Organizational Sense: A Notion for Studying Emerging Organizational Professionalism at Work

Abstract

This article examines organizational professionalism at work and in action. I focus on how organizational professionalism emerges in the workplace and what kinds of situated skills are involved. Organizational professionalism is explored in three dimensions (activity, politics, and ethics), from which the notion of organizational senseis developed. Organizational sense has three accepted meanings. The first accepted meaning relates to everydayness and ecologies of action. It has collective, material, and informational dimensions, and is distributed between people and objects. The second accepted meaning concerns the political dimension of performing a professional activity and its sensitivity (attentiveness, discernment, etc.). The third accepted meaning concerns ethics and examines loyalty toward an organization. The notion of organizational sense is illustrated by means of fieldwork with a population of internal communicators working in seven major French organizations.