Sensemaking, Organizing, and Surpassing: A Handoff*

• Published date: 01 November 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12617
• Date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Karl E. Weick

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

Sensemaking, Organizing, and Surpassing:

A Handoff*

Karl E. Weick

University of Michigan

ABSTRACT In this essay, I reflect on the intellectual influences that led to the genesis of the

Social Psychology of Organizing and assess the way forward. I stress that the Social Psychology

aspired to provide an outline of an organizational epistemology. I particularly focus on the inter-

play between experience and understanding, highlighting the following features: self-validating

prophecy, partiality toward similarity, ambivalence between belief and doubt, and understand-

ing as ongoing accomplishment. I conclude with a discussion of the three papers published in

this Special issue.

Keywords: epistemology, organizing, process, sensemaking, understanding

INTRODUCTION

A commemoration is an invitation to go beyond the thing being commemorated. Such

an invitation to surpass becomes more compelling when the thing commemorated is

summarized and updated and the surpassing more vividly illustrated. This essay does

the former by means of selective references to both editions of the ‘Social Psychology of

Organizing’ (1969, 1979). The essay describes an evolving vocabulary intended to focus

on meaning and collective action. The three associated studies in this special section

extend that vocabulary.

Journal of Man agement Studi es 57:7 November 2020

doi:10. 1111/j om s.1 2617

Address for reprints: Karl E. Weick, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan

48109, USA (karlw@umich.edu).

*The following discussion includes several quotations. The intentions are to preserve the original context of

the idea; to make it easier for readers to develop their own interpretations of the point being made; to doc-

ument that my ‘evidence’ lies in a lineage of ideas; to preserve abstractions that facilitate generalization; and

to avoid the removal of subtleties by rough paraphrase. Walter Benjamin, an avid collector of quotations, put

a more spirited spin on the practice when he said that the role of a quotation is not to illustrate but to arrest

and disrupt complacent understanding. Quotations “are like wayside robbers who leap out and rob you of

your convictions. (Sniedziewski, 2017, p. 138).