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Cross-Disciplinary Scientific Foundation for Sustainability Chapter j 3 51

situation in an organizationally approved way. The emergence of other, non-
organizationally defined typifying schemes results from the breaking down of
the taken-for-granted world when the actors enter into face-to-face relationships.

The Actors’ Experiential Space: Organizational Lifeworld

The actors construct their reality, individually and collectively, but they do not
experience it in this way. Moreover, they see reality as if they live in an
external world independent of themselves. Through the language and typifi-
cations, we understand things as being natural and that society is something
“out there” that we cannot change. The reason for this stability is that from
our knowledge we “know” the world and that actions confirm us in a given
understanding of the world (see Hennestad, 1986; Silverman, 1983). How-
ever, the experiential space is not something that exists independent of the
actors and, as it is argued, it is through the actioneknowledge process that the
actors create their organizational activities and the experiential space.
Therefore it is problematic to talk about borders between the firm and the
environment:
While the categories external/internal or outside/inside exist logically, they do
not exist empirically. The “outside” and “external” world cannot be known.
There is no methodological process by which one can confirm the existence of an
object independent of the confirmatory process involving oneself. The outside is a
void, there is only the inside. A person’s world, the inside or internal view is all
that can be known. The rest can only be the object of speculation.
Weick (1977, p. 273).
The experiential space exists “inside the firm”: The experiential space is
the actor’s moving picture as constituted by the interaction and knowledge
processes. On the other hand, the actors are confronted with circumstances in
the experiential space that one cannot claim that they have invented and that
they cannot disregard. The actors exist in a society outside which they cannot
place themselves. However, the firm cannot be seen as a reaction on things that
happen “out there”: What is “out there,” is still an item for a subjective and an
intersubjective interpretation and understanding. In other words, the organi-
zational actions will influence and change the experiential space directly. The
central point is not only the product, marketing, or the economy but also
everything that the actors see and talk about: it is the way in which they talk
about it, and the way in which this talking creates a situation, actions, and
moving pictures of reality.
The actors have to understand how they create their experiential space and
how they can act sensibly. So actors who are conscious about the fact that they
create their experiential space will be less orientated toward what is true or
false and more oriented toward what is sensible in the situation. Therefore