Making Sense of the Organization, Volume 2: The Impermanent Organization

ISBN-13: 9780470742204 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 312 str.

Karl E. (University of Michigan) Weick

Opis

Making Sense of the Organization elaborates on the influential idea that organizations are interpretation systems that scan, interpret, and learn. These selected essays represent a new approach to the way managers learn and act in response to their environment and the way organizational change evolves. Readers of this volume will find a wealth of examples and insights which go well beyond thinking and cognition to explain action. The author's ideas are at the forefront of our thinking on leadership, teams, and the management of change. "This book engages the puzzle of impermanence in organizing. Through rich examples, evocative language, artful literature citing, and imaginative connecting, Weick re-introduces core ideas and themes around attending, interpreting, acting and learning to unlock new insights about impermanent organizing. The wisdom in this book is timeless and timely. It prods scholars and managers of organizations to complicate their views of organizing in ways that enrich thought and action." - Jane E. Dutton, Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Professor, University of Michigan

Spis treści

Preface.

Acknowledgments.

PART I INTRODUCTION.

1. Organized Impermanence: An Overview.

2. Mundane Poetics: Searching for Wisdom in Organizational Theory.

3. Faith, Evidence, and Action: Better Guesses in an Unknowable World.

PART II ATTENDING.

4. Managing the Unexpected: Complexity as Distributed Sensemaking.

5. Information Overload Revisited (Kathleen M. Sutcliffe and Karl. E Weick).

6. Organizing for Mindfulness: Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge (Karl E. Weick and Ted Putnam).

PART III INTERPRETATION.

7. Making Sense of Blurred Images: Mindful Organizing in Mission STS–107.

8. Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking (Karl E. Weick, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld).

9. Impermanent Systems and Medical Errors: Variety Mitigates Adversity.

PART IV ACTION.

10. Hospitals as Cultures of Entrapment: A Re–analysis of the Bristol Royal Infirmary (Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe).

11. Enacting an Environment: The Infrastructure of Organizing.

12. Positive Organizing and Organizational Tragedy.

PART V LEARNING AND CHANGE.

13. Emergent Change as a Universal in Organizations.

14. Drop Your Tools: An Allegory for Organizational Studies.

15. Leadership as the Legitimation of Doubt.

Epilogue.

References.

Index.

O autorze

Karl Weick is the Rensis Likert College Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan.

He is one of the leading figures in the American Academy of Management and he is seen by many as one of the most influential thinkers and writers in the field.

Blurb

The seeming permanence of organizations conceals an endless cycle of interruptions, recoveries, and re–organizing. This fundamental cycle is explored in a series of essays that focus on ways in which people organize their attention, interpretations, actions, and learning in order to cope with impermanence. Coping is explored in settings such as the spread of a puzzling virus, a foam strike on the space shuttle, excess deaths following pediatric surgery, wildland fires that suddenly explode, and the misidentification of fingerprints in a crime lab. Recovery from events such as these tends to be rough. The fixes made in the name of recovery tend to be transient and eventually give way to new interruptions, new challenges for sensemaking, and renewed efforts to reorganize. The purpose of these essays is to render the challenges less mysterious.