Ambiguity Into Action and Out Again: Enactment as Alpha and Omega in Weick's Model of Organizing

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

Abstract

Purpose and Context

This paper concentrates on a seminal aspect of Weick’s notion of “enactment” (Weick, 1995). Contemporary discussion of Weick typically begins with an emphasis on the interpretive processes triggered by disruptions in the everyday flow of activity..
This has implications for two aspects of Weick’s theorizing about the processes of organizing. The first concerns the relationship of mind and action, a connection most famously illuminated in the work of Vygotsky (1978), which subsequently served as a foundation for Lave’s and Wenger’s (1991) notion of cognitive apprenticeship invoked by Weick (1995) in the first sentence of the Preface to Sensemaking in Organizations (p. xi). This might be considered the alpha, or instigation, for sensemaking. The omega, or end of sensemaking, is also encapsulated in the mutual relationship of ambiguity and action, as enactment cascades from “premise controls” (Perrow, 1986), the taken-for-granted assumptions and definitions that condition processes of organizing (Weick, 1995) and institutionalization (Weick, Sutcliff, and Obstfeld, 2005). The interplay of ambiguity and action is, as argued in this paper, at the root of Weick’s (1995) claim that sensemaking is the feedstock of institutionalization.

Modes of inquiry

The paper is based on philosophical inquiry into Weick’s rendering of the role of ambiguity and his uses of the term “enactment” through a close reading of the works of Weick on sensemaking (Weick, 1988, 1993, 1995, 2005; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2006). The paper puts these works in conversation with critical commentary about Weick’s model of organizing (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2015), as well as drawing on related concepts from cultural-historical notions of mind and action (Derry, 2013.

Scholarly significance

As alpha and omega, enactment serves as a taproot for investigating Weick’s response to an enduring debates of the social sciences, that of the primacy of agency or that of structure in organizational life. It also has important practical ramifications for making sense of the role of ambiguity in processes of organizing in schools, especially at a time when outcomes-based education.

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Author

• David H. Eddy Spicer, University of Virginia