orgcomania

I'm a little late getting to this blog entry but we'll think about chapter four nevertheless. Systems theory is obviously another in our line of theories for thinking about organizations and organizational communication. In the language of theory some people are realists and some people are instrumentalists. A realist thinks that a theory actually explains what is going on. There is a direct correspondance between the theory and reality. An instrumentalist thinks of theory as a tool. Theory doesn't necessarily explain exactly what is really going on but it provides a way of thinking about what is going on that is useful for predicting, explaining, and controlling. (Guess which I am, realist or instrumetalist?)

Systems theory is interesting looked at this way. Is systems theory trying to say how things are actually organized or is presenting a model that lets us understand the relationships between things and parts of things? At first I think systems theorists were realists, trying to explain the way things really are. Now I think systems theorists are mostly instrumentalists, using the ideas of systems theory to be able to talk about complex interactions about all kinds of stuff. Certainly we (humans) have built organizational structures with so much complexity that we need all the help we can get to understand them. If I think about there is somebody down in Madison (in the UW-System office) who I don't know and will never meet, who has a job that I have never heard of and probably never will hear of, who will make a decision today that will have a direct and almost immediate influence on me. The UW-System is one of those big, human creations that is hard for humans to understand. Systems theory at least gives us a peak.

But I like Weick. Weick is one of those people who comes up with ideas that you look at once and say "this guy must be nuts." Then you go back and look again and you say "of course, it's so obvious, why didn't I always understand that it works like he says." Weick doesn't even try to explain organizations. He explains organizing. His genius is that he focuses on how WE make sense of the world (and organizations) rather than on the sense of the organization. Weick says that the world isn't out there for us to make sense of. He says that as we look at the world we are constantly breaking off little pieces and giving them a meaning and using our sense of those little pieces to help us make meaning of the next pieces we break off. His idea of "enactment," the idea that we actively parse and make sense of the world is a radical way of looking at the order of the world. I love it. His theory explains how people can have experiences that on the surface look similar but can end up with radically different meanings for them. His theory explains how a person or a group of people can engage the world in ways that other pepole look as completely nonsensical. Why do cult members, for example, not take the information that the rest of us use to see the fallacies in the cults beliefs. Many things factor into this of course, but Weicks explanation of enactment, selection, and retention provides a perfectly normal way of engaging the world that can create sense that anyone else cannot hope to understand.

The focus shifts from organization to organizing and that's the key. How are we making this organized behavior not how do we understand this entity, the organization, that stands before us. Different, confusing, but very cool.