Discourse and Collective Symbols Shaping Sensemaking

Definition

Organizational sensemaking does not occur in a cultural vacuum—it is shaped by institutionalized language patterns, metaphors, and collective symbols that carry historically developed meanings and connotations. Collective symbols are figurative elements of talk (allegories, emblems, analogies) that exist at the level of "interdiscourse"—shared cultural knowledge that cuts across specialized discourses. These symbols enable identification and frame interpretation; they affect which meanings are visible and compelling to organizational members during processes of change and adaptation.

In the Book

Jordan and Mitterhofer's chapter "Studying Metaphors-in-Use in their Social and Institutional Context" develops this concept by investigating how organizational members made sense of lean production and total quality management implementation using different metaphors of change. They discovered that members used either "incremental/evolutionary" metaphors (suggesting minor change) or "radical/transformational" metaphors (suggesting major change), and that which metaphor dominated depended on how it connected to institutionalized collective symbols in the organization's broader cultural context.

Following Jürgen Link's discourse analysis, they define collective symbols as "figurative elements of talk" that operate as "culturally anchored" interpretive frames. For example, a ship in stormy waters serves as a collective symbol to represent organizational crisis or transformation—but the connotations (sinking vs. successfully resisting the storm) shape whether identification with that symbol enables optimism or despair. The chapter demonstrates that "conceptual metaphors were particularly powerful when they referred to institutions that enabled identification by virtue of taken-for-granted favorable connotations and by means of interpretive flexibility."

The analysis reveals a critical gap: while earlier sensemaking studies examined how individual metaphors persuade, they often ignored the broader institutionalized discursive context that gives certain metaphors greater power than others. The book's contextualized metaphor analysis operates on three levels: local (how metaphors are used strategically in specific settings), semantic (how they link to institutionalized meanings and collective symbols), and pragmatic (what value-laden identification effects they enable).

Why It Matters

This concept reveals that organizational sensemaking is not purely local or creative—it is constrained and enabled by culturally inherited vocabularies and symbols. Leaders introducing change cannot simply deploy any metaphor; the metaphor's power depends on how it resonates with institutionalized meanings already embedded in how people talk and think. The concept also shows that attending to the discourse level is crucial for understanding organizational change: if change leaders rely on metaphors disconnected from institutional collective symbols, their intended meaning will not gain traction in members' sense-making. Conversely, understanding which symbols carry favorable connotations in a culture allows leaders to craft change narratives more likely to enable identification and support.