Karl E. Weick on Knowledge

"Any approach to the study of organizations is built on specific assumptions about the nature of organizations and how they are designed and function."

"If an organization is to learn anything, then the distribution of its memory, the accuracy of that memory, and the conditions under which that memory is treated as a constraint become crucial characteristics of organizing."

"The organism or group enacts equivocal raw talk, the talk is viewed retrospectively, sense is made of it, and then this sense is stored as knowledge in the retention process. The aim of each process has been to reduce equivocality and to get some idea of what has occurred."

"They bypass such questions as how one comes to know that a problem exists, what it does to solution adequacy to be working on several different things concurrently with problem solving, what it's like to go about solving a felt, intuited problem rather than an explicitly stated consensually validated problem which was made visible to all members at a specific point in time."

"That’s what this entire book is about. The basic recipe coordinates with organizing in the way outlined in Figure 5.3 . The organism or group enacts equivocal raw talk, the talk is viewed retrospectively, sense is made of it, and this sense is then stored as knowledge in the retention process. The aim of each process has been to reduce equivocality and to get some idea of what has occurred."

"In the recipe, How can I know what I think until I see what I say, saying equates to variation, seeing equates to selection of meaning in what was said, and thinking equates to retention of an interpretation. The retained interpretation may then be imposed subsequently to interpret similar saying in order to construct cumulative understanding, test past labels for their validity, or generalize older labels to newer events."