(De)Constructing the Disruption: Enacted Sensemaking and Sensegiving in Institutionally Plural Fields

1 Introduction

On Friday, January 27, 2017, American President Donald J. Trump signed Executive Order 13,769 “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” (“The EO”), which temporarily suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and entry into the country by citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen (Trump 2017). Effective immediately and without prior warning, the order roiled the country’s political and business sectors (Feintzeig and McMillan 2017; Weigel and O’Keefe 2017) and provoked public statements from higher education leaders (Fain 2017) and the global academic community (Redden 2017).

Perhaps unique in its immediacy and symbolic importance, the Travel Ban was not a crisis for universities in the canonical sense of the term. Contemporary scholarship has coalesced around a broad definition of a crisis as a well-identified event, predictable or unpredictable, originating within or outside the organization, that threatens—or is perceived to threaten—an organization’s image, high-priority goals, or daily operations (Coombs 1995; Seeger, Sellnow, and Ulmer 1998). As a reputational disruption, the travel ban emerged from outside the field of higher education and did not specifically target colleges and universities or foreign students (see Trump 2017). Although spontaneous protests erupted on campuses across the country after the EO went into force (Zendehnam 2017) and some foreign scholars boycotted U.S. based research conferences (Redden 2017), it is unlikely that these actions were seen as damaging the image of colleges and universities. Indeed, student protest and campus-based activism is the status quo ante for higher education leaders (Quaye et al. 2022) with a long social and cultural history (Wheatle and Commodore 2019).

Moreover, the operational disruption to educational activities was relatively minimal. In 2015 and 2016, students from the seven named countries represented just 1.7 % of international students on American university campuses; international students, in turn, accounted for about 5.5 % of graduate and undergraduate enrollment in the United States (Institute of International Education 2018a, Institute of International Education 2018b). The travel ban, in a narrow sense, impacted just 0.09 % of students on American university campuses. Indeed, in their public statements, some university leaders acknowledged that no members of the campus community had been directly affected by the Order (e.g. Herbst 2017).

Thus, one might ask: if almost nobody was directly impacted, and there was no crisis, then to what end did universities issue public statements? This question serves as our point of departure. We may consider that although the Travel Ban may not have constituted a crisis, per se, it is possible that it constituted a macro-level institutional disruption of the taken-for-granted nature of American universities’ engagement in international student, faculty, and staff recruitment. Since at least the early 1950s, international students have been a taken-for-granted part of American university campuses as part of higher education’s broader role in postwar American political development (Kramer 2009; Stevens and Gebre-Medhin 2016). In this context, even indirectly curbing these institutionalized activities may have had the potential to delegitimize these activities, thus provoking some form of institutional defense (Lawrence and Suddaby 2006; Rainelli Weiss and Huault 2016).

However, simply asserting the existence of an institutional disruption and then examining the responses of higher education organizations does not fully explain the dynamics of the situation. Higher education is also an institutionally plural field (Kraatz and Block 2008), with activities legitimated by conflicting academic, entrepreneurial, market, and managerial logics (Dunn and Jones 2010; Gumport 2000; Howells et al. 2014; Wadhwani et al. 2017). For example, rationales for international students’ presence on American university campuses have included globalization and international understanding (Altbach and Knight 2007; Taylor and Cantwell 2015), competition and organizational prestige (Jaquette and Curs 2015; Jaquette, Curs, and Posselt 2016), and globalization (Altbach 2004; Wilkins and Huisman 2012). For universities confronting the contradictory logics of an institutionally plural field, then, it may not be self-evident what the travel ban was about, much less whether it rose to the level of being a ‘disruption.’ It is entirely possible that what one university perceived as an attack on institutional norms was another’s welcome disruption of the status quo and an opportunity to move up a status hierarchy (Brankovic 2018). Thus, a fieldwide event “is like a rugby ball sitting on the ground. It cannot achieve anything on its own” (Munir 2005, 96).

Here, rather than starting from the assumption that the travel ban was an institutional disruption and then focusing on university actions in response, we adopt a social construction perspective “shift[ing] the focus of crisis from phenomena that are ‘out there’ to those that are constituted through communication” (Gigliotti 2020, 563). In doing so, we consider the dynamics of fieldwide sensemaking and sensegiving in constructing an event as a disruption as antecedent conditions to studying organizational responses to that disruption. In this paper, therefore, we use the travel ban as an illustrative case of the kind of exogenous event that illuminates these dynamics with some clarity and emphasize that the fieldwide dynamics following the travel ban can be considered paradigmatic of similar events in other fields: every organization periodically confronts exogenous events such as natural disasters (McKnight and Linnenluecke 2019), market failures (Vitullo and Johnson 2010), and scandals (Cole and Harper 2017).

From this point of departure, management research has demonstrated how, within organizations, individuals enact these shocks as crises through processes of sensemaking as individuals ask ‘what is going on’ and ‘what should we do’ (Weick 1988) and sensegiving as leaders shape organization members’ understandings with the intent of protecting operational and reputational disruptions (Klein and Eckhaus 2017). To our knowledge, organizational sociologists have yet to consider these dynamics at the level of the institutional field (Munir 2005 is a notable but limited exception). As we discuss below, the translation from organization to field is not as straightforward as it might initially seem if one is to take seriously the notion that pluralism is a constitutive condition of many institutional fields (Micelotta, Lounsbury, and Greenwood 2017; Kraatz and Block 2008).

Thus, in this paper, we theorize the social construction of events as institutional disruptions in institutionally plural fields, with the goal of developing a more nuanced conceptualization of how events become triggers for organizational response in plural fields. We start from the position that institutional disruptions are empirical phenomena that are negotiated and constructed in real-time. We explicitly consider the possibility that not all events become disruptions, and, in particular, elaborate the role of intermediary organizations in shaping fieldwide understandings of unclear situations. We theorize how organizational actors in institutionally plural fields take notice of events, construct those events as institutional disruptions, and give sense to the field about the institutional disruption at hand.

In so doing, we weave together two well-studied but yet disconnected concepts—pluralism and sensemaking/sensegiving in institutional fields—and integrate previously disconnected literatures on enacted sensemaking, organizational sensegiving, and institutional pluralism. We argue that in plural fields an institutional disruption is enacted through fieldwide sensegiving that plays out intersubjectively between organizations in the moments after an ‘event.’ In other words, an institutional disruption does not inhere in the event, but is rather socially constructed as organizations in real time shape each other’s interpretations of the meaning and significance of the event through their discourse and their actions. Thus, much like organizational crises are enacted as individuals make sense of and give sense about the events unfolding around them (Klein and Eckhaus 2017; Weick 1988), institutional disruptions are also enacted: first as disruptions, and second as institutional disruptions.

We offer three contributions to the literature on organizational sociology. First, we open up the possibility of studying antecedent processes to organizational responses to disruptions by highlighting the role of institutional pluralism, sensemaking, and sensegiving in constructing events as disruptions. Second, we uplift and argue for the role of intermediaries in constructing and shaping fieldwide understandings of the meaning and significance of events in the interstices of time between the event and an organizational response. And finally, we thereby call into question how institutional disruptions might be studied by demonstrating that “what seems to be a single phenomenon is in reality composed of assorted heterogenous elements” (Davis 1971, 315).

The rest of this paper unfolds as follows. In the following three sections, we summarize the literatures on events, sensemaking/sensegiving, and institutional pluralism, respectively. Then, we discuss the relationships between sensemaking, events, and institutional pluralism, and identify avenues for further inquiry.

2 Institutional Pluralism and Change

3 The Role of Institutional Pluralism

Research demonstrating that organizations are subject to institutional pluralism (Kraatz and Block 2008, 2017) calls into question the possibility of a single institutional logic that guides fields to unitary, isomorphic understandings of novel or ambiguous situations. Rather, organizations embedded in institutionally plural fields are “subject to multiple regulatory regimes, embedded in multiple normative orders, and/or constituted by more than one cultural logic” (Kraatz and Block 2008, 243). In other words, instead of having one overarching logic to draw from when making sense of novel situations, individuals within organizations in institutionally plural fields have multiple potential legitimated prescriptions from which to enact their sensemaking efforts (Radoynovska, Ocasio, and Laasch 2020). These logics may conflict with each other, potentially creating “fragmentation, incoherence, goal-ambiguity, and organizational instability,” although they may also create opportunities for “symbiosis and latent cooperation among distinct identity groups” within organizations (Kraatz and Block 2008, 244, 266). To our knowledge, organizational sociology scholarship is yet to engage fully with the specific question of whether and how organizations in institutionally plural fields come to consensus during times of ambiguity. To do so, we integrate the literature on institutional pluralism with our previous discussion of enacted sensemaking/sensegiving to offer an explanation of how pluralism may change the pathways of organizational and field enactments of an event as an institutional disruption.

In plural fields, organizations may enact the same event as convergent (legitimate), divergent (illegitimate), or wholly irrelevant to a particular set of institutionalized values, given the particular constituencies and institutional logics that legitimate their understanding of the institutionalized activity (Kraatz and Block 2008). The extent to which these enactments are heterogenous may depend on the extent to which organizations can resist the “temptation” of a prevailing fieldwide logic (Lepoutre and Valente 2012). However, in plural fields, the existence of a prevailing logic is not guaranteed; therefore we may consider that the field serves a site of contestation, negotiation, and dialogue (Alexander and Bowler 2021; Hacker and Binz 2021; Zietsma and McKnight 2009).

This complexity may be most acute for organizations in moderately centralized, nested, and/or highly fragmented fields like higher education in which no single institutional logic stands dominant and isomorphic forces are less hegemonic (Frølich et al. 2013; Hüther and Krücken 2016; Pache and Santos 2010). Here, the role of fieldwide intermediaries in organizational sensemaking and sensegiving becomes more salient. As discussed above, intermediary organizations often do the work of theorizing and legitimating fieldwide norms (Greenwood, Suddaby, and Hinings 2002), which individuals ‘carry’ across the field through their professional identities (Scott 2008); in unitary fields, these organizations offer a prevailing logic aiding organizational interpretations of novel or ambiguous situations. However, because institutionally plural fields have multiple stakeholders, logics, and normative orders, they may have multiple fieldwide intermediaries, each of which serves as the legitimizing and regulatory vehicle for different—and potentially contradictory—prescriptions. It follows, then, that during times of fieldwide ambiguity, although professional associations may play a large role in helping organizations make sense of and theorize unfolding events through particular institutional lenses, the effect of their roles may not be convergent, depending on the extent to which member organizations are coupled to particular institutional prescriptions, and the relevant prescriptions in question are contradictory.

To make this abstraction concrete, we may consider that the field of American higher education comprises multiple professional associations, including the American Association of Universities (AAU), the Association for Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of International Educators (NAFSA). Each of these associations is coupled to a different set of institutional logics legitimizing the work of their member organizations: AAU to research and scientific inquiry; APLU to access, equity, workforce readiness, and community engagement; and NAFSA to international education and fostering mutual understanding. NAFSA, for example, with stronger internalized logics of international understanding, might interpret the travel ban as relating to and potentially undermining values of global citizenship and international exchange; other intermediaries identifying more strongly with other logics might interpret the travel ban as a contravention of those values, or may interpret it as wholly unrelated to the institutionalized norms they support. Universities, in turn, may choose to affiliate with one or more of these associations and differentially couple to or decouple from the logics legitimized by each intermediary (Orphan and Miller 2020).

Here, the scripts provided by these intermediaries may or may not cohere, rendering their effects on (individual) intersubjective and (organizational) generic subjective sensemaking indeterminate. Indeed, insofar as a key question about organizing is how actions are coordinated given multiple interpretive templates (Weick 1995), “the pluralistic organization does not automatically hold itself together” (Kraatz and Block 2008, 263). In plural fields, then, how organizations make sense internally and give sense externally about ‘what this event is about’ may vary considerably, which may lead to multiple, conflicting discourses across the field. Thus, neither the “institutional” nor the “disruption” is self-evident. Rather, we suggest that events are enacted as institutional disruptions in two stages. First, the event must first be theorized as an institutional disruption within each organization: i.e. the organization determines that the event is institutional in nature (i.e. that it is infused with value(s) beyond the immediate operational consideration) and that the event is a disruption (i.e. that it undermines, or threatens to undermine, those institutionalized values) significant enough to warrant a response.

In doing so, each organization may draw on potentially contradictory interpretive templates offered by one or more intermediary organizations, who may theorize different disruptions or non-disruptions, offering field members a ‘menu’ of legitimized interpretive bases. Once each organization has internally made sense of and enacted the event as an institutional disruption, each organization in the field communicates—or gives sense—about its understanding of the event to other organizations in the field. If and when the field converges to a shared understanding of the event as an institutional disruption, and enacts that shared understanding through common action, then we may say that an institutionally plural field has experienced an institutional disruption.

Thus, in institutionally plural organizational fields, whether and how events become institutional disruptions becomes an empirical question. We suggest that the greater the number of potentially legitimate interpretive bases, the less likely it is that the field converges around a single shared understanding of an event. We recognize that even in plural fields, institutional logics may converge (Bastedo 2008), a prevailing logic may exist (Lepoutre and Valente 2012), and organizations may be able to hold conflicting and complementary logics together to mount a fieldwide response (see, e.g. Oliver 1991; Smets et al. 2015). Yet, since “pluralism appears as confusion over which rules to follow and which authorities to obey … [and] ambiguity over which roles to play and which logics to enact,” (Kraatz and Block 2017, 545), we submit that conditions of institutional pluralism are more likely to generate dissensus than consensus. What if no university had responded to the travel ban, and none had acknowledged any breach of institutionalized norms or values? Or, what if they had acknowledged that something had happened, but could not agree on exactly what? “Until we make a response, we don’t know what the stimulus was” (Weick 2012, cited in Glynn and Watkiss 2020, 1,337). If an institutional breach happens in the forest, and nobody is around to witness it, is it still a disruption?

4 Discussion

Having considered how conditions of institutional pluralism complicate our understanding of how events are enacted as institutional disruptions, we now discuss its implications for scholarship in organizational sociology. In doing so, we invite organizational sociologists to consider the complex interrelationships between organizations, their fields, and broader social conditions and to more intentionally examine the intersectional spaces between organizational and sociological theory.^[2]

Most proximately, the above analysis raises the question of whether conditions of institutional pluralism are protective of the status quo ante during periods of interpretive ambiguity or whether pluralism facilitates institutional change. On the one hand, because institutional pluralism may lead to fragmented and divergent interpretations of an event, the lack of common understanding may pierce the “perfect theory” of institutionalized practices (Meyer and Scott 1985), which can lead to the questioning of taken-for-granted norms and the eventual delegitimization of taken-for-granted practices. For example, conditions of institutional pluralism provide a greater number of potentially legitimate interpretive bases, which may imply that field organizations are less likely to converge around a single shared construction of an event as an institutional disruption. If members of the field cannot agree, for example, on ‘what is going on,’ and if multiple intermediaries/professional associations are also fragmented in their sensemaking and sensegiving efforts, then the field as a collective may be less likely to also agree on ‘what we should do’ about the event. Absent a collective understanding of ‘what is going on,’ and ‘what should we do about it,’ institutionally plural fields may also be less likely to collectively defend any threatened institutionalized practices, thus paving the way for their erosion.

On the other hand, because institutional pluralism allows organizations to legitimate activities using multiple and hybrid logics, it is possible that the fragmented response may serve to prevent the enactment of an event as a disruption per se. Recalling Munir’s (2005, 108) conclusion that “it is because events are already theorized for us that we are able to identify them as possible triggers,” if the field fails to enact an event as a disruption, then what, exactly, is the event disrupting? Moreover, even if the field were to coalesce around a shared understanding of ‘what is going on,’ a plural institutional environment may yet provide multiple rationales to defend the existing status quo (‘what should we do’), allowing field organizations to develop a multi-faceted, if not united, response to the enacted disruption.

Returning to where we began: if an event happens in an organizational field, and no one calls attention to it, what, if anything, has been disrupted? And if it has, what makes that disruption institutional? And is the institutional disruption a crisis? It may be tempting to suggest that these are distinctions without a difference: that the core phenomena of interest to scholars and practitioners ought to be stability or change in the institutionalized practices at hand and/or whether and how organizations respond to the event. After all, how does it matter whether the event is constructed as a disruption, a crisis, or something else altogether, if organizations decouple talk and action in response, protect core organizational practices, and nothing really changes on the ground?

We suggest that the distinctions do, indeed, matter. As we have discussed above, fieldwide events like the travel ban create discursive spaces where taken-for-granted assumptions could be contested. Failing to construct a disruption and re-assert institutionalized norms when field actors perceive a disruption may pave the way for the eventual delegitimization of institutionalized practices (Oliver 1992), as might re-asserting norms when other field stakeholders do not perceive a disruption (Harmon 2019). Studying the social construction of events as an institutional disruption, we suggest, invites a deeper contemplation of the relationships between organizational sensemaking/sensegiving, and the social construction of meaning within organizational fields, and has important implications for both scholarship and practice.

First, scholars may investigate fieldwide patterns of response and nonresponse to major events like the travel ban and corroborate, refute, and extend our theoretical explorations, with a particular eye towards the role of institutional pluralism per se in facilitating or stalling institutional change processes. For example, although there is emergent research on the effects of the travel ban on international student mobility (Molina, Yuran, and Edwards 2020) and on the content of university public statements (Pyle, Linvill, and Gennett 2018; Stein 2018), scholarship has not yet, to our knowledge, explored variations in fieldwide constructions of the travel ban, or how plural constructions relate to whether and how universities decoupled policy and practice in response to the travel ban. And although it may be too soon to know whether and how the travel ban delegitimized the practice of international student enrollment, deconstructing the disruption by analyzing universities’ in-the-moment sensemaking and sensegiving may build the foundation for future process tracing studies.

Our theorizing also opens avenues for organizational sociologists to link the micro and macro of institutional theory by focusing on the strategic actions of individuals in institutionally plural fields in times of ambiguity. For example, having proposed that in institutionally plural fields an institutional disruption is the result of a fieldwide process of sensemaking and sensegiving mediated by one or more fieldwide professional associations or other intermediaries, future research may situate its focus in the decision-spaces of this work. An empirical question that arises from our theoretical exploration is how, when, and why organizational leaders choose between the various interpretations offered by their professional associations. What are the organizational processes, in plural environments, that link intrasubjective, intersubjective, and generic subjective sensemaking? What are the determinants of these processes, are they conscious or sub-conscious, and do actors have a sense of the effects of their agency on the institutional order?

Moreover, we may ask a similar question about leaders of professional associations or other intermediary organizations facing an event about which they must make and give sense. Because these organizations may depend on their members for revenues and organizational survival, it follows that they would take their interpretive cue from members during emergent and ambiguous situations. However, as discussed above, existing research and our theoretical exploration suggests that because such organizations speak ‘for’ their member organizations, members might look to their associations to make sense of fieldwide events as disruptions or non-disruptions, institutional or otherwise. This leads to an apparent chicken-and-egg problem: whose sensegiving comes first? Future research may explore the reciprocal nature of sensemaking and sensegiving between member organizations and their intermediary associations in an institutionally plural field, how these processes shape and are shaped by each other’s constructions of the event as an institutional disruption, and these constructions’ ultimate impact on longer-term processes of institutional change.

Finally, our theorizing suggests that a greater focus may be paid to the moments immediately following a fieldwide event in studying institutional change brought about by exogenous shocks (Micelotta, Lounsbury, and Greenwood 2017). As discussed above, the predominant approach to studying such institutional change has been to consider the institutional disruption as coterminous with the precipitating event (Desai 2011; Maguire and Hardy 2009) that leads to a prolonged dialectic of disruptive, defensive, and reconstructive institutional work (Fredriksson 2014; Micelotta and Washington 2013). Here, by focusing on the construction of the disruption as a contingent phenomenon after a fieldwide event but antecedent to this institutional work, we draw attention to the link between framing and action during periods of ambiguity as a mechanism for understanding the nature and effectiveness of the institutional work that emerges. In doing so, we open up avenues for research in organizational institutionalism that could support not just our understanding of exogenous events as potential “disruptions” but also provide opportunities for studying organizational responses that are embedded in, but not completely beholden, to the fields in which they are situated.

Each of the avenues for research we have described above is ripe for empirical exploration by organizational sociologists. To our knowledge, however, empirical research is yet to explore the real-time dialectic of sensemaking, sensegiving, and the social construction of meaning in institutional fields, or link this dialectic to longer-term processes of institutional change. We believe that focusing on unexpected events like the travel ban may serve as natural experiments for such study, although the implications of our theoretical explorations are neither limited to higher education as a field nor the travel ban as an event. Indeed, as noted above, we consider the travel ban and its constructions within academia to be paradigmatic of similar events in other fields.

Consider, for example, the sudden and unexpected nature of geopolitical conflicts, the rise of neo-nationalist movements in several countries (Douglass 2021), or the sudden impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and their heterogenous enactments as crises, disruptions, and/or the ‘new normal’ across a variety of fields and geographies. In focusing on the social construction of these events as (non)institutional, (non)disruptions across a variety of plural fields, we suggest that organizational sociology scholarship may be able to empirically and more generally illuminate the relationships between conditions of institutional pluralism, extra-field events, the social construction of meaning within fields, the role of intermediary organizations, and nature and effectiveness of organizational actions in response. These new avenues, we hope, are fruitfully traversable for organizational sociologists to add empirical heft to our conceptual explorations.