Sense-making Methodology Reader: Selected Writings of Brenda Dervin

Academic and perhaps overly dense, but the patient reader will find a trove of great ideas in Dervin's work. Today so much of Knowledge Management is limited to technical aspects and governance, without a proper understanding of the underlying principles and effects at work. The field would really benefit from a look back at all the great work done before the technology could catch up. Likewise, most peoples' knowledge of Sense Making is limited to Snowden's Cynefin Framework, and while a fine framework with powerful, practical applications, it's a remarkably narrow view. Getting back to Dervin provides much-needed context for everything that followed, and provides solid foundations for building strategies in knowledge management (ECM, WCM, etc.) and many other fields.

Excellent reference, I use this in my PhD work.

I consider this a book in two parts. The first relates to how the philosophical commitments and assumptions that social scientists bring to an enterprise or inquiry shape and inform their methods. Dervin emphasizes this "linking" by addressing the difference between methodology and method. In so doing, she undermines the notion of a "value-free" social science and suggests that the way to promote true interdisciplinary dialogue (that cuts across critical-administrative schisms) is to bring our a priori assumptions to the fore of the conversation. As well, Dervin calls for us to unpack our disciplinary "nouns" - those abstractions that we have reified and calcified by failing to understand or acknowledge the dynamism of concepts and meaning across time/space.The second part offers a theory of communication as communicatings in which the agency and social nature of individuals is counterposed against the atomistic, information-processing conceptualization offered in much of the extant scholarship. Although many communication researchers may believe we have "come a long way baby" from the traditional linear model of stimulus-response, Dervin exposes the lingering strains of this model and how it constrains our ability to develop effective communication practices.This is a book that should be widely read - not only by communication scholars, but by anyone interested in social science, philosophy of science, or education.