Socio-Cognitive Sensemaking for Digital Innovation: Enhancing Organizing Visions with Social Representations

Chasin Friedrich, Fielt Erwin

Zusammenfassung

With the speed, scale, and scope of digital innovation accelerating, it becomes increasingly challenging for organizations to make well-informed adoption decisions. Socio-cognitive sensemaking is seen as essential for digital innovation but mainly focuses on the processes within individual organizations. We suggest taking organizing vision theory, a native IS theory, as a starting point focusing on how organizations rely on collective learning for digital innovations and enhancing it with social representation theory to recognize the widening discourse in a larger community for digital innovation. The latter explains how the lay public uses common sense to get familiar with new technologies and helps us to propose a conceptual framework relating the organizational world of organizing visions to the public world of social representation. We presented specific implications of this view concerning the formation of an organizing vision, the role of early interpretation on legitimation, competing organizing visions, and the link between the organizing vision and the public’s vision of an organization.