Making Sense of the Organization

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).

• Acknowledgments viiIntroduction ixPart I Organizations as Contexts for Sensemaking 1Introduction 31 Sensemaking in Organizations: Small Structures with Large Consequences 52 Sources of Order in Underorganized Systems: Themes in Recent Organizational Theory 323 Organizational Redesign as Improvisation 57Part II Components of Sensemaking 93Introduction 95ECOLOGICAL CHANGE 974 The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster 1005 The Vulnerable System: An Analysis of the Tenerife Air Disaster 1256 Technology as Equivoque: Sensemaking in New Technologies 148ENACTMENT 1767 Enactment Processes in Organizations 1798 Enactment and the Boundaryless Career: Organizing as We Work 2079 Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations 224SELECTION 23710 Toward a Model of Organizations as Interpretation Systems 24111 Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks 25912 Improvisation as a Mindset for Organizational Analysis 284RETENTION 30513 Organizations as Cognitive Maps: Charting Ways to Success and Failure 30814 Organizational Culture as a Source of High Reliability 33015 Substitutes for Strategy 345REMEMBERING 35616 The Attitude of Wisdom: Ambivalence as the Optimal Compromise 36117 Management of Organizational Change Among Loosely Coupled Elements 38018 Organization Design: Organizations as Self-Designing Systems 404Part III Applications of Sensemaking 421Introduction 42319 Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems 42620 Cosmos vs. Chaos: Sense and Nonsense in Electronic Contexts 44421 Sensemaking as an Organizational Dimension of Global Change 458Index 473