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A review by mburnamfink
Sensemaking in Organizations by Karl E. Weick
4.0
This is a strange, brilliant, infuriating book. Weick develops a theory of people and organizations as entities that make sense of their word through stories, and the kinds of dsyfunction that can happen when those stories no longer match reality. People only know what they're thinking once they say it, and honest and open communication is a key element of success.
I'll admit that as a social constructivist, this makes a lot of sense to me. I particularly like the way that Weick neatly skewers the canard of 'shared values' as implying 'collective values' when it more often tends to mean 'values distributed from management', and the call for drawing on as rich of pool of language as possible.
What makes this book infuriating is that I'm not quite sure who it's for. It's very abstract, and a manager interested in improving their organization would not find many useful tips. For researchers, it mostly points towards "do ethnography, be a participant." We make sense of the world through stories, but I'm not sure how, or which stories.
I'll admit that as a social constructivist, this makes a lot of sense to me. I particularly like the way that Weick neatly skewers the canard of 'shared values' as implying 'collective values' when it more often tends to mean 'values distributed from management', and the call for drawing on as rich of pool of language as possible.
What makes this book infuriating is that I'm not quite sure who it's for. It's very abstract, and a manager interested in improving their organization would not find many useful tips. For researchers, it mostly points towards "do ethnography, be a participant." We make sense of the world through stories, but I'm not sure how, or which stories.