Organizing ambiguity: intent and choice in sensemaking

The strategic employment of ambiguity within communication was brought to prominence by Eric Eisenberg in his 1984 essay aimed at countering the prevailing ideology of clarity and openness as competence in organizational communication theory and research. Strategic ambiguity is defined as the deliberate, intentional use of ambiguity in communication in order to create a 'space' in which multiple interpretations by recipients are enabled and to which multiple responses are possible. The observation that strategic ambiguity results in the co-creation of meaning arises because the ambiguity is not an attribute of the communication per se, 'it is a relational variable which arises through a combination of source, message, and receiver factors'. Thus strategic ambiguity is an intertextual phenomenon and situated so the production and reception contexts of the communication are inseparable from the message itself. In this paper we wish to explore in more depth, the intentional aspects of strategic ambiguity to enrol the recipient actively in choosing how to interpret the message. In particular, we are interested in strategic ambiguity as a social strategy in that its use is 'determined by its effects on listeners and readers and the consequences of these effects in shaping the speaker or writer'. To begin our elucidation, we will review the use of ambiguity in organizational communication and related discursive concepts in the linguistic, political and legal communication and, more recently, organizational literatures. With a few exceptions, the potential of intentional use of ambiguity in a creative sense in organizational discourse has not been widely canvassed in the literature and its existence may still be viewed as a problem. What is evident, with its increasing dissemination in the organizational literature, however, is that there appears to be some equivocality over the implications of the intentional implementation of ambiguity in discourse. We will explore the sources of the uncertainty surrounding what is, and what is not, strategic ambiguity. The confusion over the concept of strategic ambiguity and its implementation has arisen, we believe, because of two characteristics that are not necessarily taken into account. First, for its use to be strategic there has to be intent rather than coincidence in the formation of the ambiguous message, so we will summarise the literature on the notion of strategic intent, as inducement to participate, in communication. Second, the producer of the message must assume that the recipient of the ambiguous communication will perceive it as equivocal and respond creatively but possibly unpredictably to the multiple choices offered by the ambiguity. Thus we will review the literature on interpretation of communications as part of the notion that the intentional use of ambiguous communication is a social discourse strategy. Following this review of the nuances in the use of ambiguity in communication, we will describe a framework encompassing types of discursive ambiguity in communication with the delineators being the notion of intent and the perception of choice by the recipient. We will discuss some of the issues that are evident in trying to research different components of the framework, such as recognising intent prior to the communication relationship as opposed to labelling it as intent in retrospect. Irrespective of these potential issues, we believe this framework will help both to clarify the notion of strategic ambiguity and differentiate it from related concepts, as well as to further the understanding of, and potential uses of, this discursive strategy in organizational sense-making