On Weick: An Appreciation

When I first read Weick in 1977, I had no idea what to make of him. The style of writing and thinking was unusual, even weird to me. It struck me initially as cryptic and arcane, and also as rooted in ideas that seemed obscure and esoteric. Furthermore, he demonstrated these ideas — supposedly about life in organizations — with examples that did not appear to focus very much at all on organizations. What to make of this mysterious persona and his puzzling ideas? He seemed to use the same tools — ideas and words — that I and others in my newly adopted field used to play the scholarship game, but he used them in ways that other writers didn’t, to fashion a different way of understanding the game itself. I was reminded of the great golfer Bobby Jones’s comment on Jack Nicklaus: ‘Mr. Nicklaus plays a game with which I am not familiar.’ Well, as a budding young scholar, Mr Weick seemed to be playing a game with which I was not familiar, and playing it very well. Over time, Jones’s marvelously phrased compliment has only become more apt. Although many of us play the game, none of us plays it quite the way Weick plays it. When I was first introduced to Weick the writer, I had just come from the business world (Ford Motor Company), where I had become accustomed to straightforward thinking, straightforward speaking, and straightforward action in a notably complex and dynamic world. The world I had inhabited at Ford was extraordinarily intriguing to me, not just on a ‘Get-it-done-now! Think-aboutit-later!’ level, but also on some deeper or higher conceptual plane. I was so fascinated with my whole organizational experience that I decided I wanted to learn about organizations in a more studied fashion. The big issue I kept stumbling over was trying to figure out how it was actually possible to organize 240,000 people into some sort of global enterprise that acted like it was coherent and (surprisingly) seemed to work reasonably well. Because of my frequent marveling — and frequent exasperation — at the workings of Ford, it was clear to me that the way people organized and the way they understood organizing was the golden key to grasping the whole whirling lot. I really thought it would be interesting to explore the issues involved with ‘understanding how people understand in organizations — and how they organize to create workable organizations’ (an essential question that remains with me to this day). You can imagine, then, my new-found scholarly pleasure — rather early on in my doctoral program — in finding an author who purported to address my