Karl E. Weick: Organizing

“The typical coupling mechanisms of authority of office and logic of the task do not operate in educational organizations.”

Karl E. Weick

Source: 1970s, "Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems," 1976, p. 17

Education

“The organism or group enacts equivocal raw talk, the talk is viewed retrospectively, sense is made of it, and then this sense is stored as knowledge in the retention process. The aim of each process has been to reduce equivocality and to get some idea of what has occurred.”

Karl E. Weick

Source: 1980s-1990s, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995, p. 133-134

Idea , Knowledge , Sense

“Action often creates the orderly relations that originally were mere presumptions summarized in a cause map. Thus language trappings of organizations such as strategic plans are important components in the process of creating order. They hold events together long enough and tightly enough in people's heads so that they act in the belief that their actions will be influential and make sense.”

Karl E. Weick

Weick, Karl E. Organizational culture as a source of high reliability. National Emergency Training Center, 1987. p. 98
1980s-1990s

People , Sense

“If an organization is to learn anything, then the distribution of its memory, the accuracy of that memory, and the conditions under which that memory is treated as a constraint become crucial characteristics of organizing.”

Karl E. Weick

Karl E. Weick (1979; 206), cited in: James P. Walsh and Gerardo Rivera Ungson. "Organizational memory." Academy of management review 16.1 (1991): 57-91.
1970s

Learning , Memory

“That’s what this entire book is about. The basic recipe coordinates with organizing in the way outlined in Figure 5.3 (saying = enactment, selection = seeing what I say, retention = knowledge of what I said). The organism or group enacts equivocal raw talk, the talk is viewed retrospectively, sense is made of it, and this sense is then stored as knowledge in the retention process. The aim of each process has been to reduce equivocality and to get some idea of what has occurred.”

Karl E. Weick

Source: 1980s-1990s, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995, p. 133-134, as cited in: Magala (1997, p. 321)

Books , Way , Idea , Knowledge

“Organizations are presumed to talk to themselves over and over to find out what they are thinking.”

Karl E. Weick

Source: 1980s-1990s, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995, p. 133-134, as cited in: Magala (1997, p. 321)

Thinking

“By loose coupling, the author intends to convey the image that coupled events are responsive, but that each event also preserves its own identity and some evidence of its physical or logical separateness. Thus, in the case of an educational organization, it may be the case that the counselor's office is loosely coupled to the principal's office. The image is that the principal and the counselor are somehow attached, but that each retains some identity and separateness and that their attachment may be circumscribed, infrequent, weak in its mutual affects, unimportant, and/or slow to respond.”

Karl E. Weick

Source: 1970s, "Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems," 1976, p. 3

Education

“When people perform an organized action sequence and are interrupted, they try to make sense of it. The longer they search, the higher the arousal, and the stronger the emotion. If the interruption slows the accomplishment of an organized sequence, people are likely to experience anger. If the interruption has accelerated accomplishment, then they are likely to experience pleasure. If people find that the interruption can be circumvented, they experience relief. If they find that the interruption has thwarted a higher level plan, then anger is likely to turn into rage, and if they find that the interruption has thwarted a minor behavioural sequence, they are likely to feel irritated.”

Karl E. Weick

Source: 1980s-1990s, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995, p. 48-49, as cited in: Magala, Slawomir J. " Book Review Essay: Karl E. Weick: Sensemaking in Organizations 1995, London: Sage. 231 pages. http://www.sagepub.com/mcdonaldizationstudy5/articles/Book%20Reviews_Articles%20PDFs/Magala.pdf," Organization studies 18.2 (1997): p. 324.

People , Pleasure , Feeling , Search

“Any approach to the study of organizations is built on specific assumptions about the nature of organizations and how they are designed and function.”

Karl E. Weick

R.L. Daft, Karl E. Weick. "Toward a model of organizations as interpretation systems," Academy of management review, 1984.
1980s-1990s

Nature , Study