It is tempting to venture outside one’s field in expertise and experience. Ballantyne discusses this in his work on what he calls ‘Epistemic Trespassing’. I see this often in the safety industry in three key areas: ethics, culture and linguistics. Please note, this is not just a discussion on qualifications or research but a holistic… Read More Epistemic Trespassing and Safety – SafetyRisk.net
Weick was years ahead of the game when it comes to a discussion of organising. What he discussed would be later articulated by Fuchs (Intercorporeality and Interaffectivity) in the nature of the embodiment of organising. Again, Weick was years ahead in his thinking about organising and risk. He states (p.65): Words such as connection, relation,… Read More Inter-connectivity, Inter-affectivity and Inter-corporeality in Weick
One of the creative things about The Social Psychology of Organising is Weick’s consciousness of metaphor, his semiotic illustrations and linguistic turn. We see this in how Weick explains ‘think-ing’, transformation, conversion and change/movement/learning. In his discussion (p.43) he uses the morphing of a pseudopod to exemplify the process of change/movement/learning in organisations. You can… Read More Weick’s Semiotics and Conceptual Metaphors
In our continuing discussion of Weick we can now explore one of Weick’s semiotics, a clock for visualising ‘commensurate complexity’. This is based on Thorngate’s postulate, that it is impossible for a theory of social behaviour to be simultaneously: general, accurate and simple. In order to understand this, Weick uses the logic and graphic of… Read More Weick’s Clock, a Semiotic for Organising
In Weick’s first book (1979 second edition), he begins his discussion on organising based around a selection of narratives and a ‘grook’ (p.14). A grook (pronounced ‘gruk’) is an aphoristic poem associated with the Danish philosopher Piet Hein. They estimate that Hein wrote over 10,000 of these poems (https://briefpoems.wordpress.com/2016/02/23/grooks-brief-poems-by-piet-hein/). Hein’s grooks were often accompanied with… Read More Weick’s Grook and The Authority/Power Myth