Karl E. Weick

Weick uses the term enactment 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.[6]

Weick's major contribution to the topic of loose coupling in an organizational context comes from his 1976 paper on "Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems" (published in the Administrative Science Quarterly), revisited in his review of subsequent uses of the concept, with JD Orton, in 1990's Loosely Coupled Systems: A Reconceptualization.[7]

Loose coupling in Weick's sense is a term intended to capture the necessary degree of flex between an organization's internal abstraction of reality, its theory of the world, on the one hand, and the concrete material actuality within which it finally acts, on the other. A loose coupling is what makes it possible for these ontologically incompatible entities to exist and act on each other, without shattering (akin to Castoriadis's idea of 'articulation'). Orton and Weick argue in favour of uses of the term which consciously preserve the dialectic it captures between the subjective and the objective, and against uses of the term which 'resolve' the dialectic by folding it into one side or the other.

People try to make sense of organizations, and organizations themselves try to make sense of their environment. In this sense-making, Weick pays attention to questions of ambiguity and uncertainty, known as equivocality in organizational research that adopts information processing theory. Because the definition of equivocality is uncertainty, Weick's study in sensemaking is an effort to reduce multiple interpretations. Within his research, Weick studies requisite variety and how organizations can achieve it by having a "most single" reality. His contributions to the theory of sensemaking include research papers such as his detailed analysis of the breakdown of sensemaking in the case of the Mann Gulch disaster,[8] in which he defines the notion of a "cosmology episode" - a challenge to assumptions that causes participants to question their own capacity to act.

In Weick's first book, The Social Psychology of Organizing, he lists seven properties of organizational sensemaking: identity, retrospect, enactment, social contact, ongoing events, cues, and plausibility. This categorization of thought is the human mind's attempt to understand information.

Robert I. Sutton considers a major idea of this book to be summed up as learning to "argue as if you are right and to listen as if you are wrong".[9]

Weick introduced the term mindfulness into the organizational and safety literatures in the article Organizing for high reliability: Processes of collective mindfulness (1999). Weick develops the term "mindfulness" from Langer's (1989) work, who uses it to describe individual cognition. Weick's innovation was transferring this concept into the organizational literature as "collective mindfulness". The effective adoption of collective mindfulness characteristics by an organization appears to cultivate safer cultures that exhibit improved system outcomes. The term high reliability organization (HRO) is an emergent property described by Weick (and Karlene Roberts at UC-Berkeley). Highly mindful organizations characteristically exhibit: a) Preoccupation with failure, b) Reluctance to simplify c) Sensitivity to operations, d) Commitment to Resilience, and e) Deference to Expertise.

Weick explained that mindfulness is when we realize our current expectations, continuously improve those expectations based on new experiences, and implement those expectations to improve the current situation into a better one.[10]

Organizational information theory builds upon general systems theory, and focuses on the complexity of information management within an organization. It is sometimes also called Information Systems Theory. The theory addresses how organizations reduce equivocality, or uncertainty through a process of information collection, management and use. However, the goal of Weick was not to eradicate ambiguity, rather work alongside it, because it is a necessary aspect of growth. His structuring of his research was purposefully complex and ambiguous because Weick believed you cannot impose order on a world that is constantly spiraling toward entropy. While in this is strong reasoning, it makes it difficult for individuals to learn and teach this complex theory. This ambiguity creates a cycle of irony, as Weick's goal is to reduce ambiguity within organizations.

Organizational Information theory analyzes how information and sense-making varies from person to person because it is perceptual in nature. Essentially, this theory seeks to answer how people make sense of information in an environment. Weick specifies that environment is not limited to a physical space, but expands into informational realms, especially in reaction to the development of the internet. As information on the internet becomes easily accessible and its consumption increases, the need for this theory is more prominent. Organizations and individuals are constantly acting and reacting in patterns that align with this theory. Its complexity mirrors the humanistic nature of society, and is continuously evolving just as the human race is.