Chapter 1 presents my “alternative fieldwork,” how I make sense of my predecessors’ fieldwork and fieldnotes. I introduce Xia Xizhou in its historical cultural context, including its colonial history and changing kinship, economy, and schooling system. I contextualize the multiple boundaries, identities, and relationships between the researched and the researchers and highlight children's agency. I recover the experience of native research assistants, not just as mediators between anthropologists and children, but as lively characters participating in children’s moral development journey. I expose the challenges of reconstructing this ethnography and the puzzles I encountered. I reveal the inherent ethical dimension of actions and interactions that made ethnographic knowledge possible. I also draw from my own experience and expertise to discern the voices, silences and voids in this archive. Throughout this chapter, I connect my discussion of reinterpreting historical fieldnotes to children's developing social cognition and moral sensibilities, which provides the foundation for intersubjectivity and communication in the original fieldwork and in the making of fieldnotes.

The preceding chapters reveal that a looming sense of crisis emerged in the BEF during and after the Battle of Passchendaele. Later, these weary men were faced with a major acute crisis – the spring offensives. Infantrymen were practically and psychologically ill-equipped to overcome this challenge. Using the concept of sensemaking, this chapter uses the records of a mix of regular, territorial, and New Army battalions drawn from six regiments to trace why men’s perceptions of battle may have changed and transformed. It charts their experiences during the optimistic days of early 1917, on the saturated battlefields around Ypres, amidst the chaos of Cambrai, in the tiring and demoralising winter of 1917–1918, and whilst facing the German onslaught after 21 March 1918. In early 1917, battle remained the imagined pathway to victorious peace. Yet, by the summer, the weather and Third Ypres left men’s hope of peace – and faith in battle – in tatters. The slow progress, casualties, and trying conditions convinced many that the war had become irreversibly static. These fears were confirmed as the BEF shifted to a defensive strategy. At the same time, esprit de corps was shaken by the BEF’s reorganisation in the new year. The work required to prepare the lines for defence was at the cost of effective training and the BEF retreated in the face of the German attacks. However, whilst the military outcome was sometimes in question, the spring offensives signalled a change in the character of the war in Belgium and France. Heavy casualties were inflicted upon the enemy, the army learnt on the job, and it appeared the conflict had entered a new phase. Somewhat counterintuitively, retreat and withdrawal rekindled soldiers’ faith in battle as the pathway to peace.

Employee resistance is often seen as the major force against the enactment of change. The literature has privileged the view that resistance, for the most extent, is the resistors’ own fault. As Ford and Ford put it, “the assumption is that they resisted a perfectly logical move.” I build on the approach that resistance to change is a form of feedback, to argue that, if organizations and their agents examine the underlying reasons, they will be better equipped to deal with the challenges related to resistance. In light of Uncertainty Reduction Theory, I also suggest that we need to move beyond the viewpoint that examines change as a one-off phenomenon and interpret it as grounded in the broader organizational life. Finally, and building on recent empirical evidence, I put forth a framework on anticipating intentions to resist future change that integrates the organization’s history of change, individual characteristics, leadership factors, and organizational factors, alongside important boundary conditions that influence the sensemaking process underlying the development of intentions to resist future changes.

Here I comment on the chapters that have formed the contribution of this volume. I note that this second edition makes contributions considerably beyond those of the first edition, in particular by devoting attention to the dynamics of planned organizational change, not simply its instigators and outcomes. In particular, the chapters contribute to several important themes associated with dynamics of planned change. These include ways of classifying types of organizational change, the importance of change leaders and the development of change leadership, the importance of both affective and cognitive processes (especially sensemaking) in change, the roles of several types of identity processes in change, and the recognition of temporal processes in change. The chapters show the salience of these dynamics, whether they are recognized or not, to sensitize scholars to look for them. I conclude by suggesting some possible new directions for future investigations of change. These include the use of process as well as variance theorizing, attention to change emergence, and attention to changes that extend beyond individual organizations.

Managers act as change agents on the frontlines of the day-to-day implementation of change processes at the same time as having to manage daily operations. This double role puts them under pressure to both implement change processes efficiently and emphasizes the need for tools and techniques to develop the change competencies of managers. This chapter addresses this issue by presenting a case study of a change management competency intervention. The intervention lasted four days of workshops and consisted of dialog exercises and serious-game simulations. The participating managers were presented with change dilemmas related to key change concepts such as change phases, change resistance/readiness, and balancing change and stability, with the aim to improve their change competencies. Drawing on interviews with managers participating in the training we analyze how the intervention challenged the managers’ perspectives on their change management and fostered learning and development of change competencies. The key role of sensemaking processes are analyzed to nuance and theorize the complexities of developing change competency.

Sensemaking is widely seen as one of the most crucial processes in crisis response operations. Frontline responders need an adequate understanding of a crisis situation to implement the appropriate actions. Gaining a better grasp of the situation requires acquiring more cues and avoiding premature commitment to a particular frame of reference. Ideally, operational members need to engage in adaptive sensemaking to achieve a perfect understanding of the crisis. Yet, crises are defined by uncertainty, which hinders a full understanding of the situation. The pursuit of a perfect understanding may also impede a rich awareness of the context and create blind spots. Thus, responders need to embrace some degree of uncertainty in their sensemaking as well, even though this is counterintuitive and demanding. The dilemma for responders is that they need to balance gaining a better understanding with embracing uncertainty. Frontline responders may deal with this sensemaking dilemma by pursuing a plausible understanding. A plausible understanding matches the demands of the situation and helps responders take bold action, but is also treated with an attitude of ambivalence, doubt, and modesty.

Augmented reality offers the opportunity to increase the fidelity of training. This chapter describes three principles related to fidelity that augmented reality can effectively support in ways that are difficult for other training modalities. The first, the Sensory Fidelity Principle, describes how realistic cues are needed for perceptual skill development. Training designers often need to make decisions about which cues require high levels of fidelity; domain familiarization activities can help guide these decisions. According to the Scaling Fidelity Principle, virtual props should be represented close to their real-world size. This allows trainees to practice important physical skills, such as body positioning. The Assessment-Action Pairing Principle describes how being able to seamlessly assess a situation and act yields better transfer of training to on-the-job performance than part-task training approaches that separate assessment from acting.

In this chapter, we examine the contribution of routine dynamics studies toward the management of unexpected events. In particular, we explore how routine dynamics studies have extended our insights into flexible coordination in the face of the unexpected and how such a perspective generates novel insights into the way people make sense of unexpected events, how they mindfully operate during the occurrence of unexpected events, and how improvisation is enacted as routine performance. In this review, we connect routine dynamics studies with research on crisis management and discuss how a routine dynamics perspective expands the research agenda for the management of unexpected events and crises.

Chapter 5 examines expert reasoning, with a focus on detectives solving murder cases. I introduce the data-frame theory of sensemaking, which argues that experts and novices share the same modes of reasoning, both relying heavily on causal models and simulation, but with experts using richer models informed by their experience and training. We also see how detectives use specialist knowledge and organizing structures, including chronologies, crime typologies and legal scripts, all attuned to the investigative context. Finally, I argue that most research on crime investigation focuses on how investigators explain evidence, but it gives us few details about how investigators evaluate complex evidence.

This chapter contrasts theistic and nontheistic interpretations of religion, with attention to Buddha, Confucius, Krishna, Moses, Paul, and Muhammad.