Fat Cats? : A Case for the Swedish Managers' Making Sense of the Developing Markets

Sammanfattning: In this thesis, I report a set of four studies designed to enhance the understanding of how managers of multinational enterprises (MNEs) perceive and make sense of their business environment under the conditions of gradual, long term environmental change. The focus lies on immanent sensemaking, a process occurring under the conditions of such an environmental change, which fails to give rise to a cosmology episode and consequently energise sensemaking as it has been traditionally understood. More specifically, the investigation is set on the evolution of Swedish MNE managers’ mental frames reflecting the growing importance of what is called developing markets.In the first study, I offer a qualitative probe into the mental frames held by five top managers of a selected MNE. The managers were interviewed and from these interviews, the managers’ mental frames were reconstructed. This study follows a design commonly used in sensemaking research.In the second study, I track the evolution of mental frames of top executives as expressed in CEOs’ letters to shareholders in a sample of 22 largest Swedish MNEs between 1991 and 2015. I juxtapose this with macroeconomic data reflecting the investigated environmental change.In the third study, I use the same data to investigate the intensity of sensemaking activities of the managers over the years.In the fourth study, I report results of a cluster analysis of the investigated companies.With the use of methods borrowed from psychological research, these four studies allow me to extend the sensemaking perspective to incorporate what is called immanent sensemaking, i.e. a sensemaking activity of low intensity and low cognitive strain, which allows for modification of extant mental frames in the face of slowly paced environmental changes which are unlikely to energise what is called episodic sensemaking, i.e. intensive, strenuous cognitive activity. I also offer an early attempt at conducting a sensemaking investigation of data of quantitative character.