Sensemaking at Sea: How Alaskan Fishing Captains Interrelate with Natural Systems.

[摘要] This dissertation employs organizational theory to extend our understanding of commercial fishing processes, and it employs commercial fishing processes to extend our understanding of organizational theory. Based on a case study of a trawl fleet operating in the Gulf of Alaska (GOA), I examine how vessel captains make sense of natural systems as they attempt to extract resources from them. My study design involved using ethnographic methods and grounded theory-based analyses to develop a theoretical model of sensemaking at sea, and then applying that model to an extreme event. Charged with efficiently interrelating with indeterminate systems, captains merge concrete and abstract elements of their experience, and draw from interrelated past and future events in order to tell a congruent story of what is happening, from which they produce a plausible conjecture of what can happen next. To increase their capacity to engage in this ;;abductive sensemaking,’ trawl captains share past experiences as well as engage in shared abductive sensemaking events. Using this theoretical model, I analyzed a bycatch event that occurred in the 2010 pollock trawl fisheries in the GOA. ;;Bycatch’ is fish that is caught while a captain is targeting another species, and which is wasted. In this event, trawl captains caught over 28 thousand Chinook salmon while fishing or pollock, which was 165 times the amount they caught in the same fishery in 2009, and which pushed the annual amount of Chinook bycatch over 50 thousand, violating the Endangered Species Act. It is apparent that captains experienced indeterminacy regarding Chinook salmon, but did not incorporate that indeterminacy into their abductive sensemaking of where and when to fish. In the aftermath of this event, regulators created an annual Chinook salmon bycatch limit, which was meant to interject a source of incongruence into captains’ abductive sensemaking. Thus, regulators created a ;;sensemaking incentive.’ Future research should examine interrelationships between sensemaking and economic models of decision making, and regulators should manage abductive sensemaking processes first, and decision-making second, for my findings demonstrate that decision-making processes are abstractions from more complex and concrete abductive sensemaking processes.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Natural Resources and Environment

[关键词] sensemaking;Natural Resources and Environment;Science;Natural Resources and Environment