Framing Contests: Strategy Making Under Uncertainty

I develop a model of framing contests to elucidate how cognitive frames influence organizational strategy making. By using ethnographic techniques to study the day-to-day practices of strategy making in one firm, I examine the ways actors attempted to transform their own cognitive frames of a situation into predominant frames through a series of interactions. Frames are the means by which managers make sense of ambiguous information from their environments. Actors each had cognitive frames about the direction the market was taking and about what kinds of solutions would be appropriate. Where frames about a strategic choice were not congruent, actors engaged in highly political framing practices to make their…