Weick's Notions of "Organizing"

• In Event: Using Weick to Understand, Explore, and Sense-Make: Implications for School Organizations and the Development of Educational Leaders

Abstract

Purpose – Theoretical Perspective

This paper reviews Weick’s concept of organizing as a means to study what people do when they act collectively in order to achieve something(Czarniawska, 2008). Weick (1996) admonishes us to “drop our tools,” to forego our notions of organization (noun) in favor of a process-oriented view of organizing (verb), “a consensually validated grammar for reducing equivocality by means of interlocked behaviors” (Weick, 1979, p. 3). Organizing is an active process of making sense of a complex and changing social world (Hernes, 2008). It is a grammar in the sense that it is a systematic account of some rules and conventions (Weick, 1979) that allows us to create sets of interlocking behaviors to deal with inherent ambiguity in order to develop casual stories that summarize experience and allow us to work in concert.
Weick (1979) acknowledges that organizing is to attempt to deal with the inherent indeterminacy of the world. Organizing takes place in a continual process of enactment, selection and retention – enactment to emphasize the active role leaders and followers play in interpreting stimuli and making sense of persistent puzzles of practice, selection and retention to represent the decision making needed to establish interlocking behaviors that become concerted action through which we adapt and progress toward organizational goals.

Methods, data sources, and signifiance

This paper is an analytic literature review focusing on Weick’s earlier theoretical work. Traditional notions of organization are static, fixed, and seem to avoid recognition of the ever-changing nature of our work reality (Czarniawska 2005, 2008). Adopting a Weickian perspective on “organizing” is to acknowledge that organizations “but temporary reifications, as organizing never ceases” (Czarniawska, 2007, p. 146), and that studying (transformational, distributed, instructional) leadership is to study action. In particular, focusing on causal maps in trying to make sense of leaders’ actions seems a critical recommendation to advance educational leadership.
Weick (1979) suggests a set of “thinking tactics” necessary for leaders to promote rich conversations: know what you’re doing, acknowledge tradeoffs, think “ing”, mutate metaphors, incorporate interest, and evoke minitheories (p. 27). He hopes that we eschew the organization chart for sets of cause maps. Weick reminds leaders that “you never do one thing all at once” (p. 244), and that “chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction” (p. 245). From his perspective, there is only chaotic action; rather than adopting off-the-shelf “best practices,” the work of leaders is to engage knowledgeable others in the process of forging theories of action (which soon change).

Czarniawska, B. (2007). Complex organizations still complex. International Public Management Journal 10 (2), 137-151.

Czarniawska, B. (2008). Organizing: How to study it and how to write about it. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management 3 (1), 4-20.

Hernes, T. (2008). Understanding organization as process: Theory for a tangled world. London: Routledge.

Weick, K. (1996). Drop your tools: An allegory for organizational studies. Administrative Science Quarterly 41 (2), 301-313.

Weick, K. (1979). The social psychology of organizing, 2nd ed. New York: Random House.

Author

• Scott C. Bauer, George Mason University