From hero to villain to hero: Making experience sensible through embodied narrative sensemaking

By A. Cunliffe, Christine Coupland. 2012

417 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article aims to make a contribution to the literature by addressing an undertheorized aspect of sensemaking: its embodied narrative nature. We do so by integrating a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective of narrative and storytelling with a documentary case taken from a filmed tour of a sports team to illustrate the process of sensemaking around a specific event. We argue that we make our lives, ourselves and our experience ‘sensible’ in embodied interpretations and interactions with others. We suggest this occurs within contested, embedded, narrative performances in which we try to construct sensible and plausible accounts that are responsive to the moment and to retrospective and anticipatory narratives.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/84242d6c4c14b2bc66ebf20c036bc693809b7006

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Gender Studies

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Simplexity: Sensemaking, organizing and storytelling for our time (2012, background): “Cunliffe and Coupland (2012) show how sensemaking and organizing occurs not in the abstract but is embodied, and how felt experiences and associated emotions and sensory knowing are integral to it.”
Sensemaking in Organizations: Taking Stock and Moving Forward (2014, background): “Taking a key moment from the film, the authors show that a central actor’s sensemaking “is not necessarily an information-processing activity but draws on an intuitive and informed feeling in his body” (Cunliffe & Coupland, 2012, p. 77).”
Ethical leadership, moral equity judgments, and discretionary workplace behavior (2013, background): “Ethical leaders also engage in sensemaking processes through the narratives contained in spontaneous and on-going communications (Cunliffe and Coupland, 2012) regarding issues such as organizational values, ethics policies, and general ethical expectations.”
Transformational leadership, psychological empowerment, and the moderating role of mechanistic–organic contexts (2014, background): “Leader narratives are an integral component of sensemaking processes (Cunliffe & Coupland, 2012; Weick, 2012).”
‘Oh, was that “experiential learning”?!’ Spaces, synergies and surprises with Kolb’s learning cycle (2016, background): “We think the popularity of EL reflects something of a ‘turn to experience’ in a range of disciplines, including management studies (Cunliffe and Coupland, 2011; Sanders, 1982), management education (Strati, 2007; Yakhlef, 2010), phenomenological psychology (Langdridge, 2007; Smith et al., 2009),…”
Sensemaking and sensegiving stories of jazz leadership (2012, background): “Second, we contribute to the body of work on sensegiving and storytelling, demonstrating that the sensegiving power of stories may be restricted because stories, by their very nature, are contested (see Cunliffe and Coupland, 2012 for further discussion of the contested nature of stories).”