Making Sense of Everyday Innovation at a Clinical Ward Through Narratives of Visitation Routines

This chapter demonstrates how participants make sense and form narratives of a change process in a hospital ward. It presents the theme of organizational change as a classical theme in organizational studies. The chapter also presents the empirical findings from an ethnographic study of an everyday change process in an emergency ward at a county hospital. It describes the structured and fragmented individual narratives about the changing visitation processes. The chapter also demonstrates how these different individual narratives provide a picture of the polyphonic sensemaking conditions of everyday change and organizing. It discusses a main sensemaking condition for organizational change in the form of different individual narratives. The clinical manager shared a structured and strategic spokesperson narrative of the good intentions of introducing the triage model at the ward. The health care professionals in the ward who had to translate the good idea for the triage into everyday routines told different stories about the implementation process.