Chasing fashion, losing meaning: emergent sensebreaking dynamics in new ways of working

Abstract

Management fashions such as New Ways of Working (NWoW) generate powerful discourses of modernity and progress that lead managers to adopt firm, unquestioned convictions about their necessity and value. However, the process through which these convictions are tested and contested by change recipients remains largely underexplored. This paper examines how taken-for-granted managerial beliefs driving NWoW projects erode and undermine change management processes. This study is based on an in-depth qualitative study of a NWoW project conducted in a large energy provider that stalled and lost its rationale. It draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with the project team members. The study develops the concept of emergent sensebreaking, understood as the gradual and silent erosion of taken-for-granted convictions that drive organisational change initiatives. Emergent sensebreaking begins from certainty, unfolds through an accumulation of disconfirming signals and culminates in disillusionment. Four mechanisms drive this process: indifference from change recipients, ambiguity from sponsors, contradiction from top management and dissonance within the project team. This paper introduces emergent sensebreaking as a novel analytical concept that complements the sensemaking tradition by directing attention to the erosion rather than the construction of meaning. It also advances a more pragmatic understanding of NWoW as a management fashion subject to emergent sensebreaking, which risks chasing fashion over meaning.