The Hypothesis of Organization Design as Meaning—Sensemaking and Structuration

The hypothesis of organization design as meaning proposes organization design as a meaning-driven process of social construction. It is represented by a model with three parts (i) intersubjective sensemaking, (ii) structure and structuration and (iii) the organization design gestalt. The first two are described in this chapter, while the organization design gestalt is discussed in Chapter 8 . The present chapter argues that in terms of its ontological origins, organization design is primarily anchored in the organization’s social form, a pattern of interactions achieved at the level of intersubjective sensemaking. This means that in many ways what gives the organization its shape is the level of intersubjective sensemaking that the organization has achieved (i.e., its social form), which, in turn, has an effect on the way people interrelate. As organizations come to rely less and less on bureaucratic structures, social form is increasingly driven by intersubjectivity, with all the consequences that this trend implies, i.e., greater reliance on sensemaking and on embodied forms of cognition. This, in turn, has an impact on the evolution of the organization’s structure, with improvisation becoming more prevalent and formalization becoming increasingly dependent upon quality of interaction. Hence, at the level of organizational structure, the chapter argues that organization design is largely shaped by the quality of interactions, a new concept that is explained as the level of “positivity” of experiences generated by interactions between participants, and subjectively judged as such.