Conflicting perceptual frameworks of conflict – sensemaking and enactment in conflict at work

Abstract

An ethnographic study in a nonprofit development organization illustrates significant processes of how both staff and management enact and make sense of conflict. The organization’s practice of framing ‘conflicts’ as ‘frictions’ sets the scene for how to make sense of conflict. Staff and management draw on five per- ceptual frameworks when making sense of conflicts: the defective personality, culture clash between departments, status inequality between organizational groups, absent leadership, and external pressure. The five perceptual frameworks are rooted in institutionalized meanings of individualism, egalitarianism, inequality, opposition, and adaptation, respectively. Additionally the article shows that conflict sensemaking may evolve from conflicting perceptual frameworks. Consequently, individuals and groups within organizations may not make sense of the same conflict in the same ways. While conflicts may have indisputable manifestations in clashes and arguments, these are peaks in a process that is, most of the time, enacted in opposing perceptual and verbal representations of what is going on. I show how some ways of making sense of conflict are more legitimate than others and I discuss power relations between individuals and different organizational groups and how power relations shape legitimacy in conflict sensemaking. I end the article by discussing the study’s implications for practice.