JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Summary Through a wide‐ranging critical review of relevant publications, we explore and articulate what constitutes the sensemaking perspective in organization studies, as well as its range of applications and limitations. More specifically, we argue that sensemaking in organizations has been seen as consisting of specific episodes, is triggered by ambiguous events, occurs through specific processes, generates specific outcomes, and is influenced by several situational factors. Furthermore, we clarify the application range of the sensemaking perspective and identify, as well as account for, the types and aspects of organizational sensemaking that have been under‐researched. We critically discuss the criticism that the sensemaking perspective has received so far and selectively expand on it. Finally, we identify the main limitations of the sensemaking perspective, which, if tackled, will advance it: the neglect of prospective sensemaking, the exclusive focus on disruptive episodes at the expense of more mundane forms of sensemaking implicated in routine activities, the ambiguous status of enactment, the conflation of first‐order and second‐order sensemaking, and the lack of proper attention to embodied sensemaking. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

It is increasingly recognized that what makes a theory interesting and influential is that it challenges our assumptions in some significant way. However, established ways for arriving at research questions mean spotting or constructing gaps in existing theories rather than challenging their assumptions. We propose problematization as a methodology for identifying and challenging assumptions underlying existing literature and, based on that, formulating research questions that are likely to lead to more influential theories.

There is an increasing concern that management theories are not relevant to practice. In this article we contend that the overall problem is that most management theories are unable to capture the logic of practice because they are developed within the framework of scientific rationality. We elaborate practical rationality as an alternative framework and show how it enables development of theories that grasp the logic of practice and, thus, are more relevant to management practice.

No abstract