Home / Lectures / Melissa Mazmanian, University of California at Irvine
Quantifying the Future: The Role of Collective Ritual in Future Oriented Sensemaking Through Budgeting

Melissa Mazmanian, University of California at Irvine
Description
Semester:
- Winter 2014
Speakers:
Lecture Time:
Fri, January 31, 2014 @ 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm
Lecture Location:
Room K1310, Ross School of Business
Speaker Webpage(s):
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mmazmani/Site/Home.html
Introduced By:
No introduction available.
Abstract
In this paper we explore an organization’s annual budgeting process as a ‘future- oriented sensemaking process.’ In so doing we articulate the critical role of ritual in guiding, shaping, and bounding how people create visions of the future that become reified and govern action. The budget ritual provides a regular sensemaking opportunity, one driven by a cyclical process rather than a crisis event, which legitimates action, channels attention and emotion, and provides a liminal space for contestation and constructing meaning. We further show how the collective temporal work of bringing together details of the past with hopes for the future occurs in the context of ritual. In outlining how future-oriented sensemaking through ritualized moves engenders a stable, coherent, and robust form of collective sensemaking this work thus has implications for strategy making in practice and organizational control.
Recording & Additional Notes
No additional notes available.