Introduction ix

Part I Organizations as Contexts for Sensemaking 1

Introduction 3

1 Sensemaking in Organizations: Small Structures with Large Consequences 5

2 Sources of Order in Underorganized Systems: Themes in Recent Organizational Theory 32

3 Organizational Redesign as Improvisation 57

Part II Components of Sensemaking 93

Introduction 95

ECOLOGICAL CHANGE 97

4 The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster 100

5 The Vulnerable System: An Analysis of the Tenerife Air Disaster 125

6 Technology as Equivoque: Sensemaking in New Technologies 148

ENACTMENT 176

7 Enactment Processes in Organizations 179

8 Enactment and the Boundaryless Career: Organizing as We Work 207

9 Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations 224

SELECTION 237

10 Toward a Model of Organizations as Interpretation Systems 241

11 Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks 259

12 Improvisation as a Mindset for Organizational Analysis 284

RETENTION 305

13 Organizations as Cognitive Maps: Charting Ways to Success and Failure 308

14 Organizational Culture as a Source of High Reliability 330

15 Substitutes for Strategy 345

REMEMBERING 356

16 The Attitude of Wisdom: Ambivalence as the Optimal Compromise 361

17 Management of Organizational Change Among Loosely Coupled Elements 380

18 Organization Design: Organizations as Self-Designing Systems 404

Part III Applications of Sensemaking 421

Introduction 423

19 Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems 426

20 Cosmos vs. Chaos: Sense and Nonsense in Electronic Contexts 444

21 Sensemaking as an Organizational Dimension of Global Change 458

Index 473