systems and organizing

The systems perspective provided a radical shift from earlier thinking about organizations and organizing. With roots in biology, the systems perspective views organizations a organisms. Einstein's theory of relativity was a major influence on the development of systems theory. McLuhan's concept of a global information society where perceptions are no longer mediated by static ideas of time and space and Prigogine's work in chemistry suggesting that disorder is a natural part of environmental change and renewal have their roots in systems theory.

I find Karl Weick's application of systems theory to organization the most compelling of all the ways in which this theory has been applied. From Weick's sense-making perspective, decision making in organizations is largely retrospective. That is, organization members make decisions and then come up with reasons for making them. Managers are symbol manipulators who encourage employees to make sense of their work lives.

In identity construction, one property of Weick's notion of sense making, how and what organization members think indicates who they are. Plausibility, another sense-making property, means that sufficiency and probability are more important than accuracy. Continuation suggests that what organization members say competes for attention with other ongoing projects.

Weick argues that organizations are communities that provides sites for socializing and storytelling. I'm especially interested in organizational storytelling and what stories reveal about organizational culture. Listening to the stories faculty told when I first arrived at SJSU helped be better understand the practices and norms in the department and the university.

Systems theory and Weick's sense-making approach encourage organizational communication scholars to examine how members interact in creating organizational life, quite a contrast from earlier views of organization.

~ Professor Cyborg