Understanding the Interfaces of Sensemaking, Discourse, and Materiality During an E-Innovation

• In Event: Organizational Change Communication: Materializing the Immaterial

Abstract

As Communication Studies seeks to understand and predict the construction and spreading of shared meaning among social agents, it must engage with the sophisticated mental world of interactants. This brings empirical challenges, particularly when the researchers seek to understand the more nuanced layers of communication using diverse overlapping theories or inductively derive a holistic and integrated theoretical model of reality. This paper presents findings from a study of the interface between sensemaking, discourse, and materiality during the introduction of an e-innovation in the health sector in New Zealand. The study sought to reveal the role material objects play in the construction and transfer of the meaning of social actions and the way interaction is reflected in social agents’ discourse. The results reveal how material objects like forms, noticeboards, booklets, and the features of an electronic system act as boundary objects (Star & Grieseman, 1989), satisfying the information requirements of management and workers, and mediate the sense both make of their daily practice.

Star, S. L. & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, translations' and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387-420.

Author

• Maryam Tehrani, University of Canterburry