stockholders in cyberspace

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STOCKHOLDERS IN CYBERSPACE Weick’s Sensemaking Online Andrew F. Herrmann University of South Florida

The growth of individuals investing in the stock of publicly traded companies in the late 1990s coincided with the development of new media outlets for equivocal financial data. Discussion board participants enact an assortment of messages, experience a number of texts simultaneously and therefore are always immersed within a multiplicity of discourses. One such cyberspace was examined to investigate participants’ sensemaking related to their financial holdings. Through the use of Weick’s double interact, discussion board participants make sense of and organize equivocal messages. For business communication practitioners, these sensemaking processes call for the creation of dialogic texts that engage readers on multiple levels. Limitations and future possibilities for research are surveyed. Keywords: cyberspace; sensemaking; stockholders; Weick; business communication

In the financial upsurge of the late 1990s, many new shareholders invested in company stock and equity-holding mutual funds (Mahar, 2003). The premiere of 24-hour news networks and financial news networks and the inception of new business and financial magazines such as FSB, Fast Company, and Red Herring, aimed at individual investors, contributed to increasing data related to financial markets and stocks (Cassidy, 2002; Mahar, 2003). As what politicians and newsmakers call the “investor class” arose, more individuals took notice of and invested in the market. As Maher (2003) noted of the boom times, “One-third of families with assets of $25,000 to $99,000, and one-quarter of those with assets of $100,000 to $499,000, made their first purchase between 1990 and 1995” (p. 115). The most vulnerable investors entered the market during what appeared to be a neverending market expansion. The growth of the Internet in the 1990s added another telecommunication outlet for financial information, allowing investors to research equities Andrew F. Herrmann is a doctoral student in communication at the University of South Florida. He thanks Drs. Rob Anderson, Bob Krizek, and Paaige Turner of Saint Louis University for their support. Journal of Business Communication, Volume 44, Number 1, January 2007 13-35 DOI: 10.1177/0021943606295778 © 2007 by the Association for Business Communication

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online and actively trade those equities at E*Trade, ShareBuilder, and other online brokers. The emergence of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the 1990s created burgeoning numbers of online cyberspaces where individuals could discuss any topic, with many dedicated to corporate governance, finance, and investing. According to estimates from 2002, approximately 580 million people are now communicating online (Cassidy, 2002). CMC is “the process through which humans create, maintain and transform meaning by interacting as users of computerized systems of communication” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 249). Examples of CMC include discussion boards, multiuser dungeons, and Internet relay chats (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002; Markham, 1998). Interaction in the virtual world, according to Robins (2000), “is about adjustment and adaption to the increasingly difficult circumstances of the contemporary world” (p. 87). Scholars researching online communicative practices have examined three particular areas of interest: community, identity, and relationships (Herrmann, 2003; Jones, 1997; Kendall, 2002; Markham, 1998). According to Jones (1997), virtual community must meet the following four conditions: (a) a minimum level of interaction among participants, (b) a variety of communicators sufficient to produce differences of opinion, (c) a common public space for inhabitation and interaction, and (d) a minimum level of continuous membership. Roberts and Parks (1999) examined the anonymity of CMC, which allows individuals online to experiment with and create new or multiple identities. Another fruitful area of investigation is how investors use online communication to reduce equivocality. Using Weick’s (1979) sensemaking, this study examined how as individuals and organizational members, investors in an online community attempted to understand mass amounts of equivocal financial messages from a variety of sources. These online financial communities are important areas of research for business communicators for a variety of reasons. First, understanding how people make sense of financial messages is desirable, given both the quantity of messages available and conflicting and confusing messages coming from various sources. Second, understanding what investors perceive as equivocal and how they reduce equivocality may help businesses create documents that help lessen equivocality before it occurs. Third, this research gives businesses communicators an opportunity to examine the porous connections between corporate discourse and investor discourse. Last, by embedding themselves in these financial sites, businesses can uncover investor concerns and address those concerns early.

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These online financial communities are important areas of research for business communicators for a variety of reasons.

The following sections briefly review stockholder research and then Weick’s sensemaking processes via the double interact, the act-responseadjustment interactions between communicative partners. Examination of The Motley Fool’s (TMF) Berkshire Hathaway discussion board revealed the double interact as one type of sensemaking process among discussion board participants. Following the analysis, I discuss the findings and future directions pertinent to the “collaborative community” (Kuhn, 2002) of scholars and practitioners. STOCKHOLDER RESEARCH: AN OVERVIEW

Occasional outbreaks of those two-super-contagious diseases, fear and greed, will forever occur in the investment community. The timing of these epidemics will be unpredictable. And the market aberrations produced by them will be equally unpredictable, both as to duration and degree. Therefore, we never try to anticipate the arrival or departure of either disease. Our goal is more modest: we simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful. (Buffet, 2001, p. 127)

Finance and investing are significant elements of our lives. In themselves, they are intriguing topics for laymen and communication, management, and organizational scholars (Fulkerson, 1996; Hawkins & Hawkins, 1986; Jameson, 2000). The publics for financial and investing information include individuals, investment bankers, mutual fund trusts, and securities analysts (Hawkins & Hawkins, 1986; Jameson, 2000). Currently, economists are incorporating concepts from communication, psychology, rhetoric, and sociology in what is called the new economic sociology (Swedberg & Granovetter, 1992). As Swedberg (1998) wrote, “there are also some economists and sociologists who believe the progress in the understanding of certain economic phenomena can be made only if interests and social structure are combined in one analysis” (p. 3). Economists are examining

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embedded understandings, group behavior, network theory, and cultural phenomena to further understanding of socioeconomic activity (Ruccio & Amariglio, 2003; Sen, 2002; Swedberg, 1998). Scholars also investigate individual investing needs and decision making processes individuals make to meet those needs (Gardner & Gardner, 2003). Whatever the initial reasons for investing, stockholders become owners of corporations. However, under current organizational structures, professional managers rather than stockholders run corporations (Micklethwait & Woodridge, 2003). Although they are members of organizations and share common interests, stockholders are geographically dispersed, voting via proxy and gathering only at annual meetings, if at all. They are connected to organizations as owners but are simultaneously separate from the day-today management of organizations. As such, stockholders are loosely coupled with the rest of the organizational system (Orton & Weick, 1990). Another fruitful avenue of stockholder research examines corporate impression management techniques as corporations create and manage image and identity (Cheney, 1992; Cheney & Vibbert, 1987; Crable & Vibbert, 1983). Because stockholders are precariously positioned with the corporations they own, researchers are extending their examinations of corporate impression management into the communicative areas of economic, financial, and investment research (Hooghiemstra, 2000; Kohut & Segars, 1992). In particular, attention is turning to research on audience use of corporate publications directed at stockholders, such as annual reports, which include obligatory financial and management discussion and analysis sections as well as nonfinancial information (Fulkerson, 1996; Hawkins & Hawkins, 1986; Miller, 1989). In the free market, the capitalization of a corporation is based on its share price, and share prices are derived not only from the actual financials of a company but from the perceptions investors hold about the corporation (Hagstrom, 1994). Consumers of annual reports and other financial information often have difficulty understanding the data provided, consider the information supplied ambiguous, and deem annual reports as inadequate sources of information (Courtis, 1986; Hill & Knowlton, 1984). Ober, Zhao, Davis and Alexander (1999) found that company communication in annual reports to stockholders contains an objective, forward-looking tone. Leuthesser and Kohli (1997) examined annual reports, determining that readers of corporate mission statements granted goodwill toward companies. Similarly, researchers have examined CEOs’ letters to stockholders. Research shows that executive letters from companies are predominantly positive, and those from companies with good financial performance are easier to read than those from poor performers (Hildebrandt and Snyder, 1981;

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Subramanian, Insley, & Blackwell, 1993). Narratives and stories in CEOs’ letters to stockholders project an active, responsible, subjective, internal locus of control for the corporate persona (Herrmann, 2004). The use of ambiguity is commonly found in organizational missions, goals, and plans, exactly the types of information contained in letters to stockholders (Yuthas, Rogers, & Dillard, 2002). Kelly and Zak (1999) ascertained that business narratives are important because they complement argumentation in specialized discourse and balance rationality with the emotional, the technical with the aesthetic. Jameson (2000, 2004a, 2004b) concluded that readers of business literature respond intellectually, emotionally, and visually to the texts they read. In fact, readers’ reactions to annual reports and other business literature depend “not only on their intellectual understanding, but also on their emotional interaction with the narrator personae and visual symbolism” (Jameson, 2000, p. 35). Stockholder reports are frequently nonlinear, incorporate dramatic strategies with a number of narrators, and use multiple subgenres, while using both verbal and illustrative discourses in their texts. All these rhetorical processes create the necessary dialogical reader-writer identities, which mirror “human relationships even when the subject matter is impersonal and technical, as it often is in business contexts” (Jameson, 2004a, p. 259). For business communicators, who work to create organizational images, CMC offers an interesting challenge. As investors receive multiple and conflicting messages from numerous sources, it becomes more difficult for a corporate rhetor to control its image. It is important to note that the Internet allows individuals the opportunity to make sense of financial information online in various cyberspaces. Although a number of sensemaking theories abound, including interaction process analysis, speech act, and relational control, each of these theories primarily examines communication on an interpersonal level. Because stockholders are owners of public corporations, I focused on Weick’s (1979, 1995) sensemaking, because it crosses both interpersonal and organizational levels of communication. Understanding investors’ sensemaking processes provides business communicators an opportunity to observe investors’ concerns, survey the assorted corporate and investor discourses, and address possible equivocal information in advance.

TAKING WEICK’S SENSEMAKING ONLINE

The theoretical underpinnings that form the foundation of Weick’s (1979, 1995) concepts of organizing are multiple and include information processing, systems theory, and sociocultural evolution. Despite the theoretical

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latticework, his conceptual frame for sensemaking and organizing falls within pragmatic communicative processes. Sensemaking is the reduction of message equivocality, that is, messages with too many possible meanings, accomplished through communicative action (Weick, 1974, 1979, 1995, 1998). Weick (1979, 1995) introduced organizing as a system of both individual and organizational behaviors. According to systems theory, organizations exist in complex and uncertain environments, and the purpose of organizing is to make sense of equivocal messages in the information environment (Weick, 1979). Sensemaking is about the enlargement of small cues. It is a search for contexts within which small details fit together and make sense. It is people interacting to flesh out hunches. It is a continuous alteration between particulars and explanations, with each cycle giving added form and substance to the other. It is about building confidence as the particulars begin to cohere and as the explanation allows increasingly accurate deductions. (Weick, 1995, p. 133)

Weick’s (1979) model of organizing consists of three distinct activities: enactment, selection, and retention. Enactment starts with the bracketing or framing of a message in the environment by an individual. Through enactment, the individual assigns importance to the message in the information environment. Accordingly, Weick (1998) wrote that enactment is a way to socially construct reality: The product of enactment is not an accident, an afterthought, or a byproduct. It is an orderly, material, social construction that is subject to multiple interpretations. Enacted environments contain real objects such as reactors, pipes, and valves. The existence of these objects is not questioned, but their significance, meaning, and content is. (p. 307)

Weick (1979) stressed that “reality is selectively perceived, rearranged cognitively, and negotiated interpersonally” (p. 164). If an enacted message is highly equivocal, organizational members select communication cycles, which consist of act-response-adjustment communicative interactions. As Weick (1979) explained, The unit of analysis in organizing is contingent response patterns, patterns in which an action by actor A evokes a specific response in actor B (so far this is an interact), which is then responded to by actor A (this complete sequence is a double interact). (p. 89)

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The more equivocal a message, the more communication cycles are required to reduce equivocality. Members use communication to make sense of new messages and what steps an organization should take (if any) regarding it. If the selection of communication cycles succeeds in reducing message equivocality, organizations can retain the process for future use. The process then becomes an organizational rule. However, as Weick (1995) pointed out, the problem with this process “is that there are too many meanings, not too few. The problem faced by the sensemaker is one of equivocality, not one of uncertainty. The problem is confusion, not ignorance” (p. 27).

Sensemaking is the reduction of message equivocality, that is, messages with too many possible meanings, accomplished through communicative action.

Weick’s model of sensemaking has limitations. Because making sense is an active ongoing process, its description and operationalization are ephemeral (Taylor & Robichaud, 2004). Likewise, making sense is a rational-actor model and leaves little room for standpoint, deconstructive, or postcolonial positions (Eisenberg & Goodall, 2003; Gioia & Thomas, 1996). Finally, sensemaking leaves emotion unanalyzed (Magala, 1997). Despite these shortcomings, however, researchers across disciplinary boundaries find Weick’s concept of sensemaking valuable. According to Magala (1997), the principal benefit of Weick’s ideas is communication and organizational researchers’ renewed concentration on the individual in action. Sensemaking not only bridges interpersonal and organizational levels of communication studies, it also crosses the systemic and cultural paradigms (Boje, 2001; Eisenberg & Goodall, 2003; Kramer, 2004). The elasticity and flexibility of sensemaking come into play as scholars have exploded the concept of the organization as a container in which communication occurs (Oswick, Putnam, & Keenoy, 2005). Rather, organizations do not have fixed boundaries but boundaries that are flexible, fluid, and permeable. Where exactly does an organization end? With its managers, employees, stockholders, or customers? There is no clear-cut answer to these and related questions. As Weick (1979) noted, “boundaries shift, disappear, and are arbitrarily drawn”

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(p. 132). This view extends the research of sensemaking outward, past traditional organizational boundaries, including the processes that occur online. Many financial messages are equivocal. Research has found that corporate communications generally “suggest and imply, but they do not lie” (Thomas, 1997, p. 63). Likewise, organizations attempt to affect stakeholders through impression management, which tends to emphasize particularly positive organizational data (Cheney, 1992; Crable & Vibbert, 1983). Some of the financial messages from online news services include rumor and innuendo (Cassidy, 2002; Lowenstein, 2004; Mahar, 2003). As Mahar (2003) noted, the proliferation of information has made it difficult to create coherent meaning: By the mid-nineties, investors were riding a wave of information, a neverending tsunami of news and numbers. No one could resist or stem the explosion of financial information—it became part of the cultural landscape. After all the bull market of the mid-nineties, like the go-go market of the sixties, was a People’s Market, and the democratization of information was part of the process. . . . as information flooded the marketplace it became more difficult to assemble the bits and pieces into a coherent pattern. (p. 175)

Equivocality, it seems, was everywhere. Weick (1999) suggested that sensemaking processes deserve attention by scholars particularly as they occur in action during everyday life. Given the tremendous number of messages in the environment, members of financial discussion boards need to discern what messages are important so they can make sense and formulate effective investment strategies. Likewise, business professionals need to better understand how their stockholders and other investors use communicative sensemaking processes to make their financial decisions, many of which will affect companies directly. Examining the fusion of sensemaking with CMC research provides scholars with a greater understanding of the communicative processes by which investors make financial and investment decisions.

Examining the fusion of sensemaking with CMC research provides scholars with a greater understanding of the communicative processes by which investors make financial and investment decisions.

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DATA COLLECTION, MANAGEMENT, AND ANALYSIS

The Fool, the Shire, and the WEB

Many online financial spaces exist, and many online communities discuss financial topics, including synchronous (real-time) Internet chat rooms at Yahoo and America Online. Asynchronous sites abound as well. One such financial community exists at TMF (http://www.fool.com). I chose to research TMF because (a) it is an established financial Web site, (b) individual investors populate the site, (c) the discussion board is asynchronous, (d) the discussion board is maintained regularly and is easily accessible, and (e) all posts become the property of TMF, simplifying the permission process. I chose the Berkshire Hathaway discussion board at TMF for specific reasons. Berkshire Hathaway is an exemplary corporation operated by Warren E. Buffett. The company’s subsidiaries are engaged primarily in the insurance business, including Berkshire Hathaway Reinsurance Group, Geico, and General Re, as well as many well-known companies such as Dairy Queen, Herman Miller, and The Pampered Chef (Buffett, 2003). Buffett, who combined the investing strategies of Benjamin Graham and Phillip Fisher with his own financial acumen, is considered one of the greatest investors: Over a period of four decades—more than enough to iron out the effects of a fortuitous roll of the dice—Buffett outperformed the stock market, by a stunning margin and without taking undue risks or suffering a single losing year. This is a feat that market savants, Main Street brokers, and academic scholars had long predicted to be impossible. (Lowenstein, 1995, p. xiii)

Berkshire Hathaway’s Class A stock, listed on the New York Stock Exchange as BRK.A, is expensive (at this writing, more than $90,000 per share). Berkshire Hathaway’s Class B stock, listed as BRK.B on the New York Stock Exchange, is approximately $4,000 per share at this writing. Given the high price of Berkshire Hathaway’s stock, I expected most participants on the discussion board to be serious investors. Data Collection

My data collection approach was simple: to gather discussion board texts to get an understanding of how participants made sense of the financial messages. A benefit of discussion board analysis is that the data set is online, ready for analysis. It is also the problem. One of the difficulties is the

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abundance of information (Markham, 1998). TMF’s Berkshire Hathaway discussion board is archived back to 1999, with tens of thousands of posts, and paring down the vast amount of data was a necessity. Because I was interested in the processes of participant sensemaking, I used threads of any length, which provided an opportunity to scrutinize differences between the individual enactment and group enactment as evidenced by the selection of communication cycles. In addition, I eliminated flame threads. In flaming, participants make derogatory statements about other participants (Kendall, 2002). Using these criteria, I maintained the primary objective of examining sensemaking related to financial messages. Finally, because of the daily inundation of financial data and the rapid pace by which these data change, I limited my data collection by date. In determining the time frame for the messages I examined, I chose a starting date and an ending date that would be common to all participants. One date the members had in common was September 11, 2001, with the World Trade Center attack and the stock market closure. Although the closing of the market was an important date, it was not sufficient in itself. However, by choosing October 1, 2001, as my starting date, I avoided posts dealing specifically with 9/11. October 1 was also the first day of Berkshire’s third fiscal quarter. I chose December 31, 2003, as the ending date because it closed Berkshire’s fourth quarter and was the fiscal year end. Therefore, I included posts from October 2001 though December 2003, because they offered the opportunity to examine discussion board threads over nine financial quarters using stratified random sampling (Frey, Botan & Kreps, 2000). I stratified the population by financial quarters (October to December 2001, January to March 2002, April to June 2002, July to September 2002, October to December 2002, January to March 2003, April to June 2003, July to September 2003, and October to December 2003). I randomly chose two discussion board threads to analyze from each stratum, using a random number table (Frey et al., 2000). In all, the threads entailed 427 pages of data. Data Management

The first step in data management occurred online at TMF. Discussion board posts can be viewed by date or by thread. I adjusted the view of the Berkshire Hathaway discussion board into threads. By doing so, I easily followed full discussions on particular topics in the order posted. I downloaded the discussions and saved and password-protected them in the portable document format, so that they remained intact and manipulation free. I also printed the sample threads, because I required hard copies on which to code,

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categorize, map, and take notes. I stored my running analysis as a separate computer file (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). Finally, online research has built-in identity protections. First, online participants use screen names, not their real ones. Second, most personal identifiers (e.g., age, race, gender) are unknown. Although these properties appeared to protect individual identity, I changed participants’ screen names to ensure extra protection. In the “Results” section, I use the generic pronoun he to refer to the participants whose screen names were not gendered. Data Analysis

In my analysis, there was one distinct set of data available for analysis— the discussion board threads—and my analysis was obviously discursive and textual (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001; Taylor, 2005; Tracy, 2001). As Weick (2005) suggested, the processes of discourse are often overlooked, because they are removed from the desired outcome. However, in this analysis, I examined the discourses as they were created in conversation. I looked at items referenced by the participants, particularly references to investment strategies, people, and organizations. I also coded for media references, including books, periodicals, and magazines, because these were likely sources of messages in the information environment. Although I collected data regarding content, it was incidental to my primary goal of researching sensemaking processes. For my Weickian analysis, I searched for act-response-adjustment communicative interactions. I examined the threads sentence by sentence to determine and categorize singular statements. I then examined successive posts sentence by sentence, searching for the statement types that matched the statements from the previous posts in accordance with the double interact.

RESULTS

As discussed earlier, sensemaking is the selection of communication cycles used by individuals to reduce the number of meanings in equivocal messages (Weick, 1979). A communication cycle consists of act-responseadjustment communicative interactions. The discussion board gives ample opportunity to analyze Weick’s (1979) model of organizing and communication cycles in the give and take of participants’ posts. The following are examples from three discussion board threads.

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Iiims: This is a quote from Buffett from an annual meeting, as printed in “Outstanding Investor Digest” Year End 2000 Edition (copyrighted): “. . . if we thought the dollar were going to weaken dramatically (and we won’t get those kind of thoughts, but if we did) we would buy other currencies . . . We don’t understand what currencies are going to do week to week or month to month or year to year. And we always try to focus on what’s knowable and what’s important. Now currency might be important, but we don’t think it’s knowable.” I’m just wondering what Buffett loyalists would make of this. How does it affect your view of Buffett and what he has to teach us? David2: One thing you need to remember with Buffett is that he is supreme believer in “Do as I say and not as I do.” I think this message is basically telling the normal Joe that he can’t make money trading currencies, but Buffett obviously feels smart enough to do it. He’s said things before in attempt to remove the normal Joe’s focus on interest rates, too. (“If Alan Greenspan whispered into my ear what they were going to do with rates. I wouldn’t know how to make money on that advice.”) Obviously, Buffett knows how to do it, but he doesn’t believe others can, so he’s giving them good advice. Same with his 20-Punch Card, junk bond investments, arbitrage, buy & hold, technology holdings, etc. Buffett gives good advice to the average investor, but he’s capable of making money doing much more complex things. Iiims: David2, although I can see your premise that Buffett may do things himself that he does not recommend for the average investor, there is a problem with this as an explanation for the quote I posted. That quote was at an annual meeting, at which Buffett is supposed to be explaining to shareholders how he runs our company. And although the “average investor” should certainly learn from this, the meeting is not a seminar for “Investing for the Simplistic Investor.” David2: Buffett tells us what he wants us to know. This isn’t the only time that he hasn’t disclosed details—usually when he withholds information he feels that it is in Berkshire’s best interests to do so (stock picks, acquisitions, insurance contracts, etc). However, sometimes it’s in the shareholder’s best interest. There are many Berkshire investors who are simplistic investors and Buffett is aware of this. He’ll never open up and tell us how he makes $1 billion a year in fixed-income arbitrage because he knows that some boob will try to copy him and lose his shirt.

The mention of this yearbook article is an example of Weick’s concept of an enacted message. In this case, the message was enacted at the individual level and then posted on the discussion board. The participant Iiims selected a communication cycle as he raised a question about the message, thus displaying uncertainty about the meaning of a quotation. This was the

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first component, the act, in the double interact as proposed by Weick. David2 initiated the second component of Weick’s communication cycle, the response. David2 replied to Iiims’s request for analysis of the message. By providing Iiims with previous knowledge of Buffett’s concern for the average investor, David2 reduced the equivocality of the message. David2 continued to explicate the message by quoting a similar message from Buffett. Equivocality reduction continued at this point. To clarify his position regarding the original message’s meaning, David2 rephrased his earlier arguments. Here, at the end of David2’s first post, the second component of Weick’s communication cycle, the response, was completed. Iiims’s second post illustrates the third component of the communication cycle, the adjustment, in action. This adjustment closed out the first communication cycle, the double interact. However, the second half of the sentence began a new communication cycle. Iiims was here asking for greater clarification, because the message’s content and the context appeared at odds and hence equivocal. The end of this post was the first component, the act, of a second communication cycle. David2 started the second component, the response, of the new communication cycle. In it he gave a number of valid arguments regarding Buffett’s seemingly incongruent and equivocal statements. This response was the last communication between David2 and Iiims, and therefore there was no closure to the second communication cycle. It ended with act-response but no further adjustment. A second thread in which the adjustment section of the communication cycle was problematized began with the participant Radical’s rather extensive post on his interpretation of three Fortune magazine articles about Warren Buffett from 1999, 2001, and 2003. I begin this thread at the point after Radical’s extremely methodological analysis, in which he opined upon Buffett’s suggestion that the market would eventually give 6% returns over the next decade or two. Radical: How realistic was that? (It wasn’t!) But in the Fortune piece yesterday Buffett said he was not buying. If the market-value-to-GDP ratio goes from 90% to 75% in the next 10 years, what will be the return for stocks from today? Again with GDP growth of 5% and a 2% dividend, the answer is about 5.25% per year. Now 5.25% is not too thrilling, which is why I believe Buffett is still sort of talking down the market. SW: “Which is why I believe Buffett is still sort of talking down the stock market.” I may be misunderstanding you but I don’t think WB trys anything to anything of the like. The FED has thrown everything at the economy, if it can’t respond, the implication is there is too much capital/production, and capital will destroy itself until profitability is restored. GDP may not grow

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at 5% forever, we may choose to consume less rather than more endlessly. Not that it will happen again, look at valuations of General Foods or Interpublic Group in 1979. How many bargains are there out there today? few and considering remaining economic risks, very few. Radical: “The aversion to equities Charlie and I exhibit today is far from congenital. We love owning common stocks—if they can be purchased at attractive prices. In my 61 years of investing, 50 or so years have offered that kind of opportunity. There will be years like that again.” Cassette: When I read Buffett’s piece in Fortune, I was and am still confused what Buffett meant by “very well.” Reading the Buffett tea leaves is always very difficult, because it leads to interpretations and reinterpretations and examinations of individual words. Does “very well” suggest “excellent” or simply “pretty good?” If “very well” suggests above-average returns, is it reasonable to expect the market to return to such a level to provide those tasty returns? If “very well” suggests something more mundane, well, then your revert-to-75% thesis is very plausible. I long for the clarity of his sex-crazed man in a whorehouse comment . . . now that was self evident! A stupid nit to pick by me, Radical. The guestimate also assumed interest rates would remain unchanged. He did say that if one expected higher returns, one possible way to achieve that result would be if rates fell significantly. That has happened. With rates lower, the market is cheaper by 25% or so, and possible favorable fiscal policy on the way. It seems to me the wind in the face of owners is now very gentle. One should still be choosy about what to own. And I still don’t believe the US will face a situation like Japan’s. The recovery might not be amazing, but I have a lot more faith in US industry’s ability to allocate capital. Radical: Of course you are right. And the fact that rates have fallen makes Buffett’s statements in the soon-to-be-released annual report, relative to his printed expectation from a few years ago, even less reconcilable. Also, I appreciate your insights regarding Japan since I know you lived there for a while.

Once again, mention of a magazine article exhibited Weick’s enacted message process. The message was enacted initially at the individual level and posted on the discussion board. SW enacted the message on the discussion board and began a communication cycle by questioning the meaning of Radical’s message about Buffett. This analysis by SW was the first component, the act, in the double interact as proposed by Weick. Radical then quoted Buffett to reduce the equivocality of his previous post. This quotation was the second part of the communication cycle, the response. At this point, another TMF member entered the dialogue. Cassette enacted what he believed was an equivocal message from the original Fortune article. He enacted a different message than the one enacted by Radical. Here

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again, adjustment was problematized, because SW did not reappear in this discussion board thread. Rather, Cassette’s and Radical’s communication became the dominant interaction in the discussion board. Perhaps adjustment happened off the board. It is also possible that adjustment did not occur because conversations in the discussion board are easily interrupted by other posters. Cassette now began the act of the communication cycle on his own, by giving examples of what these particular messages, in this case two words, might mean. In this second post, Cassette started the response segment of the double interact with Radical, to reduce the equivocality about Buffett’s 6% estimation of returns. Radical then adjusted to Cassette’s statement, the third section of Weick’s double interact, although he did not appear to agree with the conclusions Cassette presented. The discussion board participants’ disagreements arose over both equivocal information and opinions, of which there were many, and these could be argued ad infinitum. This following excerpt, in which participants discussed the stock option selling by Cisco Systems’ CEO John Chambers, provides an excellent example of attempting to make sense of the abuse of stock options. This third discussion stands well on its own as an example of Weick’s sensemaking. PennyRolls: I was watching CNBC. Well I see that the financial sodomization of shareholders continues over at CSCO . . . let’s see . . . you can just imagine the thought process . . . “Hmmmmmm . . . my options will expire soon and we’ve got all this cash the business is generating . . . so I can announce a share buy-back and sneak out with mine through the back door . . . dumbass shareholders won’t know the difference! It’s brilliant!!!” I’ll never understand how the shareholding public can put up with this by owning shares in a company which continually fights tooth and nail to continue screwing them. JimDid: Great post. I never trusted Chambers. Don’t ever trust any CEO who is constantly promoting his own stock. As crazy as it sounds, “The Great” Jack Welch had a lot of similar qualities to Chambers (without the phony West Virginia accent). Both Chambers and Welch are phonier than a three-dollar bill. I don’t know much about Jeff lmmelt, but he at least seems to be trying to “rebuild the house that Jack built.” CubicsRube: While I understand your disapproval of Chambers’ and Ellison’s styles, I don’t think a CEO excersizing his stock options and selling shares is a crime (or unethical) . . . Ellison is certainly egomaniacal and arrogant. But that doesn’t mean he’s a bad businessman—he built Oracle into what it is.

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PennyRolls: Doesn’t it strike you as just a tad bit odd on the timing of the whole thing??? Tell the public on one day that future growth prospects have improved . . . excersize your options at what is near a 52 week high . . . have the company take excess capital and simultaneously repurchase those same shares . . . if that’s OK with you and you’ve got no problem with that then by all means you’re free to buy CSCO. With Berkshire you know what you get—your dollar buys more intrinsic value . . . no games; no CEO cashing in as you’re buying the stock; no talking up the stock price; no group-think to cover the CEO’s ass . . . there is no “game” to worry about. NoBearJustBull: I love the logic. Why do they need to get so many stock options? To align their interests with shareholders. Why do they need to cash in their stock options and dump the shares? For diversification purposes, because so much of their worth is in stock options. So how long does a guy like Chambers need to keep selling for “diversification purposes”? After he’s cashed in $50 million, $100 million, $200 million, and stuck it in treasuries and munies and 3 or 4 homes including a big house at Pebble Beach, hasn’t he achieved the purpose of diversification?

PennyRolls opened this particular thread with a critique of possible stock option abuse at Cisco. Again, a message was initially enacted at the individual level and posted on the discussion board with added sarcasm. JimDid enacted the message on the discussion board. He not only praised PennyRolls’s commentary (“Great post”) but added his own opinion and critique by comparing Chambers with Welch as unethical opportunists. CubicsRube retorted to this message by questioning the premises on which PennyRolls and JimDid made their judgments: “I don’t think a CEO excersizing his stock options and selling shares is a crime (or unethical).” This communicative action added equivocality to the conversation. PennyRolls then quoted statistics and facts about Cisco’s stock to reduce the equivocality of his previous post. This quotation was the second part of the communication cycle, the response, through which PennyRolls attempted to explain why these option practices are misleading. To conclude, PennyRolls commended the management of Berkshire for being financially honest. Finally, NoBearJustBull began another communication cycle as he enacted PennyRolls’s comments about the deceptive practices at Cisco. DISCUSSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Participant sensemaking via communication cycles was apparent in the discussion board under investigation, lending support for Weick’s concept of message enactment. Many of the posts originated with or contained messages

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from various outside media sources, including CNBC, Fortune, and the New York Times, among others (Herrmann, 2006). Once a participant enacted a message and posted it on the board, participants often selected communication cycles to reduce equivocality. The discussion board threads, considered through Weick’s act-response-adjustment communication cycles, exhibited specific features consistent with these sensemaking processes. These communication cycles, which were selected by participants in an effort to understand the flood of equivocal messages, supports the concept of the co-constitutive communicative organizing processes involved in sensemaking by organizational members (Jameson, 2001; Taylor, 2001; Taylor & Robichaud, 2004). Many messages pertaining to economics and investing, not just those related to Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway, are highly equivocal. Individual investors who use discussion boards as one way to analyze and research company fundamentals must keep pace with the sheer number of messages presented in the discussion board threads, as well as their intricacies. Weick’s sensemaking model offers one way to analyze how investors use communication to reduce equivocality. According to scholars, organizational identity is the overlap between an individual’s values and those of the organization (Cheney, 1983; Weick, 1995). Through communicative processes such as sensemaking, employees internalize company values and assumptions. “As members identify more strongly with the organization, and its values, the organization becomes as much a part of the member as the member is a part of the organization” (Bullis & Thompkins, 1989, p. 289). This process of identification appears true on the discussion board, even though participants at TMF are not employees but investors and are geographically separated from corporations. Discussion board members create shared meanings, and these discourses provide the basis for collective understanding. Sensemaking itself enhances discussion board participants’identification with the organization through their discourses about the corporation, which creates individual commitment to the company. Of particular interest to business communication practitioners are the discussion board members’ sensemaking processes as they relate to the practitioner’s primary objective: to present a coherent narrative and particular image of the organization. As Kelly and Zak (1999) and Jameson (2000, 2004a, 2004b) have pointed out, readers react on many different levels to business literature, creating the reader-writer identities as they interact with a text. Although these experienced investors do read annual reports, 10-Q reports, and other organizational documents, they are acclimated to gathering immense amounts of information from other sources, financial or otherwise. Despite the use of certainty and soundly articulated

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narratives in annual reports, experienced investors acquire counternarratives, different perspectives, and otherwise conflicting information. These investors are interweaving multiple perspectives, multiple voices, and multiple textual experiences from more than annual reports. Hence, participants are in play between different and various textual discourses, and they use the double interact to better comprehend equivocal messages. Participants, in other words, are attempting to chisel all the various informational, narrative, and visual texts into one message that makes sense. Although it is not possible to eliminate all equivocality given the cacophony of different voices, business communication practitioners can strive to create a clear and concise dialogic text that thoroughly engages readers on these multiple levels. This research presents businesses communicators the opportunity to explore the connections and variances between corporate discourses and investor discourses.

Sensemaking itself enhances discussion board participants’ identification with the organization through their discourses about the corporation, which creates individual commitment to the company.

Although Weick’s conception of the double interact appears to explain how discussion board members make sense of equivocal information, the discussion board members did not always fulfill the third communication cycle phase, the adjustment, as would be expected. This failure may be due to the multiple interruptions in the threads as participants join and leave the board. Furthermore, once an equivocal message is made sense of, there may be no need to post on the discussion board, because retention takes place on an individual level off the board. That Weick’s retention process did not appear in the mediated group discussions is certainly an area to pursue further. Because it is possible to contact participants privately online, outside the discussion board proper, this peculiarity could be investigated through participant interviewing. Weick’s process of sensemaking is only one manner of investigating online communication. One possible in-depth and long-range research project could analyze and compare all the interaction analysis typologies,

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including Bales’s (1950) interaction process analysis (1950), Searle’s (1979) speech acts, or relational control (Rogers & Farace, 1975). Members’ sensemaking practices could also be examined through the lens of narrative analysis (Bochner, 2001; Herrmann, 2005; Jameson, 2001). Narratives pervade human understanding and are important across disciplines, including business, communication, psychology, and sports (Boje, 1991; Goodall, 2004; Guignon, 1998; Krizek, 1992). Similarly, network analysis could discover linkages, patterns of symmetry, frequency, stability, and multiplexity between dispersed participants (Monge & Contractor, 2001). A longitudinal study could examine why individuals voluntarily join and/or leave the discussion board community and examine the constant change in and among participants in the discussion boards, what Monge and Eisenberg (1987) called reorganizing. If the membership in the discussion board community is in flux, how does “reorganizing” problematize the concept of retention? The amalgamation of CMC and communication network research can be a fruitful union. Another question revolves around participant involvement with the information environment and investigating the varied environmental enactment processes of directed viewing, undirected viewing, and scanning within the discussion board community (Daft & Weick, 1984). Finally, research could focus on how investors manage the strategic ambiguity of executive communication (Eisenberg, 1984). Yuthas et al. (2002) found that the purposeful use of ambiguity is common in organizational missions, goals, and plans. One example of purposeful ambiguity might be Buffett’s use of “very well,” the exact meaning of which was agonized over in the second thread described above. What sense do stockholders in discussion boards make when confronted by ambiguous messages from business executives, considering that these messages attempt to influence stockholders’ impressions of the company? In warning investors that the financial world is often unpredictable, Warren Buffett himself sounds suspiciously like Weick: “Be suspicious of companies that trumpet earnings projections and growth expectations. Businesses seldom operate in a tranquil, no-surprise environment, and earnings simply don’t advance smoothly” (Buffett, 2002, p. 21). This examination of the TMF Berkshire Hathaway discussion board is one endeavor at understanding investors’ attempts to make sense of the vast amounts of equivocal financial messages in the information environment. The conglomeration of CMC, investing, sensemaking, and organizational communication gives researchers ample opportunities for further investigation.

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