organizing

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Definition

The subject is organizations; The verb is organizing. (Scott & Davis, 2007)

From Karl E. Weick (Weick, 1979, pg 3 - 4) --

Organizing is a consensually validated grammar for reducing equivocality (ambiguity) by means of sensible (readily perceived, showing reason) interlocked (united, closely joined) behaviors.

Organizing is first of all grounded in agreements concerning what is real and illusory, a grounding called consensual validation. ""...consensual validation seems to be ""common sense"" of a high order -- the things people agree upon because their common sensual apparatus and deeply common interpersonal experiences make them seem objectively so. It is a critical and cautious term for the ""reality"" so often used by other psychological schools (Munroe 1955, p 356, f.n.).""

The important issues of consensus in organizing concern rules for building social processes out of behaviors and interpretations that can be imposed on the puzzling inputs to these processes. Organizing is like a grammar in the sense that it is a systematic account of some rules and conventions by which sets of interlocking behaviors are assembles to form social processes that are intelligible to actors. It is also a grammar in the sense that it consists of rules for forming variables and causal linkages into meaningful structures that summarize the recent experience of the people who are organized. The grammar consists of of recipes for getting things done when one person alone can't do them and recipes for interpreting what has been done.

The substance of organizing, the raw material that supplies the stable elements for the grammar, is interlocking behaviors (Buckley, 1967, chpt. 4). This interlocking is circular.

In every case of organizing, there is a shared sense of appropriate procedures and appropriate interpretations, an assemblage of behaviors distributed among two or more people, and a puzzle to be worked on. The conjunction of these procedures, interpretations, behaviors, and puzzles describes what organizing does and what an organization is. (Weick, 1979, pp 4).

 

Elements of organizing -- see organizations subtopic ""properties of organizations.""