ABSTRACT
In contrast to the individual cognition or artefact-driven views, other approaches assert that sensemaking is a social process whereby a common understanding of the task and mental representations are distributed across the members of a group (Thompson and Fine 1999). This socially shared cognition interpretation takes the view that external media (artefacts) are only involved in social processes to the extent that they are co-opted by the group for communication purposes, to enable the sharing of perceptions, beliefs and intentions to create similarity across individuals’ cognitions (Heylighen et al. 2004). Weick (1995) views sensemaking as firmly grounded in social activity, taking the organisation as the level of analysis. When viewed in terms of collaborative networks (i.e. communities of practice and exploration networks), this may explain how sensemaking can be conducted as a systems-level activity. Socially distributed cognition is primarily concerned with the properties of wider systems that emerge through the
co-ordination and communication of human agents. In other words, socially distributed cognition ‘…includes phenomena that emerge in social interactions as well as interactions between people and structure in their environments’ (Hollan et al. 2000, p. 177).
