Karl E. Weick

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 show more 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. show less

Really interesting book about sensemaking. The theme that runs thought the book is "how can I know what I think until I see what I say" The manner in which we make sense of a constant flowing world (always already) by understanding it retrospectively and creating sense thusly is fascinating. I can not quite remember what propelled me to read this book, and it really is about Organizations and management, but it was still really interesting. Use many words better by walking your talk, not show more just talking the walk which may have no meaning to you and come across as inauthentic. Still, for my interest, the first section on the psychology of sensemaking was really illuminating and worth reading. show less

Scritto (tradotto?) in maniera pesante e macchinosa, non è esattamente una lettura scorrevole e piacevole. Ma i contenuti - e le numerose fonti di riferimento - costituiscono una materia preziosa e un'ottima introduzione all'argomento.

One of the best books ever written on the nature of Human Organisations, the influence of dominant alliances, the patern of relationships and the accent on processes that constitute, maintain or dissolve social collectivities.