Making sense of revolutionary change: differences in members’ stories

Abstract

Members of an organization that had undergone revolutionary, punctuated equilibrium type change were asked to tell the story of that change. Senior managers tended to make sense of the change as discontinuous, while individual contributors tended to make sense of the change as incremental. Three theories of individual sense‐making; individual agency, personal relevance, and strategic perspective are developed to suggest why individuals made sense of these changes differently.