Influence in marketing channels: A sense‐making investigation

Abstract The article compares cognitivist and constructionist approaches to organizational sense making. Following constructionist theory, linguistic analysis is applied to two narratives told by car dealers. The stories are about one incident in their marketing network. The narrative interpretation relates the degree of influence each narrator seeks to the way each makes sense of the network and constructs the network in their story. Whilst the article argues that structural factors in a network or channel and ways of sense making may be related, it highlights the importance to channel managers of an understanding of ways of sense making. Attempts to address actions within the channel must resonate with the existing sense making of channel actors. The contribution and the challenge of a sense‐making perspective to extant channel theory are discussed. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.