Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze current literature on critical sensemaking (CSM) to assess its significance and potential for understanding the role of agency in management and organizational studies. Design/methodology/approach The analysis involves an examination of a selection of 51 applied studies that cite, draw on and contribute to CSM, to assess the challenges and potential of utilizing CSM. Findings The paper reveals the range of organizational issues that this work has been grappling with; the unique insights that CSM has revealed in the study of management and organizations; and some of the challenges and promises of CSM for studying agency in context. This sets up discussion of organizational issues and insights provided by CSM to reveal its potential in dealing with issues of agency in organizations. The sheer scope of CSM studies indicates that it has relevance for a range of management researchers, including those interested in behavior at work, theories of organization, leadership and crisis management, diversity management, emotion, ethics and justice, and many more. Research limitations/implications The main focus is restricted to providing a working knowledge of CSM rather than other approaches to agency. Practical implications The paper outlines the challenges and potential for applying the CSM theory. Social implications The paper reveals the range of problem-solving issues that CSM studies have been applied to. Originality/value This is the first major review of the challenges and potential of applying CSM; concluding with a discussion of its strengths and limitations and providing a summary of insights for future work.

Suvi von Becker is a business Consultant at the Consultant company Talentree. She is a Master of Science in Technology who has expertise in building quality management systems for different kinds of organizations and businesses. She is also a coach and is now doing her PhD at University of Eastern Finland at the Department of Business. She is interested in areas such as value co-creation and participative development projects in companies.

PurposeAdopting the critical sensemaking (CSM) lens to the micro-level interaction between leader and employees, the article offers a theoretically informed example of leading with soft power and positive emotions that blurs boundaries in democratic organisations.Design/methodology/approachThe research methodology involves videography and interpretive analysis of video-recorded interactions that combines focused ethnography with video analysis. The analysis focuses on face-to-face meeting interactions between a leader and employees in a small service firm.FindingsThe findings illustrate how restoring the sense of the democratic organisation is an accumulating and complex phenomenon where explicit and implicit organisational rules and changing identity positions are enacted by constructing affective loyalties, moral and reflex emotions that serve as soft power capacities helping the leader and employees to enact meanings attached to a democratic rather than hierarchical organisation.Practical implicationsThe article provides new insight for human resources practitioners and leaders who want to build resilient organisations and pay attention to shared, distributed and relational leadership practices, co-creative work and collective decision-making processes.Originality/valueThe power explored in previous sensemaking studies has been power over, which is most often associated with the negative aspects of power, such as domination and suppression, in the pursuit of specific performance. The applications of videography method linking ethnography and interpretive analysis of video-recorded interactions are still rare in organisation studies.

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In our article, we present an analysis of work meeting interactions based on Hubert Hermans’ dialogical self theory and Erving Goffman’s frame analysis. Goffman’s approach has similarities with positioning theory and discursive psychology, which have a theoretical link to the dialogical self theory. In our analysis of work meetings, we identified three different frames in which participants discussed the acquisition of a new online text messaging service for the firm for which they worked. These frames were financial, pragmatic–instrumental, and social, all of which constructed different perspectives of the technological object and its use in daily work. Finally, the theoretical and methodological differences of dialogical self theory and frame analysis are outlined. The contribution of this article is two-fold; it illustrates how dialogical self theory and frame analysis provides, first, complementary approaches to social interaction and, second, how they differ in their orientation to the study of social situations.