Abstract The present study develops the knowledge of industrial customer relationships by examining how multinational corporations (MNCs) make sense of global customer relationships. This study also discusses how individuals make sense of global customer relationships inside of MNC networks. Sensemaking is thus viewed as both an individual action and an organizational-level action. In this research, individual sensemaking views are combined into organizational-level understanding to offer a multilevel approach to both relationships and networks. The empirical study is a qualitative single-case study that focuses on three global customer relationships of an MNC. This research describes the sensemade views of the selected customer relationships and explores how these views are created. The discussed customer relationships are global by nature, they cross national borders, and they involve the episodic and discontinuous project level as well as global customer relationships that are managed at a more continuous organizational level, and these relationships are intertwined over time. The sensemaking of customer relationships is intertwined with relationship development. This research creates an understanding of sensemaking and operationalizes the concept by showing the different types of sensemaking and exploring how individuals make sense. This research also identifies primary sensemakers whose acting and sensemaking have contributed to developing the MNC view of global customer relationships and connected the multiple different views. This research shows that within a single corporation, multiple different understandings of the customer as well as of the type and status of customer relationship can exist. This research describes how the sensemaking process inside of a network functions and how the MNC sensemade views of the customer relationship are formed from multiple individual views. In addition, the definition of an MNC is widened in this research, and an MNC is defined as an internal network that is formed around its customer relationships. Customers constitute a key driving force of internal cooperation and create the environment in which individuals strive to make sense of their own network and of the customers with whom they are operating. / Tiivistelmä Tässä väitöskirjassa keskitytään teollisiin asiakassuhteisiin tutkimalla, miten monikansallinen yritys luo ymmärrystä globaaleista asiakassuhteistaan. Lisäksi työssä keskitytään siihen, miten yrityksen sisäisessä verkostossa työskentelevät yksilöt luovat omaa ymmärrystään globaaleista asiakassuhteista. Ymmärryksen luomista tutkitaan siis sekä yksilö- että organisaatiotason toimintana. Monikansallisessa yrityksessä eri yksilöiden näkemykset yhdistyvät organisaatiotason ymmärrykseksi asiakkaasta, minkä vuoksi suhteita ja verkostoja tutkitaan usealla analyysitasolla. Tutkimuksen empiirinen osuus toteutetaan laadullisena, yhden tapauksen tapaustutkimuksena, joka keskittyy monikansallisen yrityksen kolmeen asiakassuhteeseen. Nämä asiakassuhteet ovat luonteeltaan globaaleja ja ylittävät maantieteelliset rajat. Organisaatiotason asiakassuhde toimittajan ja asiakkaan välillä voidaan kuvata jatkuvaksi, vaikka asiakassuhde käytännössä koostuukin useista epäjatkuvista projekteista eri maantieteellisten ja teknologisten yksiköiden välillä. Organisaatio- ja projektitason suhteet kietoutuvat toisiinsa suhteen kehittyessä. Ymmärryksen luominen asiakkaasta on jatkuva prosessi ja se tapahtuu samanaikaisesti asiakassuhteen kehittymisen kanssa. Tässä tutkimuksessa kuvataan, kuinka asiakkaista luodaan ymmärrystä organisaatio- ja yksilötasolla. Tutkimuksessa tunnistetaan keskeisiä henkilöitä, joiden toiminta rakentaa monikansallisen yrityksen ymmärrystä globaaleista asiakassuhteista ja yhdistää eri yksilöiden näkemyksiä. Tutkimuksessa havaitaan, että yhden organisaation sisällä voi olla lukuisia eri ymmärryksiä asiakassuhteesta ja sen tilasta. Tutkimus kuvaakin, kuinka ymmärrystä luodaan organisaation sisäisessä verkostossa ja miten organisaatiotason ymmärrys globaaleista asiakassuhteista muodostuu useiden eri yksilöiden käsityksistä. Lisäksi tässä tutkimuksessa monikansallisen yrityksen määritelmää laajennetaan kuvaamalla se sisäiseksi verkostoksi, joka rakentuu asiakassuhteiden ympärille. Asiakas on tärkein ohjaava voima sisäisessä yhteistyössä. Toimiessaan yrityksen sisäisessä verkostossa, yksilöt pyrkivät luomaan ymmärrystä omasta ympäröivästä verkostostaan sekä asiakkaista, joiden kanssa he toimivat.

This study focuses on how the internal communication within Region Uppsala and their administrations has been conducted and perceived during 2017 as the organisation went from being the county of Uppsala to becoming Region Uppsala. The goal and the research questions have been to understand how internal stakeholders interpret the strategic change communication from the management of Region Uppsala and how the management also interpret their own communication. The study relies on three main questions which has been - What goals have the management of Region Uppsala had with the communication during the change? - How has the management of Region Uppsala interpreted the communication during the change? - How has internal stakeholder interpreted the communication during the change? The study uses Laurie K. Lewis (2011) studies of organisational change as a theoretical framework while the study also has a perspective on communication as sense making and constitutive of the organisation, which has helped to clarify the meaning of strategic communication. The methods being used has been qualitative interviews as well as a qualitative content analysis of printed material. The results from the empirical data shows that it is within the interpretation of communication that meaning is created and that meaning can differentiate depending on the interpretation. This study contributes to the field of strategic communication and strategic communication during change.

While research has identified the practices that successful school leaders use, the effectiveness of those practices rests on leaders enacting them with great contextual sensitivity. Research literature suggests that leaders should be thoughtful, discerning, careful and dexterous with regard to how they lead. This thesis presents a qualitative, multi-case study of how five elementary school principals lead the improvement of mathematics achievement in their schools. Taking the perspective that leadership is a sensemaking praxis, principals’ perceptions and interpretations of their contexts were explored with the goal of better understanding why they lead the way they do. The evidence revealed that the actions of the principals in this study were the product of their contextually-influenced, idiosyncratic sensemaking. This study demonstrates the value of using the sensemaking praxis perspective as a lens for understanding the enactment of educational leadership. Further, this study has practical implications for principal training, policy implementation, and school improvement.

Depuis quelques années, de nombreuses interrogations persistent concernant la mise en œuvre du dispositif de la responsabilité sociale des entreprises (RSE) dans les petites et moyennes entreprises (PME) et notamment sur le rôle des structures d’accompagnement dans le développement des pratiques de RSE en PME (Allet, 2017). Pour ces raisons et parce que la RSE devient aujourd’hui une pratique importante pour les PME, l’objectif de cette thèse est non seulement de mettre en évidence le rôle des structures d’accompagnement dans l’implication des PME dans les pratiques de RSE, mais également de comprendre le processus de création de sens et d’engagement responsable du dirigeant de PME ayant bénéficié d’une sensibilisation à la RSE. La notion de RSE est abordée sous l’angle du sensemaking, permettant ainsi de comprendre les mécanismes mises en œuvre pour appréhender la vision idiosyncrasique du dirigeant dans le processus de l’engagement responsable. A la suite de trois études réalisées, des données ont été recueillies auprès des incubateurs, entrepreneurs et dirigeants de PME ayant bénéficié d’un accompagnement à la création d’entreprise. Les résultats mettent en évidence que malgré les diversités d’entrées et les différentes façons de l’aborder, il existe une sensibilisation formelle et dissociée de la RSE dans les structures d’incubation. Ainsi, l’entrepreneur (futur dirigeant de PME) sensibilisé pendant cette période d’incubation est susceptible de développer dans ses pratiques futures, un engagement formel et intégré. Ces mêmes résultats laissent à croire que, même si l’incubateur joue un rôle de facilitateur dans l’engagement RSE du dirigeant, les croyances et les valeurs (variable culture) de ce dernier sont déterminant de son comportement responsable. / In recent years, many questions have been raised concerning the implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and in particular the role of business incubators in the development of CSR practices. In SMEs (Allet, 2017).For these reasons, and because CSR is now becoming an important practice for SMEs, the objective of this thesis is not only to highlight the role of business incubators in the involvement of SMEs in CSR practices, but also to understand the process of sensemaking and CSR involvement of SME manager who have benefited from CSR awareness. The CSR notion is approached from the angle of Sensemaking, allowing to understand the mechanisms used to understand the idiosyncratic vision of the SME manager in the process of CSR commitment. Following three studies, data were collected from incubators, entrepreneurs and managers of SMEs who benefited from support for business start-ups. The results show that despite the diversity of inputs and the different ways of approaching it, there is a formal and dissociated sensitization of CSR in business incubators structures. As such, an entrepreneur (future SME manager) who is sensitized during the incubation period is likely to develop in his future practices, a formal and integrated commitment of CSR. Furthermore, the results suggest that, even if the business incubator plays a facilitating role in the CSR commitment of SME manager, his beliefs and values (cultural variable) are determinant of his responsible behavior.

I introduce the concept of Territory Building – a social media application approach that intends to guide and support sufferers of rare diseases in the process of “making sense” of online information. Similar to approaches that emphasize the sharing of web resources – such as social bookmarking sites - user interaction in regards to web resources is at the centre of this concept. The idea of Territory Building is built on a geographical metaphor, guiding a community in assembling a “virtual territory”, consisting of existing web resources related to the community’s domain of interest, along with user-generated information pertaining to these resources. As users build up this Territory, claiming new resources for it, charting out the place of this information in the context of the existing Territory, finally colonizing these resources by interacting, discussing, rating the information, they participte in a process that should help both the invidual and the community as a whole in “making sense” of this information. The “added value” generated through the contributions and engagement of the userbase as a whole becomes more accessible to the individual, and individuals in turn have a more immediate means of contributing to the existing knowledge. Paying close attention to the needs of the intended target group, I designed and implemented a prototype web-application based on the Territory Building approach, and deployed it for use by persons suffering from the rare disease Trigeminal Neuralgia. I observed how this audience made use of the approach, and how implementation details were received. 80 users registered in the prototype system, 31 web resources were contributed by users. The findings suggest that the Territory Building concept can address a genuine need in regards to assembling and engaging with available online information, and that patients are interested in making use of this approach for the purpose of disseminating information resources to their peers. Lessons learned also indicate that the approach can potentially support those affected by rare diseases in “making sense” of the information available to them, and that means of accessing and creating user-generated knowledge in the context of existing web-resources can increase the potential of users to benefit from the collaborative knowledge-generating processes of their peers.

Parents of seriously ill children are charged with making complicated medical decisions, and many of those decisions are made during their children’s hospitalizations. As medical staff seek to support parents, it is important for them to understand what resources parents are drawing upon for decision-making. This project explored parental decision-making by examining the following research questions: RQ1: What resources do parents draw upon to make medical decisions for their seriously ill children? RQ2: How do parents enact their spiritual or religious frameworks in clinical settings when faced with medical decisions for their seriously ill children? Methods of research included ethnographic observation of a pediatric palliative care team and semi-structured interviews with twenty parents and grandparents of seriously ill children. Analysis of the interview data brought out three main themes: the role of spirituality for parents of seriously ill children, the ways parents perceive spiritual conversations with hospital personnel, and the role of spirituality for parents making difficult decisions. A case study is presented as an exemplar of complex decision-making, and the author offers her personal narratives of parenting a seriously ill child. The author suggests new directions for practitioners based on a constitutive approach to communication in which practitioners and parents work together to build towards an understanding of the child’s illness. The findings from this study contribute to the current understanding of families with seriously ill children and should shape medical education in a way that will benefit the next generation of professional care providers as they seek to meet the needs of children and their families.

Abstract With this study, I provide insights into international opportunities in the context of early internationalising firms and entrepreneurial selling. I study the changing meanings of international opportunities and the mechanisms of international opportunity construction that entrepreneurs narrate when making sense of these opportunities. I contribute to the international entrepreneurship literature that takes an integrative and processual approach to entrepreneuring and international opportunity. I view international opportunities as socially, temporally and spatially situated. By drawing from the socially situated cognition approach, I direct analytical focus to the contextual, changing interpretations of international opportunity and the dynamic process of international opportunity construction. I take a narrative constructionist approach to this study. My empirical material consists of five entrepreneurs’ narratives. They describe past, present and future international opportunities in the context of ongoing early international entry or expansion and entrepreneurial selling in international business-to-business sales negotiation. With this study, I contribute to an in-depth, processual understanding of international opportunities. I identify multiple meanings of international opportunities as product, service, business model, relationship, and/or foreign market opportunities. By describing transformations between these manifestations of international opportunity and the interactions that produce them across diverse intersubjective spaces, I depict journeys of articulated representations of international opportunities becoming concrete opportunities. I find dichotomies within and between different meanings of international opportunities and related actions and interactions. Specialisation versus flexibility, entrepreneurs’ involvement versus professional salespeople’s involvement, and replicated versus contextually adapted processes are problematised with respect to different manifestations of international opportunity. / Tiivistelmä Tällä tutkimuksella lisään ymmärrystä kansainvälisistä mahdollisuuksista yrityksen varhaisen kansainvälistymisen ja yrittäjämäisen myynnin kontekstissa. Tutkin, miten yrittäjät merkityksellistävät kerronnassaan kansainvälisiä mahdolli-suuksia sekä niiden muutosta ja muodostamisen mekanismeja. Kontribuoin tutkimuksellani kansainvälisen yrittäjyyden kirjallisuuteen, joka käsittelee yrittämistä ja kansainvälisiä mahdollisuuksia integroivasta prosessuaalisesta näkökulmasta. Tutkimuksessani tarkastelen kansainvälisiä mahdollisuuksia sosiaalisesti, ajallisesti ja tilallisesti sijoittuneina. Hyödynnän sosiaalisesti sijoittuneen kognition lähestymistapaa tuodakseni analyyttisen fokuksen kansainvälisten mahdollisuuksien kontekstuaalisiin ja muuttuviin tulkintoihin sekä niiden muodostamisen dynaamiseen prosessiin. Lähestyn tutkimusta narratiivisen konstruktionismin näkökulmasta. Empiirinen aineistoni koostuu viiden yrittäjän narratiiveista. He kertovat menneistä, nykyisistä ja tulevista kansainvälisistä mahdollisuuksista meneillään olevan kansainvälisille markkinoille menon tai niillä laajenemisen sekä yritystenvälisissä kansainvälisissä myyntineuvotteluissa tapahtuvan yrittäjämäisen myynnin kontekstissa. Tutkimuksellani lisään ymmärrystä kansainvälisten mahdollisuuksien prosessuaalisesta luonteesta. Tunnistan kansainvälisten mahdollisuuksien erilaisia merkityksiä tuotteena, palveluna, liiketoimintamallina, suhteena ja/tai kansainvä-lisenä markkinana. Kuvaan muutoksia näiden eri manifestaatioiden ja niitä tuottavan vuorovaikutuksen välillä halki erilaisten subjektienvälisten tilojen. Näin esitän kansainvälisten mahdollisuuksien artikuloitujen kuvausten matkaa konkreettisiksi mahdollisuuksiksi. Havaitsen narratiiveissa ristiriitoja kansainvälisten mahdollisuuksien eri merkitysten sekä niihin liittyvän toiminnan ja vuorovaikutuksen sisällä ja välillä. Erikoistuminen ja joustavuus, yrittäjän ja ammattimyyjän osallisuus sekä prosessin toistaminen ja mukauttaminen problematisoidaan suhteessa kansainvälisten mahdollisuuksien eri manifestaatioihin.

Digital technologies have profoundly reshaped many industries in the past years and we are continuously witnessing the creation of new ventures designing and serving entirely new markets. At the heart of these initiatives lies decisions to act, take risk and pursue ideas in the form of entrepreneurial opportunities. Much of the research on the journey from ideas to market has advanced from the idea that entrepreneurial agency emerges at the nexus of individuals and opportunities. In most academic work, opportunities are either assumed to be exogenous to the individual or socially constructed. Despite many valuable contributions in the field, the construct as it has traditionally been used only accounts for and explains opportunities once they have been realized. Hence, the established perspectives fall short in informing our understanding of how individuals actually act and make decisions that lead up to the identification and exploitation of opportunities that lack tangible premises. The question is therefore, how do we define and understand entrepreneurial opportunities before they have been realized and how do we make the construct empirically operable? The present study challenges and extends the conventional views of entrepreneurial opportunities by investigating what they are and how they emerge and evolve over time. By drawing upon in-depth qualitative data from a longitudinal study of the new venture creation process of a digital TV and film production firm, the thesis provides a reconceptualization of the opportunity construct. External enablers, a new venture idea, a business model and opportunity confidence are suggested as components that clarify what aspiring entrepreneurs actually mean when they talk about opportunities. Departing from these components, the thesis provides a framework describing opportunity development as an iterative process evolving through modes of sensemaking, sensegiving and sensebreaking. This framework adds to entrepreneurial process studies by extending the individual-opportunity nexus to include the actions and interactions between the entrepreneurs and the external environment in which they operate. The results lay a foundation for future theorizing and empirical inquiry into the early stages of new venture creation.

Une entreprise innove pour affronter un marché en constante évolution, augmenter ses marges de profitabilité et assurer sa pérennité. Créer une organisation innovante est donc un objectif tout à fait justifier. Or, la création d’une telle organisation constitue un projet ambitieux et de grande envergure. Par où et par quoi commencer? Pour envisager la création d’une organisation innovante, l’approche par essaimage représenterait une avenue intéressante. C’est un principe par lequel une petite unité innovante est créée dans une entreprise et qui, par propagation, convertit peu à peu les autres unités. Ainsi, dans les entreprises œuvrant en développement de produits (DP), il est suggéré de s’attaquer d’abord au système de DP, lequel transforme essentiellement les besoins du client en produits finaux. En outre, le système de DP renferme le système de développement de concepts (DC), regroupant les activités en amont du DP, transformant les besoins du client en concept de produit. Le concept de produit constitue l’initiateur des phases en aval du DP menant à la création du produit final. Or, le système de DC représenterait un levier d’amplification du système de DP et il renfermerait un potentiel énorme d’amélioration. Agir positivement sur la performance en DC conduirait à des répercussions positives sur la performance globale du DP. À cet égard, plusieurs scientifiques ont développé différents outils de conception afin d’aider les acteurs du DP à mieux performer en DC, considéré somme toute comme un élément difficile du DP. Mais ces acteurs du DP sont-ils vraiment enclins à utiliser lesdits outils? La présente recherche offre une meilleure compréhension des obstacles associés au DC et propose une méthodologie utilisant un modèle systémique du DP comme artéfact de réification du DC, dans une séance encourageant la participation des acteurs du DP de manière à élever le niveau de sens qu’ils accordent au DC. Plus ce niveau de sens est élevé, plus l’engagement des acteurs envers le DC s’accentuerait. Un engagement plus grand des acteurs du DP à performer en DC laisse présager une plus grande ouverture à s’approprier les outils de conception, une augmentation de la propension à innover et une meilleure performance globale en DP étant donné les liens qui unissent le DC au DP et au final, à l’organisation.

Web services have become a prominent paradigm for building of both inter and intra-enterprise business processes. These processes are composed from existing Web services based on defined requirements. Standards and techniques have been developed to aid in the dynamic composition of services. However, these approaches are limited when it comes to the handling of unexpected events. This dissertation presents the results of experiments that investigated numerous problems related to Web service composition processes. Based on the investigation, a fault taxonomy was formulated. Faults were grouped into three broad categories, each representing a distinct problem stage. The investigation into faults gave rise to the issue of fault recovery and continued process execution. A list of requirements for self-healing Web service composition was identified, while a new self-healing cycle was exploited based on the MAPE cycle (Monitor, Analyzer, Planner, Executive). The proposed self-healing composition cycle consists of three modules: Plan Generation Module, Plan Execution Module and Failure Analysis Module. The plan execution module, consisting of the execution and run-time monitoring phases, and the failure analysis module, consisting of the analysis and sensemaking phases, were found to be vital to self-healing Web service composition. Self healing Web service composition and the goal of self-healing were achieved through the use of Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning systems. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Computer Science / unrestricted