abstract An updated analysis of the Bhopal disaster suggests that problems of abduction, awareness, reliability, and certainty were more serious than was first thought. Expanded analysis shows that the tight coupling between cognition and action, normally associated with enacted sensemaking, broke down at Bhopal. The breakdowns included a low standard of plausibility, minimal doubt, infrequent updating of both mental models and current hunches, and mindless action. The modest enactment that did occur prolonged rather than shortened the crisis.

The contributions to this special issue focus on links among sensemaking, organizing, and storytelling. They are re-examined in terms of to what the authors pay attention, with what, and for what. In pursuit of linkages, authors attend to accounts of consulting failure, hearings about the recent financial crisis, life history storytelling by elite actors, conflict in a rugby team on tour in Australia, and recurring stories told by jazz musicians. With analyses of dominant stories, discursive devices, life stories, documentaries, and oral tradition, these authors aim for a deeper understanding of order, constraint, conflict, legitimation, embodiment, and distributed improvisation. An assessment of these efforts shows how they deepen, extend, and consolidate our understanding of interpretive work.

Ambiguity may lead us to insert abstractions into our experience that create a greater number of unanticipated, unintended consequences. When people move closer to the flux of ambiguity, they work to make sense of it. High reliability organizations react to ambiguity by increasing it momentarily. To increase ambiguity is to grasp more of the situation, to refrain from simplifications, and to strive for a workable level of ambiguity. This argument is developed through a focus on connotations of ambiguity, assumptions for organizing around ambiguity, and implications for practice. To grasp ambiguity is to adopt an attitude of wisdom.

Abstract In this essay, I reflect on the intellectual influences that led to the genesis of the Social Psychology of Organizing and assess the way forward. I stress that the Social Psychology aspired to provide an outline of an organizational epistemology. I particularly focus on the interplay between experience and understanding, highlighting the following features: self‐validating prophecy, partiality toward similarity, ambivalence between belief and doubt, and understanding as ongoing accomplishment. I conclude with a discussion of the three papers published in this Special issue.

This paper provides an overview of liminality theory and its relevance to the study of sensemaking in and about crises. It sketches a model of liminal metastability as a way of thinking about disrupted equilibrium within psychosocial systems. Liminal metastability presupposes a reality composed of a complex array of forms of process, and hence calls for a relational process ontology. In developing the concept of liminal metastability, the paper discusses and critiques Weick's account of sensemaking in crisis. It also discusses the accounts of disturbed equilibrium at play in cognitive dissonance theory and Freud's theory of disruptions to the pleasure and reality principles. Liminal metastability presupposes a reality composed of a complex array of forms of process, and hence calls for a relational process ontology. In developing the concept of liminal metastability, the paper discusses and critiques Weick’s account of sensemaking in crisis. It also discusses the accounts of disturbed equilibrium at play in cognitive dissonance theory and Freud’s theory of disruptions to the pleasure and reality principles. Although much systems theory remains mechanistic and non-processual, we will see how the concept of autopoiesis, informed by second-order cybernetics, makes sensemaking core to reflection on crises, and pushes towards a liminality-theoretic orientation. Also, from a historical perspective, Freudian theory can be viewed as adding new complexity by taking seriously Fechner’s notion of a psychic system (always embedded in social systems) proper to the ‘subject in crisis’. Freud in turn influenced Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory, a classic social psychological theory born out of reflection on crisis. From dissonance theory arose the work of Karl Weick, one of today’s leading theorists of crisis and sense-making. Together, I try to show how these traditions for studying sensemaking in crisis build towards a concept of liminal metastability that moves beyond more mechanistic notions of disrupted equilibria. They build towards a processual sociocultural psychology capable of showing how crises disrupt the liminal metastability of becomings at multiple and interconnected ‘system’ levels (the physical, biological, psychological and sociological) from the microscopic to the planetary. Escape from a liminal hotspot requires sensemaking which creates new forms capable of more productively de-paradoxifying these challenging impasses. Liminal hostpots too can vary in scale from the minimicro to the macro: Might world society today, with its ‘disaster capitalism’ and its global self-definition in terms of ‘times of crisis’ or ‘catastrophic times’, be conceived as a liminal hotspot? A final point to note in this overview is that liminality theory foregrounds situated sensemaking as a core subject matter of sociocultural psychology. Sensemaking is the set of processes through which we make sense of things. Karl Weick on Sensemaking in Crises Karl Weick work has been seminal to social psychological research into why sensemaking is relevant to crises (Weick, 1995 ). It is ripe for development in the direction we are suggesting, having moved ever closer to a process ontology, albeit avoiding the passage of liminality theory (contrast Weick, 1991 with Weick, 2022 ). Can we make sense of this particular sensemaking tradition from a liminality perspective? Weick’s is an interesting case of an experimental social psychologist who, after becoming a theorist of organisations (a management guru even), shifted towards mostly qualitative and theoretical studies. Precious time was wasted and cues of danger inconsistent with this image were missed or rationalised into a pattern that obscured what was actually happening. When the leader finally saw the size of the fire that had in fact already crossed the Gulch just 200 yards in front of them, things happened so fast that personal and collective sensemaking had no time to re-pattern into a more adequate form. Most were dead in a matter of minutes. Weick describes another swathe of issues as to do with ‘structure’, including the role system of the fire-fighters qua organisation. This more recent example is of particular interest because it shows the movement of Weick’s approach towards a form of process thought. Certain basic theoretical ingredients nevertheless remain in place. Amongst all available information, a limited set of ‘cues’ is extracted and assembled by retrospective sensemaking into meaningfully coherent patterns. These patterns are then used to enact a more orderly environment, which in turn yields further cues via cycles of interpretation and action. To grasp why this matters it is helpful to compare Weick’s new processual framing with his older theory: a hybrid of a cognitive information processing approach and the enactment-oriented constructionism of micro-sociology. Here, sensemaking is an inherently retrospective construction of plausible meanings for any ‘discrepant cues’ that interrupt an activity in process (Maitless and Sonnenshein, 2010 , Introna, 2018 , Holt & Wiedner, 2024 ). His notion of ‘cues’ arguably betrays a residual cognitivism which also assumes a meaningless and alien world (reduced to ‘information’) to which the cognitive operations of individuals lend order. But the reversal also suggests the value of looking closely at our practice as a Our sensemaking today is a key contributor to the fact that our social systems are collapsing in crisis all around us and we are being ‘led’ by those with ever more brutalised psychic systems at their disposal, and hence ever more destructive sensemaking is gaining ground. I have probed how liminality theory can help us grasp the relevance of sensemaking to crisis. I have proposed developing common notions of upset equilibrium and homeostasis into a contrast between pivotal and liminal metastability, and I have traced its relevance through some key figures in psychology.