This volume brings together the best-known and most influential articles on sensemaking by one of its most distinguished exponents, Karl Weick. Weick explores the process of how organizations discover that they face important decisions. Often organizations have discussions in order to see what they think, or act in order to see what they want - before they are even aware that a decision has to be made. The effective organization is one that understands this process of sensemaking and learns to manage it with wisdom. The ways in which people do that are demonstrated in chapters of this book. This important collection provides a valuable addition to the international literature on organization theory and will be welcomed by students and researchers alike.
This volume brings together the best-known and most influential articles on sensemaking by one of its most distinguished exponents, Karl Weick. Weick explores the process of how organizations discover that they face important decisions. Often organizations have discussions in order to see what they think, or act in order to see what they want - before they are even aware that a decision has to be made. The effective organization is one that understands this process of sensemaking and learns to manage it with wisdom. The ways in which people do that are demonstrated in chapters of this book. This important collection provides a valuable addition to the international literature on organization theory and will be welcomed by students and researchers alike.
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
Part I Organizations as Contexts for Sensemaking 1
Introduction 3
1 Sensemaking in Organizations: Small Structures with Large Consequences 5
2 Sources of Order in Underorganized Systems: Themes in Recent Organizational Theory 32
3 Organizational Redesign as Improvisation 57
Part II Components of Sensemaking 93
Introduction 95
ECOLOGICAL CHANGE 97
4 The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster 100
5 The Vulnerable System: An Analysis of the Tenerife Air Disaster 125
6 Technology as Equivoque: Sensemaking in New Technologies 148
ENACTMENT 176
7 Enactment Processes in Organizations 179
8 Enactment and the Boundaryless Career: Organizing as We Work 207
9 Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations 224
SELECTION 237
10 Toward a Model of Organizations as Interpretation Systems 241
11 Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks 259
12 Improvisation as a Mindset for Organizational Analysis 284
RETENTION 305
13 Organizations as Cognitive Maps: Charting Ways to Success and Failure 308
14 Organizational Culture as a Source of High Reliability 330
15 Substitutes for Strategy 345
REMEMBERING 356
16 The Attitude of Wisdom: Ambivalence as the Optimal Compromise 361
17 Management of Organizational Change Among Loosely Coupled Elements 380
18 Organization Design: Organizations as Self-Designing Systems 404
Part III Applications of Sensemaking 421
Introduction 423
19 Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems 426
20 Cosmos vs. Chaos: Sense and Nonsense in Electronic Contexts 444
21 Sensemaking as an Organizational Dimension of Global Change 458
Index 473
Karl E. Weick is the Rensis Likert College Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology and Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. He has written numerous books and articles, including Sensemaking in Organizations (1995), and The Social Psychology of Organizing (Second Edition 1980).
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