@misc{9230899,
  abstract     = {{Title: When the Map Is Wet, Navigation Still Depends on It: Organizational Sensemaking and Digital Infrastructure Dependency
Course: BUSN49, Degree Project in Managing People, Knowledge and Change – Master Level
Authors: Clara Gerber and Ember Truppelli
Supervisor: John Murray
Purpose: This study examines how individuals within organizations make sense of digital infrastructure dependency when the infrastructure they rely on to coordinate and respond to disruption is simultaneously the source of the problem. Motivated by growing geopolitical instability affecting U.S.-owned digital infrastructure, the study asks what sense organizational actors are currently making of this condition and how the meanings they construct shape what courses of action feel possible.
Methodology: Thirteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with IT managers, technical leads, consultants, and organizational decision-makers across Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The data was analyzed using an interpretive, constructivist approach, treating interviews as sites of sensemaking and examining how participants extracted cues from their environment and assembled them into organizational narratives.
Theoretical Framing: The study draws on Karl Weick's sensemaking framework as its primary analytical lens, in combination with organizational change theory and technological change literature. This triangulation allows the study to address not only how meaning is constructed under uncertainty, but why recognized problems so consistently fail to produce action.
Contributions: Four organizational narratives are identified through which the same dependency is assembled into fundamentally different stances toward action. Across three of them, sensemaking produces accounts coherent enough to make waiting feel rational, extending Weick's framework by identifying successful sensemaking as a potential mechanism of inertia. The fourth demonstrates that this pattern is not inevitable, but depends on whether the interpretive framework itself is questioned.}},
  author       = {{Gerber, Clara Martha Michèle and Truppelli, Ember}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{When the Map Is Wet, Navigation Still Depends on It: Organizational Sensemaking and Digital Infrastructure Dependency}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}