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Making Sense of the Organization cover

Psychology

Psychology

Making Sense of the Organization

Karl E. Weick

A collection of influential articles on organizational sensemaking by the leading scholar in the field, exploring how organizations discover decisions, manage ambiguity, and create meaning from complex organizational experiences.

Difficulty Level
Advanced
Academic Level
Graduate
sensemakingorganizational theoryorganizational behaviordecision makingorganizational cognitioncomplexityorganizational learning

01 / Reading Guide

Reading Guide

Citation

Weick, K. E. (2001). Making Sense of the Organization. Blackwell Publishing.

Chapter Summary

This is a collected volume of twenty-one chapters by Karl Weick on sensemaking in organizations, arranged in three parts over roughly 470 pages. Weick views organizations as collections of people trying to make sense of what is happening around them. The publisher describes the volume as bringing together his best-known and most influential articles on the topic. Part II, the longest, is divided under five headings (Ecological Change, Enactment, Selection, Retention and Remembering), and each of the three parts opens with a short introduction.

Part I (Chapters 1–3): Organizations as Contexts for Sensemaking

Chapter 1, "Sensemaking in Organizations: Small Structures with Large Consequences", is the volume's anchor. It introduces equivocality and sensemaking in organizational life and develops the idea of committed interpretation: the commitment to interacts, their justification and the validation of that justification, including postdecision validation. Chapter 2, "Sources of Order in Underorganized Systems: Themes in Recent Organizational Theory", and Chapter 3, "Organizational Redesign as Improvisation", complete the part by taking up themes in recent organizational theory and by treating redesign as improvisation.

Part II, Ecological Change (Chapters 4–6)

Chapter 4 is "The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster", Chapter 5 "The Vulnerable System: An Analysis of the Tenerife Air Disaster", and Chapter 6 "Technology as Equivoque: Sensemaking in New Technologies". The first two take disasters as cases in which sensemaking collapses; the third treats new technology as a source of equivocal events.

Part II, Enactment (Chapters 7–9)

Chapters 7 to 9 are "Enactment Processes in Organizations", "Enactment and the Boundaryless Career: Organizing as We Work" and "Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations". They develop the idea that people help create the environments they then interpret, applied to organizational processes, careers and crises.

Part II, Selection (Chapters 10–12)

"Toward a Model of Organizations as Interpretation Systems", "Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks" and "Improvisation as a Mindset for Organizational Analysis" treat organizations as interpretation systems, look at the collective mind that forms when people on a flight deck relate their actions heedfully, and present improvisation as a mindset for analysis.

Part II, Retention (Chapters 13–15)

"Organizations as Cognitive Maps: Charting Ways to Success and Failure", "Organizational Culture as a Source of High Reliability" and "Substitutes for Strategy" treat organizations as cognitive maps, culture as a source of high reliability, and substitutes for strategy.

Part II, Remembering (Chapters 16–18)

"The Attitude of Wisdom: Ambivalence as the Optimal Compromise", "Management of Organizational Change Among Loosely Coupled Elements" and "Organization Design: Organizations as Self-Designing Systems" turn to ambivalence as a compromise, to change among loosely coupled elements, and to organizations as self-designing systems.

Part III (Chapters 19–21): Applications of Sensemaking

The closing part applies the ideas in "Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems", "Cosmos vs. Chaos: Sense and Nonsense in Electronic Contexts" and "Sensemaking as an Organizational Dimension of Global Change". Part III has its own introduction, and the volume ends with an index.

Key Concepts

Part I

  • Equivocality: situations open to more than one interpretation, which people must reduce.
  • Committed interpretation: sensemaking driven by commitment to actions and their justification, then validated after the fact.
  • Improvisation: redesign carried out as an ongoing activity.

Part II

  • Collapse of sensemaking: the breakdown of shared understanding in disasters such as Mann Gulch and the Tenerife air crash.
  • Enactment: people shaping the environments they then make sense of.
  • Heedful interrelating: the way people on flight decks relate their actions to one another, forming a collective mind.
  • Cognitive maps and loose coupling: organizations as maps of success and failure, and change among loosely coupled elements.

Part III

  • Small wins: breaking large problems into smaller, manageable ones.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

  • Concentrated authority. The articles are all by the scholar usually credited with developing the sensemaking approach, and the publisher presents the volume as his best-known and most influential papers.
  • Concrete cases. Mann Gulch, the Tenerife air disaster and flight decks give the abstract vocabulary of sensemaking and enactment real settings.
  • Clear structure. Part II is subdivided under five headings and each of the three parts has its own introduction, which helps readers locate a chapter within the whole.
  • Wide range. Topics from technology and careers to culture, strategy, wisdom and global change show how far the framework can be applied.

Limitations

  • A collection, not a textbook. The chapters were written as separate articles, so each stands alone and the framework is delivered in pieces rather than built step by step.
  • Built on earlier work. Chapter 1 opens by looking back at Weick's earlier book The Social Psychology of Organizing, so some acquaintance with his work and with basic organization theory helps.
  • Dated. The volume appeared in 2000-2001 and so does not cover later work on sensemaking.

Where It Fits in the Course

Read this volume after Weick's monograph Sensemaking in Organizations (1995), which introduces sensemaking as a fundamental organizational process. The collection then offers the ideas worked out in particular settings, especially disasters, careers, technology and design. Organizational psychology courses can use individual chapters as readings alongside more general texts.

Morgan's Images of Organisation places sensemaking and enactment within a wider map of organizational metaphors, while Schein's Organizational Culture and Leadership gives a fuller account of culture, which Weick treats in the retention chapters. Haslam's Psychology in Organisations and The New Psychology of Leadership offer a contrasting angle, since they use social identity to explain how groups form shared understanding. For a conventional textbook framing, the OpenStax Organizational Behavior or Spector's Industrial and Organisational Psychology come first.

How to Use This Book

The book suits graduate students and advanced undergraduates in organizational psychology, management and communication who already know basic organization theory.

Begin with Chapter 1, which states the framework that later chapters use, and then read selectively. Chapters 4 and 5 are the most concrete entry points because they analyze specific events. Chapters 7 and 9 give the enactment idea, Chapter 11 the notion of collective mind, and Chapters 19 to 21 the applications. Read the introduction to each part before its chapters, and keep a one-page note of the Part II headings (ecological change, enactment, selection, retention, remembering) to place each chapter. Use the cases as templates for analyzing an event from your own organization.