Sensegiving as mise-en-sens - the case of wind power development

Hervé Corvellec, Gothenburg University
Annette Risbert, Copenhagen Business School

This article intends to contribute to the conceptualising of organisational sensegiving. Based upon a qualitative analysis of how Swedish wind farm developers manage the permit application process for their projects, we describe in a first order analysis how developers contextualise and ontologise their projects and defend them against criticisms. To emphasise the precarious conditions of agency that govern the activity of developers as sensegivers, we introduce in a second order analysis the notion of mise-en-sens, a neologism that borrows both from the performing art notion of mise-en-scene and the fact that ‘sens’ can in French mean both meaning and direction. Mise-en-sens underscores that stage-setting and direction providing are key activities of sensegiving. In our concluding remarks we suggest that mise-en-sens could therefore serve to describe the activity of many actors involved in sensegiving, for example, project managers or entrepreneurs.