Celebrating Success: Dr Harsh Jha

Congratulations to Dr Harsh Jha whose paper titled “Field Position and Sensemaking: Prospective Sensemaking of Change by Professional Actors” has been nominated for the 2020 Carolyn B. Dexter Award by the Managerial and Organizational Cognition (MOC) division of The Academy of Management.

The summary:

Periods of field change are marked by contention and ambiguity, leading to extensive sensemaking and sensegiving by the actors involved. However, though the relevance of sensemaking during change is well acknowledged and extensively studied, most of the work has been focused at the individual and organizational levels. Further, comparatively less attention has been paid to prospective sensemaking, even though research suggests that prospection is integral to interpretation of ambiguous change. Even less studied is the relationship between actor’s field position and their sensemaking. This is surprising, as prior research suggests that fields are highly hierarchical and variegated structures and interpretation of issues may vary substantially across actors in a field. Even in research which explicitly explores the influence of field position on interpretation, field position has typically been treated as a unidimensional construct, e.g. based on Bourdieu’s notion of capita. In this paper I address these gaps in our understanding of the influence of actors’ field position on sensemaking by drawing on two dominant sociological theories of field – Bourdieu’s and Fligstein & McAdam’s – and developing a multidimensional conceptualization of actors’ field position. I specifically ask the following question: how does actors’ prospective sensemaking of change evolve over time and what is the influence of actors’ unique field position on prospective sensemaking.

I undertake this research in the context of market based reforms in English legal services and enactment of Legal Services Act, 2007.  LSA 2007 drastically transformed the fundamental structure of the legal profession in England as it challenged the three key pillars of an established profession – allowing entry barriers to non-professionals, removing professional control of professional organizations and challenging professional self-regulation. Such a contentious change provides a rich context for exploring the relationship between actors’ field position and sensemaking. To do so, I define actors’ field position based on two dimensions: structural position or capital (central versus peripheral) and membership of the proximate client field (individual versus corporate) and identify the unique field positions held by the four key professional actors as central—individual (Barristers), central-corporate (corporate law firms), peripheral-individual (small law firms) and peripheral-corporate (in-house lawyers). I examine actors’ sensemaking based on the coverage in legal trade media during the period of 2001-2006, coding 327 articles in total.

My inductive analysis presented two aggregate theoretical dimensions of prospective sensemaking of change in the legal profession: schema of change and problematization of change. I find that actors’ schemata of change is expressed through three different mechanisms: change outlook, affective response to change and market opportunity construction. I also induce three different mechanisms through which change is problematized – public interest, professionalism and bureaucratic inefficiency. My analysis shows that actors’ schema of change varies substantially based on the membership of the client field (individual versus corporate), whereas, their locus of problematization of change varies substantially based on the position in the legal services field (central versus peripheral).