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This introductory chapter seeks to familiarize you with some of the major trends of recent times that pervade the context of contemporary managing and organizations. Some of these will be familiar; others you may not have thought about. Managing and organizations are dynamic elements of the contemporary world, changing rapidly. Little stays the same, other than the processes that underline what managers do. What managers do is to make sense of these changes and other stimuli in the environments in which they find themselves. Doing this is called sensemaking. Sensemaking is one of a number of closely allied terms, including sensegiving and sensebreaking, which are constitutive of managerial work, irrespective of its substantive content.

We can differentiate between managing as a practice, as something that we do, and organizations as goal-oriented collectives, in which we are organized. To be …