The Multifaceted Nature of Organisational Coping: The Case of Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change represents complexity in that events resulting from climatic changes can be concurrently abrupt and persistent. They can be simultaneously short-lived and decades long. Such complexity can push organisations beyond their coping range. Leveraging the sensemaking literature, our study explores how dairy farmers in New Zealand coped with drought conditions to the decade ending in 2014. By relying on interviews and thematic analysis, contrary to many previous studies, our findings suggest that actors relied on heterogeneous forms of sensemaking to cope: 1) coping through immersion; 2) coping through detachment; and 3) and coping through deliberate action. We also discovered that sensemaking was not limited to individual actors, but rather sensegiving was received from macro, external actors; namely, other farmers. Important external actors such as climatologists, meteorologists and scientists were discounted. The findings offer new insights into how organisations cope with climate change and we describe opportunities for future research.