Karl E. Weick

Karl E. Weick is an organizational theorist who is noted for introducing the notions of "loose coupling" and "sense-making" into organizational studies. He is a professor in the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

Key Contributions

Enactment

Karl Weick uses this term to denote the idea that certain phenomena (such as organizations) are created by being talked about.

"Managers construct, rearrange, single out, and demolish many 'objective' features of their surroundings. When people act they unrandomize variables, insert vestiges of orderliness, and literally create their own constraints." [Social Psychology of Organizing, p243]

Loose Coupling

Karl Weick's major contribution to the topic of loose coupling in an organizational context comes from his 1982 paper on "The Management of Change among Loosely Coupled Elements", which is reprinted in Making Sense of the Organization.

Sense-Making

People try to make sense of organizations, and organizations themselves try to make sense of their environment. Weick pays attention to questions of ambiguity and uncertainty in this sense-making, which he calls equivoque.

Selected Bibliography

• The Social Psychology of Organizing 2nd Ed. McGraw Hill (1979) ISBN 0-07-554808-9.
• Sensemaking in Organizations Sage (1995)
• Making Sense of the Organization Blackwell (2001)
• Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity with co-author Kathleen Sutcliffe, Jossey-Bass (2001)

External Links

• Research Statement by Professor Weick
• Leadership When Events Don't Play By the Rules Short essay by Karl Weick
• Karl Weick page at OnePine
• Complicate Yourself interview with Karl Weick in Wired, April 1996
• Information Systems Theory page based on the work of Karl Weick, by some students at Ohio University.