395 research outputs found

    MAKING THE MOST OF MESS: RELIABILITY AND POLICY IN TODAY'S MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES ‐ by Emery Roe

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    Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102225/1/padm12080.pd

    Sensemaking, Organizing, and Surpassing: A Handoff*

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    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 interplay between experience and understanding, highlighting the following features: self‐validating prophecy, partiality toward similarity, ambivalence between belief and doubt, and understanding as ongoing accomplishment. I conclude with a discussion of the three papers published in this Special issue.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163428/2/joms12617_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163428/1/joms12617.pd

    Making sense of theory construction: Metaphor and disciplined imagination

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    This article draws upon Karl Weick’s insights into the nature of theorizing, and extends and refines his conception of theory construction as ‘disciplined imagination’. An essential ingredient in Weick’s ‘disciplined imagination’ involves his assertion that thought trials and theoretical representations typically involve a transfer from one epistemic sphere to another through the creative use of metaphor. The article follows up on this point and draws out how metaphor works, how processes of metaphorical imagination partake in theory construction, and how insightful metaphors and the theoretical representations that result from them can be selected. The paper also includes a discussion of metaphors-in-use (organizational improvisation as jazz and organizational behavior as collective mind) which Weick proposed in his own writings. The whole purpose of this exercise is to theoretically augment and ground the concept of ‘disciplined imagination’, and in particular to refine the nature of thought trials and selection within it. In doing so, we also aim to provide pointers for the use of metaphorical imagination in the process of theory construction

    The blameworthiness of health and safety rule violations

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    Man-made disasters usually lead to the tightening of safety regulations, because rule breaking is seen as a major cause of them. This reaction is based on the presumptions that the safety rules are good and that the rule-breakers are wrong. The reasons the personnel of a coke factory gave for breaking rules raise doubt about the tenability of these presumptions. It is unlikely that this result would have been achieved on the basis of a disaster evaluation or High-Reliability Theory. In both approaches, knowledge of the consequences of human conduct hinders an unprejudiced judgement about the blameworthiness of rule breaking

    Making sense of actor behaviour: an algebraic filmstrip pattern and its implementation

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    Sense-making with respect to actor-based systems is challenging because of the non-determinism arising from concurrent behaviour. One strategy is to produce a trace of event histories that can be processed post-execution. Given a semantic domain, the histories can be translated into visual representations of the semantics in the form of filmstrips. This paper proposes a general pattern for the production of filmstrips from actor histories that can be implemented in a way that is independent of the particular data types used to represent the events, semantics and graphical displays. We demonstrate the pattern with respect to a simulation involving predators and prey which is a typical agent-based application
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