Of Organizing and Sensemaking: From Action to Meaning and Back Again in a Half‐Century of Weick’s Theorizing

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12613
• Author: Lee Watkiss,Mary Ann Glynn
• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Date: 01 November 2020

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Of Organizing and Sensemaking: From Action to

Meaning and Back Again in a Half-Century of Weick’s

Theorizing

Mary Ann Glynna and Lee Watkissb

aCarroll School of Management, Boston College; bIvey Business School at Western University

ABSTRACT The themes of organizing and sensemaking have reverberated throughout Weick’s

remarkable career and constitute one of the hallmarks of his contribution. We review his major

works and show how Weick differentially emphasizes organizing and sensemaking over time

and, eventually, arrives at a fuller integration of meaning and action. Initially, Weick (1969;

1979) models their relationship as linear, focusing on how organizing functioned as a context

for sensemaking, an approach we label Sensemaking in Organizing. Later, however, Weick (1995a;

2005) construes their relationship in more dynamic, interactive, and reciprocal cycles, modelling

sensemaking as the process whereby organizing is achieved, an approach we label Sensemaking

as Organizing. We explore the evolution and implications of these approaches and discuss their

impact on management scholarship. Finally, we draw out potential future research directions at

the interface of organizing and sensemaking.

Keywords: action, meaning, organizing, sensemaking, Weick

INTRODUCTION

Weick’s The Social Psychology of Organizing (1969; 1979, hereafter SPO69 and SPO79,

respectively), precipitated a tectonic shift in organizational theory. Weick broke new the-

oretical ground by envisioning organizational life in a hitherto unimaginable mix of

‘sequence, motion, implementation of recipes, chains of events, series of actions … that

produced a plausible rendering of organizing’ (Weick, 2015, p. 1). Organizing, for Weick,

was not conceptualized in terms of the then-dominant view of a process whereby ra-

tional actors executed strategic plans to meet organizational goals; instead, he saw or-

ganizing as a process whereby the interlocked behaviours of organizational members

Journal of Man agement Studi es 57:7 November 2020

doi:10. 1111/jo ms.1 2613

Address for reprints: Mary Ann Glynn, Carroll School of Management, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth

Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA (maryann.glynn@bc.edu).

1332 M. Ann Glynn and L. Watkiss

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

were conjoined via interpretative processes that sought to explain and justify previous

actions. For Weick, these interpretive processes constitute sensemaking, i.e., the process

of rendering meaning from experience, the theorizing of which he (1995a) brought to

full flower with the publication of Sensemaking in Organizations (SMO95).

Organizing and sensemaking would be at the centre of Weick’s work for the remain-

der of his career. To us, it seems that he considers both organizing and sensemaking to

be aimed at constructing order out of ‘noise’ and disorder (Patriotta, 2016). We observe

how early in his career, Weick focuses on organizing: initially in terms of interlocked

behaviours (SPO69) and later, in terms of shared cause maps (SPO79). He writes in

SPO69/79 that order is achieved through processes of organizing (the Enactment-

Selection-Retention cycle); whereas in SMO95, he articulates that order is achieved by

placing stimuli in a framework (sensemaking). In SPO79, Weick observes that sensem-

aking is the ‘recipe for organizing’ (p. 133); at that time, however, the theoretical thrust

of Weick’s writing is to consider sensemaking as a component of a sequential model of

organizing. Over time, sensemaking came to occupy a central role in organizing, moving

from the periphery (SPO69) to the core of organizing (SMO95); finally, organizing is

fully intertwined with sensemaking: sensemaking is the process by which organizing is

achieved (Weick et al., 2005).

We view Weick’s theorizing as undergoing subtle shifts in an evolutionary trajectory,

moving from what we describe as Sensemaking in Organizing to Sensemaking as Organizing. The

difference reflects not a substantive theoretical shift, but instead, a degree in emphasis,

moving from foregrounding action, to foregrounding meaning, and finally, to integrating

meaning and action, highlighting that ‘sensemaking and organiz[ing] constitute one an-

other’ (Weick et al., 2005, p. 410). We believe that there is insight afforded in examining

Weick’s evolution in theorizing because it offers a unique glimpse of theoretical develop-

ment in its early stages (Weick, 1995b) as well as the process of theorizing, which ‘rep-

resent[s] interim struggles in which people intentionally inch toward stronger theories’

(Weick, 1995b, p. 385).

We seek to understand the connections that Weick postulated between organizing and

sensemaking, over time, and, perhaps more importantly, how they evolve to evidence

‘stronger theories’ (Weick, 1995b, p. 385). As such, our goals are twofold: first, to exam-

ine in depth Weick’s theorizing of organizing, sensemaking, and their interconnections,

and second, to examine Weick’s processes of theorizing itself, and especially the ways

in which it reflects attention to activity, temporality and flow (Langley et al., 2013). We

believe that by so doing, it affords us, as researchers, an exemplary model that offers ‘rich

conceptual handholds and metaphors for the expression of processes … [which] pro-

vides a useful starting point for conceptual contributions’ (Cloutier and Langley, 2020,

p. 6). Notably, Weick engages in ‘classic process thinking heuristics … [that] include:

thinking of phenomena in terms of gerunds or verbs instead of nouns (Weick, 1979)’

(Cloutier and Langley, 2020, p. 20). Thus, we seek to explicate these processes, in order

to illuminate the ‘ongoing flow of organizational … phenomena in insightful ways’

(Cloutier and Langley, 2020, p. 21). Our work makes several contributions.

First, we track the evolution of Weick’s theorizing regarding organizing and sensemak-

ing and how he grapples with the complexities of these phenomena and their inter-rela-

tionships. We trace the arc of Weick’s thinking, beginning with his earlier work in which