Educational Leadership, Organizational Learning, and the Ideas of Karl Weick

Perspectives on Theory and Practice

Bob Johnson Jr., Sharon D. Kruse, Bob L. Johnson Jr., Sharon D. Kruse, Bob Johnson Jr., Bob L. Johnson Jr., Sharon D. Kruse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367662875
• eBook ISBN: 9781351626286
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Grounded in the theory of sociologist Karl Weick, this edited volume explores key concepts of educational leadership and organizational learning. Chapter authors analyze and reflect on the implications of Weick's thinking on leadership preparation and development. Providing a thorough understanding of the influence of his ideas in education, this volume unpacks the ways in which Weick's ideas influence and shape organizational learning and educational leadership and policy today.

1 Educational Leadership, School Organizations, and Karl Weick

An Introduction

Bob L. Johnson, Jr. and Sharon D. Kruse

Few contemporary theorists have exerted a more potent and expansive influence on the study of organizations than Karl Weick (1932–). Weick’s ideas have gained traction in a number of academic and professional disciplines, including but not limited to the fields of business, public administration, engineering, communication, and medicine. A cursory review of the literatures and citation indices in these areas provide prima facie evidence of this. His work in organization theory attracts and is respected by many. Several concepts/ideas are worthy of enumeration. This list represents only a sample of those deemed central to his work:

• organizations vs. organizing;
• organization as an afterthought;
• stamp out nouns, stamp in verbs;
• inter-locked organizational behavior;
• assembly rules;
• double-interact loops and cycles;
• organizational sensemaking;
• environmental enactment;
• organizing puns and equivoques;
• organizational impermanence;
• episodic vs. continuous change;
• theory as disciplined imagination;
• complicating self;
• the spines of leadership;
• protean thinking;
• cognitive requisite variety;
• discrediting past enactments;
• dropping your “cognitive” tools;
• organizational learning;
• high-reliability organizations;
• galumphing;
• virtual role systems;
• mindfulness (heedful interaction);
• action bias;
• self-amplifying deviation;
• cosmology episode; and
• the attitude of wisdom.

For those unfamiliar with Weick, this list no doubt reads more like words drawn randomly from a dictionary than a coherent set of ideas. Certain concepts evoke a humorous response (galumphing); others have a mystifying effect (cosmology episode, protean thinking, the spines of leadership). Absent a contextual referent, the relationship they share is far from obvious. Yet, each has its place in the scheme of Weick’s thought. As students of Weick, they have all piqued our interest through the years.

To be sure, our intent in this endeavor is not to examine all of these concepts or the relations they share. Rather, our goal is to examine select concepts/ideas from Weick and reflect on the utility these have for expanding our understanding of school organizations and educational leadership and improving them.

Those who study schools have gleaned much from Weick’s insights. Most notable are his thoughts on organizational coupling. Weick’s seminal work on educational organizations as “loosely-coupled” systems (Weick, 1976, 1982a; Orton & Weick, 1990) functions as both gateway and terminus for those interested in schools. While some have traversed beyond this gateway to engage Weick’s larger body of work, many have not. As a result, Weick’s thoughts on coupling as a structural, yet variable feature of schools have often been misunderstood.

Those familiar with Weick’s larger corpus of work understand the focus of his argument in this publication (Weick, 1976). It is not the adaptability of educational organizations per se that interest him, but the adaptability of formal organizations writ large. For Weick the structure-adaptability relationship exhibited in educational organizations mirrors that found in other types of organizations: adaptability to changing environmental contingencies is enhanced in organizations characterized by structurally independent or “loosely coupled” subunits and diminished in those that are not.

As the defining subunit in school organizations, loosely coupled classrooms put teachers in a position to address shifting environmental contingencies in functional ways. In making this argument, Weick is not saying that classroom subunits are decoupled or completely independent of the structural apparatus of larger organization—only that the structural link/coupling is not as strong as it might otherwise be (Barr & Dreeben, 1986). Exhibited most vividly in educational organizations, this relation is, according to Weick, discernable in varying degrees in most if not all formal collectives.

We are convinced that Weick has more to say to the educational community, much more than what has been appropriated to date. While some of his concepts/ideas have been examined more than others, many remain unexplored in education. Veins of Weickian conceptual ore can be identified here and there in the literature, yet the full yield of the motherload remains relatively untapped. This volume represents a deliberate effort to mine further this load from an educational perspective.

It is all too easy to attribute this underutilization to a general lack of interest in Weick among educators. This indeed may be the case for some. However, we think other factors are in play. Weick is a creative thinker; he is also an incisive, counterintuitive thinker. Not only is his work pitched at a high level of abstraction, but also his take on organizations often runs counter to traditional approaches found in the literature. As noted earlier, Weick’s interest lies in understanding organizations of all types, not just schools. His focus on leadership goes beyond that which occurs in educational organizations to include leadership and group dynamics in all organizations.

Access to Weick is further complicated by the fact that organization theory is indeed an abstract discipline—more so than leadership (Johnson, 2004, 2018; Johnson & Fauske, 2005). While students pursuing advanced degrees are experientially familiar with life in organizations, they are less familiar with the literature, language, and logic that surround the systematic study of organizations. That organization theory makes use of abstract concepts is no surprise. Every field has its own constellation of essential concepts. Its maturity is a function of the extent to which these have been empirically grounded, operationalized, and related to explain a wide range of phenomena. Many students are more familiar with leadership theory and its concepts than organization studies.

As inductive summaries abstracted from concrete realities, concepts are the building blocks of theory—a working explanation developed to account for an experience we have or phenomena we observe. Whether we recognize this or not, we are constantly theorizing. The power of a given concept or theory lies in its ability to identify similar phenomena beyond the original context from which it was derived. The further it moves away from this context, the greater its cognitive utility for others. With this move comes an increase in abstraction level whereby particulars give way to generalizations.

Thus, at one level we talk about teacher motivation in our school—the motivation of a specific group of individuals, in a specific role and school, at a specific place and time—or we can talk more generally about human motivation at an abstract, decontextualized level. We can even talk about worker motivation at levels in between these extremes. The concept of motivation is the common referent for all. What distinguishes these different forms of motivation is the level of abstraction at which motivation is pitched. To benefit fully from the fruits of any field of study one must be adept and moving up, down, and across levels of theoretical abstraction as the context dictates while understanding what this cognitive move entails (Glaser, 2002; Johnson, 2018; Merton, 1949).

Of specific interest in this volume is the ability to discern the levels of abstraction being considered as one reads Weick and the cognitive facility required to move up and down between theoretical levels of abstraction with him as the context dictates (Weick, 1974). People vary in this ability. For those who lead and study schools, developing this skill-set is a potent strategy for utilizing the knowledge-base of organization theory to enhance one’s understanding of them. It is also an effective means for assessing the extent to which schools are similar yet distinct from other types of organizations.

For example, reading Weick’s analysis of the Mann Gulch disaster requires educators to move up and down between levels of abstraction (MacLean, 1972; Matthews, 2006; Weick, 2007a, 2007b, 1998a, 1998b, 1995b, 1993a). Readers are pressed to discern the extent to which the organizational dynamics inferred and then generalized by Weick from this specific context (i.e., organized firefighting on public lands) are reflected in organizations such as schools. Whereas the organizational dynamics identified by Weick are stated at a high level of abstraction, determining the extent to which these dynamics are present/absent in schools and the specific pattern they assume requires one to think at a lower, more concrete level of abstraction.

Coupled with these factors are the specific kinds of organizations Weick uses to ground his theoretical generalizations—the organizational types that occupy his attention. This too creates barriers for those who think solely in terms of schools. Weick’s interests focus on complex organizations (Perrow, 1979; Thompson, 1967; Weick, 1979)—those organizations defined by knowledge-intensive, high risk, and uncertain core technologies, the failures of which create “dysfunctional levels of arousal” (Weick, 1984, p. 40). Included in this are hospital emergency rooms (Weick, 2006c; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2003), air traffic control towers (Weick, 1990b), nuclear power plants (Weick, 2006b; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007), and space exploration agencies (Weick, 1997a, 1995a). The level of expertise required to successfully perform the core tasks in these organizations and the high cost of failure associated with them are of keen interest to Weick. Thus, to understand his work requires a degree of familiarity with these types of organizations and a willingness to persist through the technical details of his descriptive accounts and inferential logic. Readers who do are called upon to make a series of critical judgments about Weick’s conclusions: (a) Are these theoretical insights applicable to school organizations? (b) To what extent do they capture (or fail to capture) school dynamics? (c) How are schools similar to, yet different from other types of organization along these dimensions? (d) How can educational leaders use these insights to improve schools?

When Weick’s unique style is added to this constellation of factors it is reasonable to understand why his work can be difficult to access and why a period of acclimation is often required. His work is particularly challenging for those who habitually think about leadership and organizational dynamics solely in terms of the type of organization they inhabit (e.g., I think of leadership only in terms of how it occurs in school organizations) and/or confine their reading to material written a single or constricted level of abstraction (e.g., As a leader, I primarily read material written about and from the perspective of educational leadership in schools) (Johnson, 2018). Considered together, these factors make Weick’s work a challenge for many in the educational community.

Animated by a desire to make Weick’s insights more accessible, this volume represents an attempt to diminish if not surmount some of these barriers. It does so by examining Weick’s concepts/ideas from an educational perspective: from the vantage point of school leaders and school organizations. While other levels of abstraction are considered, the interpretive referent for this exploration is schools. How does the work of Weick inform our understanding of schools? How does it enrich our understanding of educational leadership?

With these ends, challenges, and rationale in view, our intent in this chapter is to provide a context for the contributions that follow. We begin with a review of the assumptions guiding this project. This is followed by a brief account of Weick’s academic background and a descriptive overview of the theoretical perspective(s) that guide his research. It is our hope that these will help readers discern the narrative arc his work has assumed through the years.

This is followed by the identification of working assumptions we deem foundational to Weick’s thought. Though not offered as the final word, these assumptions have been distilled from our sustained engagement with him. In one way or another all are implicit (and at times quite explicit) in his research. By articulating these up front, it is our hope that readers will be in a better position to connect the conceptual dots and thus move toward developing a more coherent view of Weick’s work in toto. The probability of understanding any single publication of Weick is increased if one understands the assumptions on which his larger body of work rests. In this sense, this volume functions as a prolegomenon to Weick’s thought from an educational perspective.

Our Working Assumptions

Multiple assumptions undergird the conception, design, and development of this volume. Consistent with calls for “truth in advertising,” we offer several for consideration. These provide insight into our own thinking and a context for the editorial choices we’ve made.

Beyond recognizing the value of Weick’s contributions to the study of organizations, we proceed on the assumption that ideas are important. Because they form the basis of action, the ideas we encounter and those we embrace are consequential. Included in this are the working theorieswe espouse (Argyris & Schon, 1974; Weick, 1969, 1979, 1995a). If Marilyn believes that instructional improvement will come as the result of (a) prolonged engagement with the literature on teaching and (b) trial-and-error experimentation in the classroom, chances are she will behave accordingly. If she embraces an alternate theory of instruction, she will likewise behave accordingly.

Regardless of the validity of one’s working theories or the intended or unintended effects inherent in them, if acted upon, they are consequential. For this reason, we assume that effective leadership and effective organizations hinge on the ability of individuals to test and refine the validity of these explanations on an ongoing basis. Working theories matter; the validity of these working theories matter; the ability to test and refine these same theories likewise matters. The development of this ability and the cognitive skills on which it rests must be a priority in leadership preparation programs (more on this in Chapters 2 and 3).

We also recognize the temptation within the educational community to think within the confines of its own set of ideas, many of which are presented as reifications. This dynamic functions as a gravitational force that perpetuates the status quo. It does so by pulling the system back to habitual, institutionalized ways of thinking. While new ideas are frequently introduced within this community, more often than not they are lassoed and tamed, their ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Educational Leadership, School Organizations, and Karl Weick: An Introduction
• 2 Leadership as “Disciplined Imagination”: On Developing the Cognitively Agile Leader
• 3 Karl Weick’s Spines of Leaders: Reflections on an Early Essay
• 4 Leaders as Bricoleurs: Sensemaking as a Pathway to Skillful Leadership
• 5 Where the Action Is: Enactment as the First Movement of Sensemaking
• 6 Karl Weick’s Organizing
• 7 Mindful Leadership and High-Reliability Schools
• 8 Past, Present, and Future of Coupling as a Leadership Concept
• 9 Exploring the Ideas of Coupling and Complexity in Schools
• 10 Leading and Organizing in Schools: Connecting the Dots, Charting the Future
• Contributors
• Index