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Making sense of sexual harassment: narratives of working women in Sri Lanka
Author(s) -
Adikaram Arosha S
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
asia pacific journal of human resources
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.825
H-Index - 33
eISSN - 1744-7941
pISSN - 1038-4111
DOI - 10.1111/1744-7941.12154
Subject(s) - harassment , narrative , action (physics) , process (computing) , identity (music) , social psychology , psychology of self , sri lanka , psychology , sociology , gender studies , aesthetics , computer science , linguistics , philosophy , physics , ethnology , south asia , quantum mechanics , operating system
The purpose of this paper is to explore how Sri Lankan women make sense of their experiences of sexual harassment at the workplace using Weickian's ‘sense‐making in organizations’ as the theoretical lens. Drawing from three narratives of working women, the findings indicate how women seek to understand what is going on, through a complex and interrelated process of enacting, selection, action and reaction, where retrospection, focusing and extracting on cues, social processes and identity construction, takes place in an ongoing process of sense‐making. The findings move beyond previous studies by providing an in‐depth understanding of the multifaceted process of sense‐making in its entirety from experiencing sexual harassment to responding to it, in a backdrop of cultural norms and beliefs.