...therefore 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

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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 never-ending market expansion.

The growth of the Internet in the 1990s added another telecommunication outlet for financial information, allowing investors to research equities 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.

The following sections briefly review stockholder research and then Weick's sensemaking processes via the double interact, the act-response-adjustment 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 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-to-day 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; Subramanian, Insley, & Blackwell, 1993). Narratives and stories in CEOs' letters to stockholders project an active, responsible, subjective, internal locus of control for the corporate...

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