The Micro-Foundations of Meaning Making in Organizational Contexts

This symposium examines the cognitive, behavioural, affective and material mechanisms that individuals use to create meanings inside and outside organizations, and how these mechanisms facilitate the transfer of meanings across levels of analysis. This focus resonates with an increasing interest in the micro-foundations of organizational processes in different domains, such as strategy, institutional theory, sensemaking and organizational capabilities, as well as in multi-level theorizing. Four presenters will describe meaning making processes and mechanisms. These presentations examine the roles in meaning making of imagination, physical structures, category taken-for-grantedness, and passion narratives. The symposium will follow an innovative findings first format in which presenters devote the first half of their presentation to discussing their fresh findings, focusing on what they discovered, and the second half of their presentation discussing interesting implications for theory and future research....