Speaker: Dr Gordon Shen
Title: The Circle of Exchanging Sense
Date: Thursday, 22 August 2024
Time: 12:00pm – 2:00pm
Venue: Building 21, PAP Moran, G058, Seminar Room
EY Song is the host of this visitor
Abstract
Organizational hierarchy and its corresponding asymmetries of power require reconsidering the ways in which employees make, break, and give sense to each other. “Sense functions” have been ascribed to job roles in empirical studies: sensemaking to workers, sense-giving to middle managers, and sense-breaking to top managers. While the sensemaking perspective intersects with institutional theory, institutional theory has not fully accounted for power differentials that are inherent in organizational hierarchies. We make three contributions accordingly. First, we introduce the concept of “sense-exchanging” to denote the relationship between employers and employees. Our second contribution is an integrative model of the sense cycle. Thirdly, we build on critical discourse scholarship, using vignettes from Employee Assistance Program (EAP) newsletters to illustrative episodic and systemic power. We use EAP as an example because human resource (HR) crises disrupt the rhythm of organizational life. The vignettes contained in EAP newsletters reveal the interrelated layers of discursive organizing: circumstances surrounding trigger events; the questioning of individual and organizational identity; and discernment of best practice. They specifically illustrate how EAP and other HR managers are the actors who break down meaning, with implications for the sense supervisors should give. Sense-breaking and sense-giving jointly affect worker sensemaking. Although sense-exchanging is inherently social, it is not necessarily reciprocal among organizational members since power is asymmetrical within the sense cycle. Sense cycle has a stabilizing effect: New meanings emerge from dyadic, and occasionally triadic, workplace interactions as divergences (i.e., crises) are transformed into convergences (i.e., business as usual). The sense cycle is a meaning structure that guides sense-exchanging according to one’s position in the organizational hierarchy.
Bio
Gordon Shen is an Assistant Professor of Health Care Management at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston) School of Public Health. He is a member of its Management, Policy, and Community Health Department. Prior to joining UTHealth Houston in 2019, Dr. Shen was an Assistant Professor at The City University of New York. His research agenda focuses on responsible innovations, which entail a balanced understanding of culture, context, and co-creation. His empirical research has addressed deinstitutionalization, Muslim community-based health organizations, and humanitarianism. He has extended organizational theory in understanding such phenomena. His research has appeared in journals, including Academy of Management Perspectives, Sociology of Development, and Voluntary Sector Review. Dr. Shen holds a B.S. in psychobiology and public health (2005, University of California, Los Angeles), a S.M. in epidemiology (2007, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), and a Ph.D. in health services and policy analysis (2013, University of California, Berkeley). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Public Health in 2014. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Program award to China and a Fulbright-Fogarty Fellowship in Public Health in Ethiopia. Dr. Shen consulted for the World Health Organization, The World Bank, and United States Agency for International Development.