Abstract

Objective
This paper is about how sensemaking is a racialized implementation process. I describe how implementers’ racialized sensemaking can guide them to make sense of and respond to new policies in racialized ways that maintain the dominant culture and (re)produce systemic racism.

Theoretical Framework and Methods
This conceptual paper theorizes the role that race plays in sensemaking in general and sensemaking as an implementation process more specifically. I leverage literature on sensemaking, policy implementation, and race in organizations to explicate how racialized schemas result in racialized policy outcomes.

Results
Scholars sometimes utilize the process of sensemaking (Weick, 1995) to explain how implementers’ existing schemas (i.e., mental maps) lead them to interpret and adapt new policies in ways that do not stray far from their current practice (Coburn, 2004; Cohen & Ball, 1990). I expand on this by further unpacking the sensemaking process. I describe how implementers’ racialized schemas drive all aspects of the sensemaking process andresults in predictable racialized implementation outcomes that perpetuate systemic racism.

For example, new policies, particularly those that are unexpected, confusing, or asking for large shifts from people’s current practice, often trigger periods of sensemaking where implementers work to make meaning of new policies to get back to a sense of normalcy. During this sensemaking process, implementers’ socially-constructed, racialized schemas bias their retrospective gaze and determine which cues they notice, bracket, and pull from the ongoing flow of information; which labels are plausible and preferred to assign to those cues; and what action to take in response the policy, all while protecting the implementer’s identity. Simultaneously, implementers make and give sense together, intentionally or unintentionally using their racialized schemas to shape each other’s sensemaking. Implementers’ racialized schemas also have cause-effect relationships inscribed into them that guide them to respond in some ways and not others. Thus, existing racialized schemas can be barriers to changing racist practices, because, if implementers were not practicing a particular way before, they likely do not have existing schemas available to make sense of new policies in the ways reformers hope.

Utilizing a case of school discipline policy, I elaborate those predictable patterns and how they can be disrupted by influencing the collective sensemaking and sensing process during implementation as well as creating policy designs whose language and content reflect its social justice goals. For instance, including implementers who do not typically shape the sensemaking process, such as traditionally marginalized implementers and knowledgeable others, can disrupt the process (Wong, 2019). The sense made with their involvement will be different than the sense made without their voices.

Significance
Policy designers, researchers, and others can also leverage the framework detailed in this paper to support more just and equitable implementation. The responsibility for disrupting this predictable pattern of policy implementation is not solely on the shoulders of implementers.

Authors

• Kara S. Finnigan, University of Michigan

• Christina C. Leal, University of Rochester