1 What is sense-making? What is framing?
Sense-making is at the heart of social psychology. But if social psychology is about making sense of how people make sense of their world, then what is sense-making?
Sense-making is the transformation of our relation to things into human sense. It is the process through which our relations, actions and experiences gain meaning and become communicable. This section will introduce you to a concept at the heart of the sense-making process: framing.
This concept is an important device for sense-making. But, before you look at how framing shapes sense-making, you will begin by asking: ‘What is a frame?’
What is a frame?
Think of a framed picture hanging on a wall (like that shown in Figure 1, for example). In the image you are thinking of, the frame is likely a wooden, metal or plastic structure surrounding the picture. But what is this structure doing? Here, the frame facilitates and shapes sense-making by supplying boundaries. For the sense-making observer, the frame’s boundaries distinguish between what is included within the picture and what is not. The frame is not part of the picture, but neither does it belong to the wall. It is a kind of threshold object that helps differentiate the picture from the wall.
While a picture frame is material and quite static, the concept of framing also serves as a useful analogy in more dynamic situations. Think, for example, of how a conversation between two neighbours can be framed. For example, it might start and end with polite rituals like ‘Hello, nice weather we’ve been having …’ and ‘Well, it was lovely to chat. I hope you have a nice day.’ The conversation takes place in the time between these two rituals. In other words, the rituals provide a ‘frame’. In this case, the frame is not simply spatial (like a picture frame) but temporal. It begins with a ‘greeting’ and ends with a ‘parting’.
Conversations can also involve a further layer of contextual framing. For example, what someone says after a greeting can frame the topic to come. Imagine, for example, if one neighbour says, ‘By the way, about that cooking pot I borrowed... ’ This remark frames the interlocutors’ expectations of what their conversation will be about – in this case, the borrowed pot.
Frames, then, are not just brute ‘things’. Rather, they function as devices. More specifically, they function as devices which limit and lend structure to sense-making, thereby shaping how sense-making is likely to unfold. Once you start thinking of frames like this, you might start finding them everywhere!
Still, an important question remains: is a frame merely something extra and essentially unnecessary (like the decorative frame without which the painting would still be a painting) or of merely conventional importance (like the saying of ‘goodbye’ which allows us to part ways)? Or is it that framing is actually something fundamental to the activity of sense-making? After all, a decorative frame around some doodle may serve to define the doodle as a work of art – as would, in a wider sense, the institutional frame provided by the presence of an art gallery hosting the doodle!
In the next section you will think more about framing as a device for sense-making.