Making Sense of the Organization

by Karl E. Weick

Overview

This volume brings together the best-known and most influential articles on sensemaking in organizations by one of its most distinguished exponents, Karl Weick.

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• Brings together the best most influential articles written by one of the gurus of sensemaking - Karl Weick.
  
• Helps readers develop a thorough understanding of the sensemaking process - essential for effective management.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780631223191
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	11/08/2000
Series:	KeyWorks in Cultural Studies , #5
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	6.75(w) x 9.70(h) x 1.03(d)

About the Author

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).

Table of Contents

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