Acting Intuition into Sense: How Film Crews Make Sense with Embodied Ways of Knowing

Abstract

This study contributes to a holistic understanding of sensemaking by going beyond the mind-body dualism. To do so, we focus analytically on a phenomenon that operates at the nexus of mind and body: intuition. By observing four film crews, we unpack how people act their intuition into sense-that is, how they transform, through action, an initial sense (intuition) that is tacit, intimate, and complex into one that is publicly displayed, simpler, and ordered (i.e., a developed sense). Our model identifies two sensemaking trajectories, each of which involves several bodily actions (e.g., displaying feelings, working hands-on, speaking assertively). These actions enable intuition to express a facet of itself and acquire new properties. This study makes three important contributions. First, it develops the holistic-relational character of sensemaking by locating it in the relations among multiple loci (cognition, language, body, and materiality) rather than in each one disjunctively. Second, it theorizes embodied sensemaking as a transformative process entailing a rich repertoire of bodily actions. Third, it extends sensemaking research by attending to the physicality and materiality of language in embodied sensemaking.

Lived experiences of inequalities in the USA: a sense-making perspective

“…Inequality experiences, therefore, consisted of their minds, bodies and the physical-social environment they encountered. They made sense of their experiences immanently through their perceptions, intuition and interactions with other actors (Cunliffe and Coupland, 2011;Meziani and Cabantous, 2020). Hence, descriptions of inequalities did not exist in participants' minds but in the space between them and the world as they interacted with it (Dreyfus, 1991).…”

Common Sense, New Sense or Non‐Sense? A Critical Discursive Perspective on Power in Collective Sensemaking

“…While a discursive perspective such as the one taken here is obviously interested in the texts we read and utterances we hear, the ‘raw materials’ of discursive sensemaking can also be multimodal and include elements such as images, colour, music and even smell (Hollerer et al, 2019; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001; Van Leeuwen, 2008). In this view, sensemaking is fully ‘embodied’ in that all manner of ‘bodily senses and feelings’ are involved, not just what we see or hear (Meziani and Cabantous, 2020, p. 1387). The important point for our purposes here is that language furnishes us with the categories and meaning systems through which a selection of these embodied cues is turned into shared meanings.…”

“On and off screen: Women's work in the screen industries”

“…In management studies and work life research, the early 2000s saw an increased interest in focusing and exploring the working conditions in the screening industries, alongside the growing interest for working experiences in what often referred to as the creative industries (see, e.g., Blair, 2001; Delmestri et al., 2005; Ebbers & Wijnberg, 2009; French, 2020; Jones & Pringle, 2015; Meziani & Cabantous, 2020; Soila‐Wadman, 2003; Sörensen & Villadsen, 2014). This strand has also included a certain focus on how film can be used as a tool for instruction on how to exert leadership (see, e.g., Bell & Sinclair, 2016).…”