<p>This study takes a mixed-method, micro-approach to understanding the internal sensemaking and understanding of employee-directed CSR given the potentially changing nature of such efforts. In particular, this study explores how organizational members (i.e., employees) construct knowledge (via their sensemaking) of organizational CSR and primarily those employee-focused.I take a communicative and discursive approach in viewing CSR as a socially constructed phenomenon (Schultz, Castello, & Morsing, 2013) and (social) movement within organizations (Georgallis, 2017), and thus contextual and unique to organizational sites. Findings revealed D/discourses of CSR from employee perceptions at the micro level and reflected in macro level document messaging. Through this, I found various paradoxes of CSR from the expectations versus reality of what it means for organizations to be “responsible.” At the individual level, employee sensemaking around CSR came to light—particularly in highlighting how these stakeholders rationalize, perceive, and identify with such efforts, especially those targeting or benefiting employees. In presenting a multi-method study, this dissertation contributes to research on the micro-foundations and limited internal perspective of CSR and provides important pragmatic implications given the timely and relevant nature of this work.</p>

Background: Usage of temporaries in contemporary business is increasing due to demand for agile and efficient way of doing business. This trend has been rising especially when turning into 21stcentury. Growing group of temporary workers in different industries being mobile and under different circumstances than regular full-time workers. One professional group working with clients in temporal terms is consultants hired as project managers to lead customer projects in project-based organizations. These project managers switch context between businesses and try to adapt as soon as possible to new environments. The paper uses concept of liminality as a metaphor to describe these passages between projects which starts identity work and sensemaking process in individual. Purpose of Thesis:  The purpose of this thesis was to study how project managers cope with liminality using sensemaking and identity work as a point of view. Methodology: This is a qualitative cross-sectional study conducted through semi-structured interviews in order to gather primary data for further analysis and findings. The empirical data was gathered from a Finnish professional service company and consisted ten interviews of consultant project managers. Findings: The study presents a four-field matrix forming project manager archetypes as embodiments of variation how consultant project managers deal with liminality. Although, the group of people in the sample can be perceived homogeneous, it turned out that it contained heterogeneous characteristics regarding the research scope. The main differences found are illustrated through technical or social approach toward work, and whether sensemaking processes occurred in individual or collective manner. Therefore, the study was able to create four different form of archetypes: the realist, the connector, the performer and the moderator.

Early research on motivation draws connections to what are now understood as aspects of sensemaking, however research does not explicitly draw a connection to the theory of sensemaking itself. Therefore, the sensemaking perspective is applied to the motivational theory of self determination in order to gain a deeper understanding of how and why motivation develops through sensemaking. This is accomplished through a qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews for empirical data collection, followed by thematic analysis. The research concludes with a representation of the sequential process that demonstrates the interconnectedness of sensemaking and motivation, demonstrating the connection between environmental change, meaning creation and internalization, need satisfaction, motivation and action. Consequently, this research provides insight to the co-existence of sensemaking and motivation, facilitating opportunities to reach a more complete understanding of how individual motivation actually exists and develops.

Complex social problems are at the forefront of our awareness. We are witnessing intensifying political, social and environmental challenges and waning confidence in our ability to engineer solutions. We are also seeing a proliferation of large scale, multi-agency interventions that seek change at the level of systems, and through which actors pursue adaptive learning as a means to develop effective solutions. Proponents assert that the prediction and control on which conventional program design and evaluation are based are not available under complex conditions. They propose instead that learning through experience in a program’s own context can create more responsive, impactful and sustainable interventions. These ideas offer a potentially transformative opportunity. However, they need to be complemented with a better understanding of implementation - the ‘ways of doing things’ that bring them to life. This study focused on developmental evaluation as an example of an adaptive learning (AL) approach for the development of innovative social interventions. The study was informed by ‘sensemaking’ theories and research in organizational learning, knowledge mobilization and program evaluation. Through an exploratory lens and a mixed methods design, this study sheds light on the role of specialized intermediaries in an AL process; how the role is performed in practice; and what this implies for adaptive learning in the domain of social interventions. The study documents how an intermediary can help actors navigate recognized challenges of developing interventions under complex and dynamic conditions. The findings have implications for how an AL process is understood and implemented. They provide an empirical contribution to an emerging field of study on the design of AL systems, to support future research and real-world practice as AL approaches become mainstream.

Thesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-Smith / Across the nation, most states are implementing a new set of standards- and accountability-based reforms: the Common Core State Standards and their accompanying assessments. Unfortunately, the perspectives of school-based educators are largely missing from policy and implementation decisions about the Common Core. To address some of the gaps in previous research, the purpose of this dissertation—a comparative case study of two middle schools on the East Coast of the United States—was to describe and analyze school-based educators’ perceptions of and responses to the Common Core and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) Exam. Data analysis revealed that educators in the two schools generally worked from an inquiry stance on teaching, learning, and schooling (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) in that they collectively and critically analyzed the intentions of educational policy and practice based in part on their beliefs about student-centered, constructivist teaching and learning. Consistent with this perspective, they made sense of the Common Core and SBAC based on the degree of alignment they perceived between their own educational values and beliefs, on the one hand, and the values and beliefs that animated the policies, on the other hand, which I conceptualized as “principled sensemaking.” How the educators actually implemented the Common Core and SBAC was the result of the intersection of their principled sensemaking of these standards-based reforms and the degree of agency they had over policy implementation. I termed this type of response to policy “principled implementation.” Four types of principled implementation were identified: principled adoption, principled neglect, principled compliance, and principled resistance. New understandings of school-based educators’ unique, critical, and nuanced perceptions of the Common Core and SBAC and how they believe the Common Core and SBAC influence teaching and learning have the capacity to inform decisions about the future of the Common Core in schools, and contributes to a broader understanding of how school-based educators take up and respond to standards- and accountability-based reforms. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Thesis advisor: Diana C. Pullin / This dissertation examines how district- and school-level leaders' understanding of achievement gaps influences the work of leadership in addressing educational inequities and broadening students' opportunity to learn. While the reporting of disaggregated data by student subgroup confirms that achievement gaps exist, reports from high-stakes testing fail to provide district- and school-level leaders with the diagnostic data needed to identify key factors inhibiting student performance. Yet, identifying and understanding factors hindering student performance is critical knowledge for leaders to cultivate as they work to address elements within their school or district that may need to change if student learning is to improve. Results from this single case study in a diverse urban district illuminate how district- and school-level leaders can challenge and support their community as they work collectively to confront and address issues related to disparities in student performance. Drawing on previous research, which introduced the cognitive shift as a unit of analysis for studying the work of leadership, this study identifies shifts in thinking that district- and school-level leaders attempted to prompt in others, as well as the framing strategies district- and school-level leaders used in their attempts to prompt identified shifts in thinking. The study found that district- and school-level leaders attempted to prompt a common set of cognitive shifts using a range of framing strategies. Furthermore, the study found a correlation between leaders' use of a particular of framing strategy and their level of leadership (i.e., district or school), with common patterns of strategy use unique to each level of leadership. Additionally, distinct patterns of strategy use also emerged for the leaders of the district's top performing schools which differed from the patterns of strategy use that emerged for the leaders of the district's lower performing schools. These findings suggest that certain framing strategies may be more effective than others. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

Thesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-Smith / A new phenomenon in teacher education, referred to as new graduate schools of education, or nGSEs (Cochran-Smith, et al., 2016), is gaining traction in the U.S. Profoundly different in program structures and arrangements from most university programs, these non-university affiliated teacher education programs have emerged during the current era of standards- and accountability-based reform. However, limited empirical research has examined how nGSEs conceptualize and enact teaching and learning and how these programs might signal a shift in the field of teacher education. This dissertation attempts to address this empirical lacuna through an in-depth qualitative case study of the first such program, located within High Tech High (HTH), a charter school network. The purpose of this study is to understand the HTH program’s core beliefs and behaviors, as well as the organization’s relationship with its institutional environment (i.e. the broader educational policy, funding, and field-level contexts). Utilizing institutional analysis and sensemaking theory, I argue that teacher education programming at HTH drew on a core logic of constructivism, which informed the school’s instructional work of teaching and learning and its organizational design. Through this constructivist approach, teacher education faculty and students were able to “practice with theory,” bridging the theory-practice dichotomy and informing a relational and actionable conception of knowledge. Finally, HTH took an active stance towards its institutional environment, developing organizational networks to both retain organizational fidelity to its mission and also enact change in accordance with this mission. My analysis has implications for teacher education, organizational analysis, and education policy. Because constructivism dually informed instruction and organizational structures, HTH offers new possibilities for the design of education organizations. The centrality of constructivist logics allowed for both remarkable consistency in values, beliefs, and goals across the organization as well as considerable agency for individual actors. The agency of HTH personnel, paired with the program’s “active stance” towards environmental forces, such as funders and field-level partners, informed how education leaders’ design choices simultaneously supported individual agency and organizational mission as well as ground-up approaches to change. Lastly, the case of HTH indicates that the nGSE phenomenon models new organizational approaches to teacher education, which can challenge and expand the ways in which we understand teaching and learning for educators. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

As the signs of the impending ecological crisis become more apparent, the issue of sustainability comes to the forefront in many studies. However, there appears to be a substantial lack of focus on the individual level which can be considered a major shortcoming due to the fact that sustainability can only be obtained through joint efforts of each and every person. A significant part of sustainability work lies on the shoulders of companies and organisations as they are not only legally obliged to reduce the environmental footprint of their activities but also bear a huge responsibility in the face of the whole society. As employees often carry the main burden when it comes to implementing new initiatives, we decided to gain a better understanding of their perspective. In the presented research we explore the sensemaking of employees in relation to sustainability in order to determine their role as followers in company’s or organisation’s sustainability work. Our ambition for the research was to contribute to closing the gap in existing studies by suggesting a theoretical model which would describe various roles which employees enact when faced with sustainability issues. We carried out a qualitative study based on an inductive approach and case study research method. For the purpose of the study we conducted interviews and analysed data looking for recurrent themes, patterns and more importantly variations in the ways employees make sense of sustainability. As a result, we presented four roles which employees enact in the context of sustainability, namely movers and shakers, happy campers, truth-seekers and distant observers, and provided the description of main distinctive characteristics inherent in these roles.

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The aims of this research are to identify the elements of leader sensemaking which both promote and hinder mindset change. I Use a qualitative, ethnographic active participant research approach in three organisations and semi-structured interviews with leaders from other organisations. My research identifies the inter-related elements of leader sensemaking of an organisational change methodology which is influenced in its approach by postmodern thinking and which challenges current mindsets about leadership and organisation. By identifying and establishing the interrelationship between nine key elements of leader sensemaking my research provides academics and practitioners with a basis for facilitating leader mindset change. I also identify further research opportunities around issues of sustaining individual mindset change and embedding this in organisational culture, which I have identified as a result of my research. Nine key elements of sensemaking are identified and used to understand the sensemaking process of leaders. I identify the relationship between the elements and the impact they can have in both promoting and inhibiting mindset change. My research finds that current leader thinking about organisations, leadership and organisational change is largely modernist in perspective. When presented with a methodology that is influenced by a postmodern perspective all the elements shape and influence the sense the leaders make of the challenge to their mindset and their decision on whether or not to engage with the methodology. These elements are inter-related, each is essential but insufficient in isolation, and each influences, and is influenced by, all the others. My research explores the relationship between the sensemaking elements in a range of practical organisational settings. In so doing it provides insight into how those wishing to influence the mindsets of others can understand and recognise the dynamic of sensemaking, whilst highlighting that changing leader mindsets is not something that has easy ‘how to’ answers or which can be achieved by following simplistic cause and effect step models that are prevalent in the current literature which many practitioners are familiar with.