This volume brings together the best--known and most influential articles on sensemaking in organizations by one of its most distinguished exponents, Karl Weick. * Brings together the best most influential articles written by one of the gurus of sensemaking -- Karl Weick.

Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix Part I Organizations as Contexts for Sensemaking 1 Introduction 3 1 Sensemaking in Organizations: Small Structures with Large Consequences 5 2 Sources of Order in Underorganized Systems: Themes in Recent Organizational Theory 32 3 Organizational Redesign as Improvisation 57 Part II Components of Sensemaking 93 Introduction 95 ECOLOGICAL CHANGE 97 4 The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster 100 5 The Vulnerable System: An Analysis of the Tenerife Air Disaster 125 6 Technology as Equivoque: Sensemaking in New Technologies 148 ENACTMENT 176 7 Enactment Processes in Organizations 179 8 Enactment and the Boundaryless Career: Organizing as We Work 207 9 Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations 224 SELECTION 237 10 Toward a Model of Organizations as Interpretation Systems 241 11 Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks 259 12 Improvisation as a Mindset for Organizational Analysis 284 RETENTION 305 13 Organizations as Cognitive Maps: Charting Ways to Success and Failure 308 14 Organizational Culture as a Source of High Reliability 330 15 Substitutes for Strategy 345 REMEMBERING 356 16 The Attitude of Wisdom: Ambivalence as the Optimal Compromise 361 17 Management of Organizational Change Among Loosely Coupled Elements 380 18 Organization Design: Organizations as Self-Designing Systems 404 Part III Applications of Sensemaking 421 Introduction 423 19 Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems 426 20 Cosmos vs. Chaos: Sense and Nonsense in Electronic Contexts 444 21 Sensemaking as an Organizational Dimension of Global Change 458 Index 473

This volume brings together the best-known and most influential articles on sensemaking by one of its most distinguished exponents, Karl Weick. Weick explores the process of how organizations discover that they face important decisions. Often organizations have discussions in order to see what they think, or act in order to see what they want - before they are even aware that a decision has to be made. The effective organization is one that understands this process of sensemaking and learns to manage it with wisdom. The ways in which people do that are demonstrated in chapters of this book. This important collection provides a valuable addition to the international literature on organization theory and will be welcomed by students and researchers alike.