“Oh yeah, we’re really in deep s*” From Sensemaking to Resistance: Making Sense of a New Planetary Regime in Business School

New climate and planetary disruptions confront management learning and education with a profound challenge: how do business school students make sense of a non-linear, uncertain world, and how does this sensemaking shape their agency? Drawing on 390 reflexive micro-narratives collected over three years in a required postgraduate course in France, this study shows that the pedagogical issue is not only awareness-raising, but the fragile work of stabilizing what a new planetary regime makes plausible and doable for managerial action. We contribute empirically by tracing how students interpret climate and planetary framings within a core course. Conceptually, we develop a dual, processual model linking intimate triggers, a threefold sensemaking process (cognitive, affective, political), and differentiated agency outcomes, while theorizing resistance as a set of distributed moves rather than a fixed attitude.