Publications

The purpose of this paper is to provide a richer process understanding of strategic change implementation, by illustrating sensemaking dynamics during change implementation and by reflecting on how a mindful organizing perspective on strategic change adds to this deeper understanding. To do so, we adopt a change recipient sensemaking perspective with the objective to identify salient hurdles of sensemaking dynamics. Through an explorative case ...

This paper seeks to develop a mid-range theory of change recipient sensemaking processes during simultaneous change in professional service firms. From a competence-based strategic management perspective, organizations develop strategic flexibility in order to adapt to shifting environments. How strategic flexibility is realized in a context of causal ambiguity represents nevertheless an under researched micro-foundation. Based on extant ...

Through a sensemaking lens, this article investigates the concrete appropriation of the so-called transdisciplinary learning communities-approach (TLC for short) as part of a Flemish–Bolivian university cooperation project for development. The article has its empirical basis in ethnographic research conducted between 2017 and 2020 on four campuses of the Bolivian university UCB. The primary data is the so-called organisational talk, gathered ...

Purposeful and systematic data use has a positive impact on the quality of educational decisions (Rossi et al., 2004). However, research has shown that Flemish schools make limited use of pupil outcome data, benchmarks, standardized assessment and feedback from scientific research in order to shape their policy and practice (Van Gasse et al., 2015; Vanlommel et al., 2017). In this doctoral project, we investigated to what extent and in what ...

In this dissertation, we examine how teachers and school leaders make sense and make use of school performance feedback (SPF) from external standardized assessments, and we explore factors that promote or hinder these processes. The conceptual framework is rooted in research on data-based decision making in education, SPF systems, and score reporting. We also incorporated perspectives from social and cognitive psychology, such as attribution ...

Formal achievement data such as test scores and school performance feedback from standardised assessments can be a powerful tool for data-based decision making and school improvement. However, teachers’ and school leaders’ usage of these data is not necessarily straightforward or predictable. In order to illuminate how educational professionals engage with data in their daily practice, from their own subjective backgrounds and within their own ...

The present study investigates how Flemish middle school mathematics teachers make sense of schoolperformanfeedback data from low-stakes, external standardised tests. We take an in-depth look into the interpretive steps they take, based on a conceptual model that integrates intuitive and rational aspects of individual and collective sensemaking and empirical data collected in semi-structured interviews. We describe the nature of these ...

The formation of concepts is central to human learning. Concepts can result from various experiences and interactions like formal learning in schools and universities, non-formal learning through games and workshops, and informal learning in everyday life. The concepts as formed are used as a means to make sense of experience, structure our actions, and support interaction with our environment. Concepts are personal constructions. As the result ...

In this article we critically analyze micro-processes of sensemaking during change implementation under a macro-level discourse of top-down planned change management, which we coin change managerialism. We demonstrate how taken-for-granted enactments of managing change interweave with organizational change discourses and how this subsequently inhibits sensemaking micro-processes. Adopting a reflexive research methodology, this article ...