Sensing that Something is Wrong: On the Role of Senses in Sensemaking in Frontline Safety Work

1 Introduction

Using work in a high-security prison as a case, the present article examines how safety practitioners’ sensing skills are developed and entwined in socio-material work environments and are thereby involved in early sensemaking processes related to safety.^[1]

‘Sensemaking’ is a concept that describes the processes where people construct their understandings of what is going on around them to know what actions are required (Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld 2005). Although this has mainly been understood as a social process where people make sense through retrospective thinking and discourse, several scholars have argued for applying a broader view that includes emotions, senses^[2] (de Rond, Holeman, and Howard-Grenville 2019; Maitlis and Sonenshein 2010; Maitlis, Vogus, and Lawrence 2013; Sandberg and Tsoukas 2015) and materiality (Haavik 2016; Rosness et al. 2016; Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020). Emotional and sensory aspects are particularly interesting when studying operational work in the area of safety, where the situational contingencies and temporal characteristics of work require improvisation (Almklov 2018), that is, immediate on-the-spot reactions that do not allow for analysis (Weick 1998). This makes more unspoken aspects, such as sensing, interesting for how people make sense of safety in situ.

Thus, the current article elaborates on the role of the senses in sensemaking processes evolving in safety work. Risk is here understood from a sociological perspective that emphasises how people construct understandings of risk in socio-cultural contexts (Wall and Olofsson 2008). ‘Safety work’ refers to work aiming to ensure the safety of people and systems, either as an explicit objective as in prison work, police work and firefighting or indirectly as in mining, seafaring and aviation. Although failed sensemaking in other contexts can result in error and confusion, safety practitioners who fail to properly make sense of risk situations and fail to choose the right intervention can produce great harm (Weick 1993).

Therefore, understanding how people in organisations make sense of safety and risk is crucial, not only to cope with evident problems, but also to understand what makes ‘operations proceed smoothly’ (Rosness et al. 2016, p. 54). Whereas safety can be seen as a ‘dynamic non-event’, Hollnagel points out that this focus ‘does obviously not mean that nothing happens’ (2014, p. 23). Still, most studies on sensemaking in organisations focus on sensemaking efforts triggered by major events (e.g. Cornelissen, Mantere, and Vaara 2014; Weick 1993) or at least in ‘high tempo’ work settings where sensemaking processes become more visible (Albolino, Cook, and O’Connor 2006). Yet minor events and everyday work practices are important to study, both because sensemaking in such situations is more common and because of the potential of minor events becoming major if the initial sensemaking efforts fails (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2015, p. 13). Thus, an important aim of the present article is to make visible the role of senses in workers’ understanding of what is going on in their everyday work, both to keep the system running and to solve problems in early phases so these potential problems become ‘nonevents’, at least from the outside. The socio-material environment in which the workers’ sensing skills are entwined is particularly interesting with a view to recent changes in many workplaces concerned with safety, due to increasing standardisation and technological development (Almklov and Antonsen 2019; Almklov and Antonsen 2014; Gould and Macrae 2021; Kongsvik et al. 2020). This is also true in prisons (e.g. Kaun and Stiernstedt 2021). To investigate these issues, the research question is as follows:

How do safety practitioners use their senses to make sense of situations in their everyday socio-material work environment, and how can the constitution of this environment affect the accomplishment of sensemaking? This will be explored through the case of prison officers’ work with safety in a Norwegian high-security prison.

Below, I first present existing research on how safety workers use their senses before presenting sensemaking as the theoretical framework. Thereafter, I describe the study’s data and methods before presenting and discussing the results.

2 Senses in Safety Work

Although several studies have investigated sensemaking in safety work (e.g. Albolino, Cook, and O’Connor 2006; Kilskar et al. 2018; Rosness et al. 2016; Weick 1993), the use of senses has received little scholarly attention. However, sensing is probably included in what is referred to, often briefly, as ‘practical knowledge’, ‘intuition’, ‘gut feeling’ and experience in frontline work, for instance, for helicopter pilots (Chua and Feigh 2013, p. 304), prison officers (Midtlyng 2022, p. 6) and seafarers (Kongsvik et al. 2020, p. 6). Seafaring is, in fact, a kind of work where the sensory aspects are often mentioned. For instance, it is described as involving extracting ‘cues from sounds, smells, vibrations and other weak signals’ (Kongsvik et al. 2020), and seamanship implies feeling ‘the rhythm of the sea, the wind, and the vessel’ to ‘know the signals of the boat’ (Størkersen and Thorvaldsen 2021, pp. 6–11). This suggests that sensing has an important role in seafarers’ work as part of the ‘ship sense’ consisting of both cognitive and perceptual abilities (Prison, Dahlman, and Lundh 2013).

In several studies with a more explicit focus on the senses – and although sometimes with an equivalent implicit focus on safety – how frontline workers use their senses for the sake of safety has been documented in a broad range of contexts, such as military patrolling (Hockey 2009, p. 481), medicine and nursing (e.g. Ihlebæk 2018; Maslen 2016), mining (Kamoche and Maguire 2011; Leger and Mothibeli 1988), firefighting (Somerville and Lloyd 2006, p. 286) and prison work (Herrity 2021; Sørensen 2023). Like with ‘ship sense’, firefighters conceptualise the way their bodies provide information through sight, sound, touch, sensation and movement as ‘fire sense’ (Somerville and Lloyd 2006, p. 286). For miners, ‘pit sense’ is a well-known concept (Kamoche and Maguire 2011; Leger and Mothibeli 1988), which has been described as ‘an ability to take notice minute warning signs, sounds and smells’ (Douglass 1977 referenced in Leger and Mothibeli 1988). Relevant research on the use of senses in work, beyond safety work, is among others Silva and Cunha’s (2022) study of the cork industry and Andreasson, Lindblom, and Thorvald (2017) who conceptualise the sensory competences found in manufacturing as ‘professional sensing’. Research has also pointed out the tensions between such embodied knowledge and other logics in frontline safety work (Almklov and Antonsen 2014; Almklov, Rosness, and Størkersen 2014; Hutchinson, Dekker, and Rae 2022; Kongsvik et al. 2020; Maslen 2016; Perin 2005).

However, safety practitioners’ use of senses for sensemaking has rarely been investigated. Herrity (2021) is an important exception, connecting the use of the senses with sensemaking in safety-related work in her study of sound in a prison (and a pub). She shows that prison officers use the ‘soundscape’ of the prison to make sense in prison work, arguing that different rhythms and tunes form ‘a focus for assessing and monitoring safety’ (Herrity 2021, 14). While Herrity emphasises the significance of sound in prisons, the current article focuses on sensory input more broadly. Moreover, this article uses the prison as a case to examine the use of the senses as a cross-sectorial phenomenon in safety work and emphasises how the constitution of the work environment can affect the accomplishment of sensemaking. Building on existing research, the present article aims to contribute to a theoretical framework for understanding the sensory aspects of sensemaking in frontline safety work.

3 Sensemaking

In this article, sensemaking is understood as a socio-material process in which the role of materiality (included technology) and social aspects for sensing is acknowledged (Haavik 2016; Rosness et al. 2016; Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020). In contrast to seeing people and the workplace as separate entities, as is common in many other approaches to sensemaking, Sandberg and Tsoukas argue that people are ‘always already immersed within specific sociomaterial practice worlds’ which ‘specifies a particular way of being and acting’ (2020, p. 5). This way of seeing people ‘immersed and skillful[ly]’ engaging with the world is different from the subject–object separation more common in organisational sensemaking research (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020, p. 3). As such, this perspective on sensemaking does not see socio-material work environments as consisting of freestanding entities that we subsequently attach meaning to but, rather, as relational ensembles of people, objects and tools that constitute a meaningful context for sensemaking (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020, p. 5). For people new to a work environment, this is a shift from seeing the environment at a distance, to becoming immersed in a ‘meaningful relational whole’ (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020, p. 5). Thus, how people make sense of their environment will differ based on where they are situated and, consequently, are engaged. For a pilot flying an aircraft, a cockpit is ‘not an array of externally related objects to be contemplated, as it would be for an outsider, but a meaningful whole that is available for action’ (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020, p. 5). Therefore, sensory skills differ between different environmental domains, and workers consequently develop an occupation-specific ‘ordering of importance and hence of notice and attention’, which differs in different areas of expertise (Winch 2018, p. 675^[3]).

Thus, embodiment, such as bodily sensations, sensory knowing, felt experiences, and emotions, are an integral part of sensemaking (Cunliffe and Coupland 2012; Herrity 2021; Sandberg and Tsoukas 2015, 2020; see also Rosness et al. 2016, p. 63) because our entwinement with the work environment is constituted bodily through sensory engagement (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020). The topic of embodiment is not new in sensemaking research; it was recognised early on, for instance, by Weick (1993), who underlines how the firefighter Dodge was an ‘experienced woodsman’ who tried to save his crew of wildland firefighters in Mann Gulch (de Rond, Holeman, and Howard-Grenville 2019, p. 1962). However, Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld (2005, p. 412) suggested that organisations are ‘talked into existence’, which underlines the mainly cognitive and discursive focus of this research (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2015) and sensemaking research has generally been accused of the ‘neglect of the body’ (e.g. Sandberg and Tsoukas 2015, p. 20, see also de Rond, Holeman, and Howard-Grenville 2019).

Despite this, there is some studies on the role of emotions in sensemaking, such as Maitlis and Sonenshein (2010, p. 566) who note that emotions often have been viewed as an impediment to cognitive processes, particularly sensemaking but that, in reality, emotions (or at least arousal) are at the core of sensemaking processes. Maitlis, Vogus, and Lawrence (2013) suggest that emotions are important in signalling the need for sensemaking, to shape processes and conclude it. How emotions can affect sensemaking in stressful situations in professional work is, for instance, documented in Cornelissen et al.’s (2014) study of an antiterrorist police operation and in Boehm’s (2018) study of bodily performativity in frontline command. Regarding the use of the senses in sensemaking, however, there are very few studies, with Cunliffe and Coupland (2012) and Herrity (2021) being two exceptions. The neglect of the body in sensemaking research is problematic because what are often understood as mental activities are constituted by bodily engagement in our environment (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020, p. 6) and leaving out these embodied aspects only allows for investigating deliberate forms of sensemaking (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2015, p. 25).

The shortcomings of only focusing on deliberate sensemaking is pointed out in Herrity’s (2021) study, when she observes that sensemaking is grounded in familiarity with what one of her participants in the prison termed ‘the everyday tune that’s normal for here’ (p. 13). In their typology of sensemaking, Sandberg and Tsoukas (2020) mention this as immanent sensemaking. This is the most basic type of sensemaking in organisations, principally bodily, and a continuous habitual mode of engagement in which people spontaneously respond to and make sense of routine situations without deliberative elements (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020).

This means that sensemaking is not ‘activated’ by interruptions, as has been commonly portrayed in organisational sensemaking research (Maitlis and Christianson 2014; Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld 2005, p. 414). What breakdowns and disruptions activate is not sensemaking but rather improvisatory, innovative action (Yakhlef and Essén 2013) involving a different type of sensemaking. Involved-deliberate sensemaking is partly tacit and bodily and partly a deliberate thinking process that happens when the habitual routine is interrupted by, for instance, an anomaly (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020, p. 11). By ‘bracketing, noticing and extracting cues from our lived experience of the interrupted situation’ (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2015, p. 409), people create an ‘initial sense’ of the situation that they start interpreting (p. 14). Going from immanent to involved-deliberate sensemaking means that people shift, in reality on a recursive continuum, from ‘absorbed engagement to paying deliberate attention to what is going on’ (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020, p. 11). Ingold points out the differences in perceptual systems for the ability to notice such features in the surrounding environment: ‘ … because the perceptual system of the hunter is attuned to picking up information, critical to the practical conduct of his hunting, to which the unskilled observer simply fails to attend’ (2000, p. 55). Therefore, those skills that enable professionals to spot details in dynamic situations are important for practicing certain occupations (Winch 2018, p. 678). Similarly, Weick et al. emphasise the ability to be aware of ‘discriminatory detail’ based on ‘patterns of interrelation among processes of perception and cognition’ (2005, p. 515). This shows how skilful sensemaking processes can contribute to mindful organising, that is the ability on the front line to collectively capture ‘discriminatory detail about emerging threats’ and ‘swiftly act in response to these details’ (Vogus and Sutcliffe 2012, p. 723).

For the study of operational safety work, immanent sensemaking and the transition from immanent to more involved-deliberate sensemaking is particularly interesting. These are the sensemaking modes both when ‘operations passes smoothly and safely’ (Rosness et al. 2016, p. 54) and when there have been interruptions, but there is still time to prevent or mitigate breakdowns. Based on this framework of sensemaking, the present article aims to analyse how safety workers use their senses to make sense of situations related to safety. Through a relational understanding of how work environments constitute meaningful contexts for sensemaking, the article also aims to analyse how sensemaking can be affected by the ways in which the work environment is constituted.

4 Data and Methods

The data have been generated from a larger ethnographic study of safety work in a Norwegian high-security prison, where an initial research interest was practical, tacit knowledge as part of how frontline workers understand and ‘read’ situations related to safety.

Ethnography is an acknowledged method to study tacit knowledge that is often taken for granted (Atkinson and Hammersley 2007). As a result, the method is useful for capturing the sensemaking process ‘from within its practice world’, particularly challenging for the forms of sensemaking depending on people embedded inside the organisational activities in which they enact (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020, p. 24). In their article on prospective sensemaking, Rosness et al. (2016, p. 65) point out that this kind of sensemaking is challenging to study because ‘one needs to know what to look for (…) to see it’. As a former prison officer, I was familiar with the characteristics of prison work, which gave me some shared modes of attention (Csordas 1993) with the participants. I used my own experiences of sensing the prison environment as a starting point to direct my observations towards the participants’ use of senses. Getting a ‘head start’ by knowing about the research topic in advance can be an advantage when researching familiar contexts (Berger 2015, p. 223). In addition to knowing what to look for, this familiarity made it easier to navigate the prison by knowing how prisons work and are organised and being familiar with the related jargon. Prison officers mentioned that they did not have to ‘babysit’ me because as a former prison officer, I could ‘take care of myself’ in a prison environment, and some of them expressed relief that I would not misinterpret their ‘black humour’. However, sharing tacit knowledge with participants can also complicate the research process (see, e.g. Berger 2015), among other things, because of the possibility of taking things for granted. It could be that the participants who knew that I was a former prison officer took it for granted that I knew things and, accordingly, did not elaborate or explain. It could also be that my own tacit knowledge gave me blind spots. In both cases, this could result in poor descriptions. This could be particularly challenging when studying tacit knowledge such as the use of senses, and very likely, there are aspects of the work that I did not manage to capture. Still, I believe that my efforts to naively observe and describe the prison environment, especially at the beginning of the fieldwork, helped me view the prison environment from another perspective. Moreover, my approach as a ‘naïve question mark’ seemed to make the participants accept having to explain nearly everything to me. Also, I found that my experience was useful exactly because aspects of the sensemaking process become more visible when the organisational activity is interrupted (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020). For example, when I heard what I interpreted as the escalation of a conflict between an officer and a prisoner in another room, I struggled to remain with the trainee I followed, who did not read the sensory input the same way as I did and continued our conversation without reacting. As such, tacit ‘prison knowledge’ became visible in the contrast between what I was supposed to do as a researcher and what I used to do as a prison officer.

Fieldwork was conducted between August and December 2018 in 54 sessions over a total of nearly 300 h, including observation and informal conversations. Some weeks before the fieldwork began, the governor sent an email containing my information letter to all employees informing them about my project and the voluntariness of participating. I also sent a notice with information for the prison to post on the wings so that the prisoners would be informed about my presence. At the beginning of the fieldwork, the managers who lead the morning meetings briefly introduced me and my project so that everyone knew why I was there. When I was present in these meetings, and when I arrived for new fieldwork sessions and in new situations, I emphasised the voluntariness of participation in the study. Yet, it was not possible to ask for permission to observe every situation in advance. Bosk (2008, p. 155) argued that ‘an overly scrupulous approach’ to informed consent would disrupt the lives of the participants and be intrusive. For example, tense situations would suddenly arise in the prison, which required me not to interfere. I would therefore observe, and if I wrote something down, I would ask the officer afterward whether it was okay to have done so or if they wanted me to delete the notes. I still may have had an overly strict approach to the question of consent; this was commented on several times. However, I believe it was wise to be careful in such matters, especially because of the hierarchic prison structure, in which officers are used to doing what their superiors tell them.

I was following prison officers and operational senior officers at work, in different activities and tasks at the wings, in the guard’s rooms, during watch and in meetings. Because security information is not meant to be shared with the prisoners, much of the observation and informal conversation was happening where the prisoners were not present. These informal conversations were usually carried out during or right after the situations unfolded, often based on my observations of officers’ body language, but also sometimes more detached from these situations. For instance, conversations based on my observations often led officers to talk about how they used their senses more generally. Also, conversations about other topics, such as how to have oversight, could develop into officers talking about how they used their senses.

The prison under study was large (in a Norwegian context), which gave some variety in buildings, type of wings and participants’ experience and practices, which proved useful for learning about their use of senses. The prison was housing male prisoners only, both sentenced and remanded in custody. Because of anonymity considerations, the prison will not be described in further detail. Anonymity reasons is also why all participants are referred to as ‘he’, although both men and women were working as prison officers.

Prison officers are frontline personnel, so they are the first responders when ‘something happens’ in a prison. In Norwegian prisons, safety is the main objective, and the anticipation of risks related to incidents like fires, assaults, riots and escapes is central and requires early sensemaking. Together, prison officers have the responsibility for certain areas of the prison, where their function has a distinct physical characteristic: They are the ones putting out fires, handling conflicts, breaking up violence, coping with people who have committed suicide and running after people who try to escape. They are also exposed to violence themselves because of their close interactions with prisoners. In addition to responding when something happens, they are also continuously working to prevent these incidents from happening in the first place, which arises from a heavy emphasis on anticipatory work in Norwegian prisons. This makes prisons useful settings for micro-studies of the socio-material dimensions of how they continuously make sense within a bounded environment.

While doing the fieldwork, I wrote down fieldnotes in a notebook, and after every session, I wrote extensive fieldnotes as soon as possible. Usually, this was right after having left the prison. All notes were broadly categorised to obtain an overview of interesting patterns in the data material, and as such, the analytical work started the first day of fieldwork. The code ‘sensing risk’ was produced during the fieldwork. The focus on sensing followed by observations of and talk about the importance of senses in the performance of work, and this broad code initially included everything related to sensing. The focus on senses related to risk followed by the overall focus of the study on how prison officers performed safety work.

After the fieldwork ended, I refamiliarised myself with the fieldnotes and generated codes again to ensure that everything was properly included. This included to ensure that all data about sensing was included in the broad code ‘sensing risk’ which was then extracted from the rest of the data. Reflexive thematic analysis was then carried out for this part of the data material. This analytical approach can be presented as a six-phased process: familiarisation of data, coding, generation of initial themes, development and reviewing of themes, refining, defining, and naming themes, and writing the report (Braun and Clarke 2019, 2022). However, the analysis was moving back and forth between these phases, due to the recursive and non-procedural nature of reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2019).

In the first coding of the data material regarding how the prison officers were using their senses, I attempted to use codes that were close to the empirical data. This was meant to reduce the influence of the researchers’ own expectations (Tjora 2021) and ensure that the analysis was grounded in the data given a shared professional background with the participants. When possible, extracts from the data were used to produce semantic codes, such as ‘having feelers deep into the wing’, ‘sensing the atmosphere’, ‘the air that crackles’ and ‘then you sense that something is wrong’. After this round of coding, such semantic codes were grouped together, based on mutual thematic connection (Tjora 2021). Sometimes, this process created the initial themes; sometimes, it was necessary to group the codes into initial themes again. The initial themes were further developed and refined, defined and named.

Through this analytical process, two main themes were developed: ‘Sensemaking through the senses’ and ‘Cut off from the senses’. ‘Sensemaking through the senses’ was constructed as an overall pattern of shared meaning (Braun and Clarke 2022, p. 77) across three sub-themes. This theme is quite like the initial broad code ‘sensing risk’ as produced during the fieldwork, but as a result of the analytical process, the final theme became broader than merely sensing risk, and the process of making sense through the senses is highlighted. Because this broad theme included a great deal of nuance it was further elaborated in sub-themes. The first sub-theme is how the officers constructed what I call ‘sensory maps’ through engagement with the socio-material work environment. This theme was based on initial semantic codes such as ‘we know what sounds belong here’, ‘unnatural sounds at that time’, ‘now I have acquired that sense’ and ‘you know with experience’, which were grouped together in the codes ‘development of a “sense”’, ‘sensory norm’ and ‘reacting to anomalies’. These codes were grouped together in a theme concerning the ‘construction of sensory socio-material maps’ which the officers used to navigate in the prison and developed through engagement in the environment. The second theme concerned how the officers’ attention was directed at prospective risks, based on the codes ‘scanning the environment’, ‘constant awareness to change’ and ‘readiness to respond’. The third sub-theme captured how the sensory sensemaking process was shared and tacitly performed within small communities of practice, based on the codes ‘unspoken codes’, ‘shared knowledge’ and ‘no need to explain’.

The other main theme, ‘Cut off from the senses’, was an initial semantic code that was ‘promoted’ to a candidate theme because of its richness and nuance (Braun and Clarke 2022, p. 81). This theme was built on initial codes such as ‘cameras do not catch the atmosphere’, ‘cut off from the senses’ and ‘waiting for shit to hit the fan’, which were grouped in the codes ‘sparser sensory experience’, ‘missing information’, ‘reactive response’ and ‘change from before’. These codes included the way in which technological solutions can be perceived as barriers to sensory input and, consequently, the ability of officers to make sense of what is happening in the prison environment quickly.

5 Results

6 Concluding Discussion

The present article has aimed to explore the role of senses in sensemaking processes in frontline safety work and how the constitution of the socio-material work environment affects the accomplishment of sensemaking through an expanded understanding of sensemaking as an ongoing, relational and embodied socio-material process. This contributes to a more distinct theoretical framework for understanding the sensory aspects of sensemaking in such work contexts, which emphasises the relational whole of workers and their environment as a meaningful context for sensemaking.

The results show how safety practitioners are making sense of their work environment in order to maintain safety, in which what is described as a ‘gut feeling’ refers to the specialised sensing skills of ‘reading’ sensory information in a work environment. Thus, in line with the broader understanding of sensemaking (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020) applied in this article, the present study indicates that the safety practitioners’ specialised sensing is sensemaking. This adds to sensemaking theory, which usually sees sensemaking as being about a more analytical process through thinking and talking (Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld 2005). Moreover, previous sensemaking studies explicitly mention embodiment, like emotions, as a precursor to sensemaking (Maitlis and Sonenshein 2010), as something that signals the need for and ‘provides the energy that fuels’ sensemaking (Maitlis, Vogus, and Lawrence 2013). However, based on the results, I argue that, in addition to being ‘talked into existence’ (Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld 2005, p. 412), organisations are also performed into existence through frontline workers’ occupation-specific sensory sensemaking practices. The ways in which these sensing skills were entwined and developed through engagement in the socio-material work environment over time has implications for the significance of experience in safety work and the ability to build a community of practice where these skills can be developed and shared.

Based on this relational understanding of sensemaking which includes embodiment, the results also highlights how the implementation of certain technologies could disturb the use of such sensing skills and consequently sensemaking processes, by reducing sensory input in the work environment and thereby the ability to notice weak signals. Due to technological development in many organisations concerned with safety, this perspective on sensemaking offers a useful lens via which to understand the significance of how the socio-material work environment is constituted and how changes in this environment can interfere with the accomplishment of sensemaking and complicate mindful organising.

The case study was a Norwegian high-security prison, which differs from many of the typical occupations commonly studied in safety research, for instance because of the coupling of safety and security concerns and safety as a main organisational objective. However, based on research in a range of completely different contexts of safety-related work, the results seem to have broad relevance. The present article has been an attempt to start theorising these observations, looking for similarities across contexts. Significant differences and similarities between work contexts need to be further explored.

For making use of senses for sensemaking, some characteristics of work seems important. First, because this form of sensemaking depends on sensory input from each specific environment, physical closeness is a premise, with the exception of contexts based on only vision. This makes it mainly a phenomenon among safety practitioners who are hands-on with the environment in question and may differentiate it from sensework (Haavik 2016), which is concerned with sensemaking through representations. Second, I would suggest that these aspects of sensemaking are mostly relevant for situations with the temporal characteristics of operational work (Almklov 2018) and not for systematic, analytical work like investigations. For many forms of work, relying on one’s ‘gut feeling’ would be the opposite of skillful work, and for most situations, there is a need to connect deliberate aspects to this process. However, the sensemaking skills identified in the present study can be essential for keeping people safe in situations where quick reactions are needed and for the fast transition between immanent and more deliberate forms of sensemaking for early intervention.

The present article has several limitations which could be complemented in future research. This study does only focus on the perspective of frontline workers, whereas other perspectives would be useful to add, particularly regarding the experienced barriers to sensory sensemaking on the frontline. How the processes of designing and implementing various technological solutions (in a broad sense and not delimited to digital technologies) is accomplished would be important to study considering the frontline perspectives as emphasized in this study. How the implementation of new technologies influence on risk analyses of work, and how this affects the working conditions could be included in this, as only briefly mentioned in this article. How such processes could be carried out in order to include knowledge of how work is performed in real time could also be explored.

The interaction between digital technology and people would be particularly important to study in more depth, in all sectors including prisons where digitalization has been late but are expanding. One aspect only superficially mentioned in this study is how the presence of digital technologies as alternatives (and not replacements) to physical surveillance can affect workers’ behaviour, and the possible consequences of such changes. While this study mainly focuses on disadvantages with various forms of technology, it would be important to study how technology could possibly enhance sensemaking in different contexts.