THEORIST

                                       

KARL EDWARD WEICK

       (born October 31, 1936 in Warsaw, Indiana) is an American organizational theorist who is noted for introducing the notions of "loose coupling", "mindfulness", and "sensemaking" into organizational studies.

    The Rensis Likert College Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology and Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. 

I N T R O D U C T I O N

• Karl Weick focuses on the common process of organizing  rather than the static structure of the organization 
• He equates organizing with information processing.
• Weick's model of organizing describes how people make sense out of these confusing verbal inputs 

Weick's idea of organizing as a way to make sense out of equivocal information at first seems conceptually close to Shannon and Weaver's information theory and Berger's uncertainty reduction theory.

Uncertainty denotes a lack of information. 

Equivocality refers to situations where people face the choice of two or more alternative interpretations. 

When information is equivocal, people need a context or framework to help them sort through the data. 

 Face-to-face interaction is critical when an organization faces equivocal information.

 Weick agrees that Universities are loosely coupled.

Requisite variety is the degree of complexity and diversity an organization needs to match the level of equivocality of the data it processes. 

Since universities handle vast amount of confusing information it is convincing that they will fail at sensemaking unless they are loosely coupled. 

Weick prefers biological over mechanical models of organization. 



The basic unit of interconnectedness is the double interact. 

•  It consists of three elements—act, response, and adjustment

•  Its importance is why Weick focuses more on relationships within an organization than on an individual’s talent or performance.

The university portrays double interacts in a loosely coupled system. 

•  Individual departments and units on campus are not closely connected.
•  Loose coupling allows the university to absorb shocks, scandals, and stupidity without damaging the system.

Weick applies Darwin’s survival-of-the-fittest theory to organizations. 

The ultimate goal of an organization is survival. 

Some people organize in a way better adapted to survive than do others.

Unlike animals, organizations can change when their members alter their behavior.

Social-cultural evolution is a three-stage process: Enactment ---> Selection ---> Retention

Enactment: don't just sit there; do something. 

 Organizations have open boundaries with the outside environment, which they partially create through their activity. 

 The failure to act is the cause of most organizational ineffectiveness. 

Weick believes that action is a precondition for sensemaking. 

Language is action, that is why organizations need to have many meetings                                                                                                                                                       
Selection: retrospective sensemaking. 

Selection is aided by two tools—rules and cycles. 

Rules - stock responses that have served well in the past and have become standard operating procedure—are effective when equivocality is low, but fail to clarify situations when many conflicting interpretations are possible. 

The act-response-adjustment cycle of the double interact is more effective in situations of high equivocality. 

As cycles increase to handle complex data, reliance on rules decreases. 

Retention: treat memory as a pest. 

• Retention is the way organizations remember. 
• Too much retention creates a network of rules that reduces the flexibility necessary to respond to complex information.
• Some degree of collective memory is necessary to provide stability for the organization.
• Weick seeks an ongoing tension between stability and innovation—managers should not overemphasize past experience. 
• Organizations fail because they lose flexibility by relying too much on the past. 

CRITIQUE

Weick accomplishes this through a variety of provocative metaphors, vivid examples, and startling statements.

His socio-cultural application of Darwin's evolution theory shares the advantages and drawbacks of all metaphors.

• On the positive side, the biological model elaborates the hard-to-understand concept of systems in terms of something we know intimately-our living body.
• The living-information-systems model has an inherent danger. It would be easy to become so caught up in the figure of speech that the metaphor becomes an ideology.  

• Some says that it's easy for Weick to urge a quick-draw managerial response.

KEY TERMS 

Organizing

- a way to make sense out of equivocal information

Uncertainty

-  denotes lack of information

Equivocality

- refers to situation where people face the choice of two or more alternative interpretations, each of which could reasonably account for what's going on 

Requisite Variety

- the degree of complexity and diversity an organization needs to match the level of equivocality of the data it processes

Loose Coupling

- is an approach to interconnecting the components in a system or network so that those components, also called elements, depend on each other to the least extent practicable

Tight Coupling

- is when a group of classes are highly dependent on one another. This scenario arises when a class assumes too many responsibilities, or when one concern is spread over many classes rather than having its own class

Double Interact

- communication cycle that consist of act, response, adjustment

Enactment

- representing the notion that when people act they bring structures and events into existence and set them in action

Selection

- the interpretation of actions already taken; retrospective sensemaking

Rules

- stock responses that have served well in the past and have become standard operating procedure. They are effective when equivocality is low

Cycles

- double interacts best employed in situations of high equivocality

Retention

- the way organizations remember

#COMMTHEORYISFUN

#INFORMATIONSYSTEMSAPPROACHTOORGANIZATIONS

#KARLWEICK

#SENSEMAKING

PREPARED BY: 

Ma. Corena Joy  Magno Binan

 AB-Masscommunication