Sociology

Business

Pedagogy

Knowledge management

Operating system

Marketing

Political science

Ethnography

Tracking (education)

Anthropology

Process management

Sensemaking

Public relations

Computer science

Strategic planning

Process (computing)

Organizational change

Strategic Management Journal

This paper reports an ethnographic study of the initiation of a strategic change effort in a large, public university. It develops a new framework for understanding the distinctive character of the beginning stages of strategic change by tracking the first year of the change through four phases (labeled as envisioning, signaling, re‐visioning, and energizing). This interpretive approach suggests that the CEO's primary role in instigating the strategic change process might best be understood in terms of the emergent concepts of ‘sensemaking’ and ‘sensegiving’. Relationships between these central concepts and other important theoretical domains are then drawn and implications for understanding strategic change initiation are discussed.

Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change initiation