abstract: Municipal courtrooms are brimming with a variety of positive and negative emotions from defendants who are primarily encountering the criminal justice system for the first time. Municipal court judges and bailiffs must work together and find ways to communicate important information about courtroom processes to up to 70-120 defendants a day. This dissertation investigates how municipal court judges and bailiffs from two municipal courthouses respond to three organizational challenges associated with emotion--defendant confusion about courtroom processes, handling high caseloads while treating defendants as customers of the court, and managing the serious and tedious emotional moods of the courtroom environment. Using qualitative methods of observation and informal and formal interviews, this dissertation analyzes how emotion cycles between judges and bailiffs help give sense to and break sense of defendants while simultaneously helping them navigate the challenges of their work. Findings detail the nature of work in municipal court--explaining the challenges associated with emotion that judges and bailiffs face on a daily basis. The data also describes the emotional roles that judges and bailiffs employ in the courtroom. The judges' emotional roles include tension relievers, order enforcers, and care takers. Bailiffs' emotional roles comprise rule enforcers, toxin handlers, and do gooders. The heart of the analysis explores how judges and bailiffs give sense to defendants when unexpected situations manifest in the courtroom and break sense of defendants who hold incorrect or less favored beliefs about courtroom procedures. The emotional displays and responses of judges, bailiffs, primary defendants (defendants before the judge), and third party defendants (those watching in the audience) enable sensegiving and sensebreaking to occur. The emotion cycles allow courtroom staff to impact the sensemaking process of defendants in a fast and efficient manner. Theoretical implications include extensions of emotion cycle research through a consideration of the displays and responses of primary agents, intermediate agents, and primary recipients of emotional displays. Practical implications describe how specific training practices and space for employee discussion could enhance the workplace wellness of judges and bailiffs. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Communication 2012

A growing number of organizations developing complex innovation projects face the dilemma that complexity demands more stability, resulting in increased sensemaking efforts, whilst innovation requires instability which encourages the organization to breakdown meaning. The aim of this study is to shed light on the simultaneous need for a strong sensemaking process and a breaking down in meaning in complex innovation projects by analyzing the collective sensemaking process through a storytelling lens. By conducting an explorative case study, we investigated a long-term development project in the Swedish defense industry. The qualitative study is based upon ten in-depth interviews with technical experts occupying key positions in the investigated project (JAS39 Gripen E-series development). We followed a process study approach to investigate the dynamic attributes and effects of a changing dominant story on the sensemaking process of project sub-teams. We propose that the dual attributes of arising dominating narratives allow sub- collectives to "escape" the dangerous downward spiral of a collapsing sensemaking process, as they enable individuals with cause maps contradictory to an organization's dominant story to remain in action. The acceptance of temporal relaxed stability can therefore be seen as an important step in the creation of radical innovation.

It has become the norm for organisations in many industrial sectors to constantly operate in dynamic, uncertain and challenging business environments. Technology, regulations, global economy, changing political actions and international conditions are all changing rapidly, creating dynamic business conditions for organisations to understand, react to and thus survive. The Oil and Gas (O&G) sector which is the backbone of the economic growth for many countries in the Middle East region is not an exception to the real world of business filled with uncertainties. The construction of meaning or sensemaking is a prerequisite management skill for complex problem solving and decision-making for survival in today’s increasingly dynamic business environments. Current literature on sensemaking tends to focus on senior management’s role in the process, overlooking the critical role middle management teams play in the construction of meaning. Further, although sensemaking literature illustrates the influence of sensegiving and sensebreaking on sensemaking, there is limited empirical research in existing literature on how middle management teams apply sensegiving and sensebreaking to influence the process. Finally, this research fills a gap in sensemaking research in developing countries to decolonise Western-based research and ensure that local culture and ideologies are taken into account. In particular, it provides important data for the O&G sector in Bahrain, which is important for the Middle East region. Therefore, this research investigates how middle management teams use sensemaking to understand complex problems and how they apply sensegiving and sensebreaking to influence the sensemaking process in Bahrain’s O&G sector. The data was gathered using a qualitative approach using in-depth semi-structured interviews, middle management team meeting observations and operational documents review. The findings include seven themes and 26 sub-themes are visualised in a four-step sensemaking process framework. This framework also illustrates the sensemaking triggers and properties, as well as the influences and sources of information middle management teams adopt to construct meaning in dynamic O&G environments. Further, the four-step sensemaking process framework incorporates the different sensegiving and sensebreaking techniques embraced. This research extends the existing sensemaking literature by providing a descriptive empirical framework to better understand middle management team sensemaking, sensegiving and sensebreaking in dynamic O&G environments. This four-step sensemaking process framework gives middle management teams a way to organise information related to events in an objective manner, enabling them to develop effective reactions to a fast-changing environment. The framework also offers human resource practitioners a platform to assess and develop middle management sensemaking skills.

La thèse intitulée dans sa version originale ‘Strengthening weak organizations’ a pour équivalent ‘La force du faible : Une perspective organisationnelle’ en français. Elle a pour objet d’élucider comment une organisation faible et vulnérable peut se transformer en une organisation forte et pérenne. En intégrant l’environnement interne à l’environnement externe, la question telle qu’elle est formulée n’a jamais été traitée à ce jour dans la littérature en management. Cette recherche vise à explorer ce vide selon différentes perspectives afin de renforcer la robustesse et la pertinence des résultats proposés. L’étude se compose précisément de quatre parties dont la particularité est de répondre à la même question via trois designs de recherche. La partie #1 analyse le sujet de recherche selon une posture d’extériorité. La partie #2 et la partie #3 l’étudient selon une posture d’intériorité. La partie #4 combine les deux postures antérieures par l’intermédiaire d’une métatriangulation. L’ensemble de la thèse gravite autour du terme underdog qui signifie sommairement, dans le cas présent, une organisation faible et vulnérable. Il est essentiel de noter que chaque partie est distincte des autres au niveau du rendu final mais qu’aucune partie n’aurait pu voir le jour en l’état sans l’apport des autres. / This thesis entitled ‘Strengthening weak organizations’ translates to ‘La force du faible: Une perspective organisationnelle’ in French. It is intended to elucidate how a weak and vulnerable organization can transform into a strong and secure organization. By integrating the internal environment with the external environment, the question as formulated has never been investigated in the management literature before. This research aims to explore this void from different perspectives in order to beef up the robustness and relevance of the proposed findings. Specifically, the study consists of four parts whose distinctiveness lies in the examination of the same question using three research designs. Part #1 analyzes the topic from an outside perspective. Part #2 and Part #3 study the topic from an inside perspective. Part #4 combines the two previous stances by using metatriangulation. The whole thesis revolves around the term underdog which summarily equates herein to a weak and vulnerable organization. It is essential to note that each part is written as a standalone paper, but no part would have been possible without the contribution of the others.