Karl E. Weick

Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled systems

Karl E. Weick In contrast to the prevailing image that elements in organizations are coupled through dense, tight linkages, it is proposed that elements are often tied together frequently and loosely. Using educational organizations as a case in point, it is argued that the concept of loose coupling incorporates a surprising number of disparate observations about organizations, suggests novel functions, creates stubborn problems for methodologists, and generates intriguing questions for scholars. Sample studies of loose coupling are suggested and research priorities are posed to foster cumulative work with this concept.1

Collective mind in organizations: Heedful interrelating on flight decks

We acknowledge with deep gratitude, generous and extensive help with previous versions of this manuscript from Sue Ashford, Michael Cohen, Dan Denison, Jane Dutton, Les Gasser, Joel Kahn, Rod Kramer, Peter Manning, Dave Meader, Debra Meyerson, Walter Nord, Linda Pike, Joe Porac, Bob Quinn, Lance Sandelands, Paul Schaffner, Howard Schwartz, Kathie Sutcliffe, Bob Sutton, Diane Vaughan, Jim Walsh, Rod White, Mayer Zald, and the anonymous reviewers for Administrative Science Quarterly.

The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2d ed.

The book is generally well written, the study is well documented, and the authors have a sound grasp of the fundamentals and of the agencies involved. Still, it is essentially limited to the Canadian experience. The book could have been enhanced if greater efforts had been made to compare findings within a larger bureaucratic theory to results in other governments. Generally, however, the book contributes to the scientific understanding of administration in that it is a solid, well-based, and well-carried out empirical study of the major agencies of an important government. In this sense, although some of the implications may be limited to Canadian institutions, others are certainly available as a basis for formulating theoretical questions which might be applied to institutions in other governments. The appendix contains a thorough description of the research approach, including the questions used. An additional appendix also summarizes information gathered by the research questionnaire fromr the various agencies, valuable for the development of further research efforts. Because of its relatively successful attempts to relate empirical evidence to bureaucratic theory and the depth with which it examines certain agencies, the book is valuable reading for serious students of the bureaucratic phenomenon and of government function in general.

The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster

This is a revised version of the KatzNewcomb lecture presented at the University of Michigan, April 23-24, 1993. The 1993 lecture celebrated the life of Rensis Likert, the founding director of the Institute for Social Relations. All three people honored at the lecture-Dan Katz, Ted Newcomb, and Ren Likert-were born in 1903, which meant this lecture also celebrated their 90th birthdays. I am grateful to Lance Sandelands, Debra Meyerson, Robert Sutton, Doug Cowherd, and Karen Weick for their help in revising early drafts of this material. I also want to thank John Van Maanen, J. Richard Hackman, Linda Pike, and the anonymous ASQ reviewers for their he lp with later drafts.

Organizational Culture as a Source of High Reliability

Organizations in which reliable performance is a more pressing issue than efficient performance often must learn to cope with incomprehensible technologies by means other than trial and error, since the cost of failure is too high. Discovery and consistent application of substitutes for trial and error—such as imagination, simulation, vicarious experience, and stories—contribute to heightened reliability. Organizational culture is integral to the creation of effective substitutes. Using examples taken from air traffic control, nuclear power generation, and naval carrier operations, this article demonstrates that closer attention to the ways people construct meaning can suggest new ways to improve reliability.

The Vulnerable System: An Analysis of the Tenerife Air Disaster:

The Tenerife air disaster, in which a KLM 747 and a Pan Am 747 collided with a loss of 583 lives, is examined as a prototype of system vulnerability to crisis. It is concluded that the combination of interruption of important routines among interdependent systems, interdependencies that become tighter, a loss of cognitive efficiency due to autonomic arousal, and a loss of communication accuracy due to increased hierarchical distortion, created a configuration that encouraged the occurrence and rapid diffusion of multiple small errors. Implications of this prototype for future research and practice are explored.

Mindfulness and the Quality of Organizational Attention

Mindfulness as depicted by Levinthal and Rerup (2006) involves encoding ambiguous outcomes in ways that influence learning, and encoding stimuli in ways that match context with a repertoire of routines. We add to Levinthal and Rerups conjectures by examining Western and Eastern versions of mindfulness and how they function as a process of knowing an object. In our expanded view, encoding becomes less central. What becomes more central are activities such as altering the codes, differentiating the codes, introspecting the coding process itself, and, most of all, reducing the overall dependence on coding and codes. Consequently, we shift from Levinthal and Rerups contrast between mindful and less mindful to a contrast between conceptual and less conceptual. When people move away from conceptuality and encoding, outcomes are affected more by the quality than by the quantity of attention.

Drop Your Tools: An Allegory for Organizational Studies

concepts of administrative processes must be operationalized and new ones developed or borrowed from the basic social sciences. Available knowledge in scattered sources needs to be assembled and analyzed. Research must go beyond description and must be reflected against theory. It must study the obvious as well as the unknown. The pressure for immediately applicable results must be reduced. At first this sounds like standard visionary boilerplate. On closer inspection, it foreshadows values that stand up well

Organizing for Mindfulness Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge

An enriched view of mindfulness, jointly informed by Eastern and Western thinking, suggests that attentional processes in organizing have been underspecified. Respecification of attention in the context of classical views of mindfulness results in a perspective that features diminished dependence on concepts, increased focus on sources of distraction, and greater reliance on acts with meditative properties. Enriched mindfulness reveals the reality of impermanence and the necessity for continuous organizing to produce wise action.

Hospitals as Cultures of Entrapment: A Re-Analysis of the Bristol Royal Infirmary:

High performance is often attributed to an organizations culture. However, culture can just as easily undermine performance when it blinds decision makers to important performance issues and entraps them in unfortunate courses of action from which they cannot disengage. The dynamics of cultural entrapment are explored in the case of the Bristol Royal Infirmary, in which pediatrie cardiac surgeries continued for over a fourteen-year period despite evidence of poor quality care and performance that was far below that of other comparable pediatrie surgical centers. A single organizational process of behavioral commitment explains how the cultural mindset originated and why it persisted. The sequence of small, public, volitional, and irrevocable action; socially acceptable justification for that action; and the potential for subsequent activities to validate or threaten the justification created a causal loop that stabilized subsequent action patterns.