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Making Sense of the Organization - Book Review

Administrative Science Quarterly, Dec, 2002 by Roderick M. Kramer

Karl E. Weick. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001, 483 pp. $44.95.

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Simon (1991: 275) once proposed that the aim of science is to find "meaningful simplicity in the midst of disorderly complexity." Simon's sentiment finds considerable resonance in Weick's reflections on the primary impulse driving his own research on organizations over the past several decades. The central idea behind his approach to theory building, he noted, has been "to find patterns that edit particulars into a more compact summary that allows people (including theorists) to anticipate and thread their way through the complexities of everyday social life" (Weick, 1992: 172). Weick's sustained success at this ambitious enterprise is amply showcased in this important compilation of his major theoretical and empirical pieces. This impressive volume brings together under one cover a lifetime of spectacularly original work by one of the field's leading organizational theorists. In so doing, the book serves several useful functions. For the organizational scholar already conversant with Weick's work, this collection will be welcomed as a handy reference book that instantly renders his large, eclectic, and heretofore widely scattered body of writings more accessible. For newcomers to Weick's work, this well-organized volume will assist them in more readily appreciating the depth and nuance of his highly original and provocative approach to the study and understanding of organizations.

Even under the best of circumstances, providing a crisp characterization of a large, complex body of scholarly work can be a daunting task. It is at least doubly so when the author is Weick. A compact summary of his ideas is difficult to pull off. The difficulty begins with the fact that his view of organizations is hardly conventional. He likens the task of making sense of organizational life to figuring out the rules, processes, and outcomes of a rather unordinary soccer game:

Imagine that you're either the referee, coach, player or spectator at an unconventional soccer match: the field for the game is round; there are several goals scattered haphazardly around the circular field; people can enter and leave the game whenever they want; they can say "that's my goal" whenever they want to, as many times as they want to, and for as many goals as they want to; the entire game takes place on a sloped field, and the game is played as it if makes sense. (p. 32)

This is the universe for which Weick attempts to provide a cosmology. It's obviously not your average universe, and the cosmology he conjures up to explain it is far from orthodox fare. First, what counts as data in Weick's world--firefighting crews dropping their tools as they flee from suddenly and unexpectedly out-of-control wildfires, airplanes colliding inexplicably while still taxiing on airport tarmacs, or jazz quartets improvising--is quite different from what we find almost anywhere else in the literature. Moreover, the constructs he provides us with for making sense of these data--bricolage, heedful interaction, collective mind, virtual role systems, the attitude of wisdom, and cosmology episodes--seem to enjoy a different epistemological status than the independent and dependent variables we are so accustomed to coming across in the organizational sciences. They're harder to grasp, lend themselves less readily to compact summary in the standard tables that adorn our journals, and seem to have no p values attached to them, yet, ironically--or perhaps revealingly--there is never a feeling of insignificance surrounding them.

Happily for the dutiful reviewer, even if the content of this remarkable book ranges widely, its organization is easy enough to describe compactly. Part 1 examines organizations as contexts for sensemaking and introduces many of Weick's most important and enduring ideas. Among them is the proposition that thinking about organizing as a dynamic process carries us further than thinking about organizations as static entities and the notion that small structures and processes tend to enlarge to produce large and often unanticipated consequences. Weick also notes that stable segments in organizations tend to be small and less common than we might like. Even hard-won moments of clarity, he adds, are often not stable or enduring: "No sooner do people make sense of the world," he suggests, "than that sense is out of date" (p. 356). Finally, he points out that there is often less rationality in organizing than meets the eye (although Watts and Strogatz's, 1998, work on the organization of small worlds suggests that there may be more organization in what initially seems random or chaotic than meets the eye).

In part 2, Weick systematically explicates the psychological, social, and organizational components of sensemaking. Despite the impressive diversity of contexts represented by these pieces, there are a number of recurring themes. Weick repeatedly draws attention, for example, to the role surprises play in the sensemaking enterprise. Sensemaking is often triggered, he notes, when events violate expectancies. Thus, the occasions that prompt sensemaking tend to be thrust upon us when we least expect them and when our standard tools and maps don't seem to fit. It's not, as he puts it, deja vu but rather vu ja de. In this respect, sensemaking is seldom a leisurely or idle pursuit. It is nothing like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, one piece at a time, with little sense of urgency. Rather, success and even survival hinge on people desperately trying to size up situations hurriedly in the hope of discovering just what they are dealing with, while simultaneously having to act on their hunches in the hope of forestalling further unraveling of the situation. When the unanticipated trumps the expected, Weick shows, sensemaking often unravels quickly as people abandon the maps and tools they normally rely on for getting by in the world. His analyses of what can happen under such circumstances are full of counterintuitive insights and startling propositions, such as the idea that fresh firefighting crews may create more chaos and be in greater danger than the physically exhausted and cognitively numbed crews they are supposed to relieve.

Business Services Industry

Making Sense of the Organization - Book Review

Administrative Science Quarterly, Dec, 2002 by Roderick M. Kramer

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