Organizing, Process of

Equivocality Reduction

Equivocality refers to inputs that are indeterminate, inscrutable, ambivalent, or questionable. Inputs are not equivocal because they lack meaning, but because they are incredibly rich and may be interpreted in multiple ways; they are difficult to classify because they fit numerous classifications. People organize in order to reduce, manage, or remove equivocalities. One reason that communication scholars are attracted to Weick's work is that he sees language as a resource for authoring as well as interpreting reality. People both generate and interpret reality; hence, organizations construct their problems and enact their environments. Ultimately, the more equivocal the inputs for an organization, the greater the degree of complexity and diversity required of the organization. This is known as requisite variety. Most organizations today cope with vast amounts of confusing data in a rapidly changing world, so Weick urges organizational members to complicate themselves by embracing an appropriate degree of complexity. Weick's model of equivocality reduction is process oriented, and communication is key since the process takes place largely via the intersection of personal sense-making and social interaction.

The Enactment Model

Organizations do not simply operate in environments that exist independently; environments are not out there waiting to be perceived. Members enact environments through their actions and patterns of attention. Two kinds of enactment are bracketing, when organizational members isolate some changes or inputs for closer attention, and ecological change, when actors do something that changes the environment. In short, managers [Page 725]rearrange, single-out, unrandomize, and order their surroundings such that they create their own constraints. Weick advocates more mindful observations as a way to more fully see, comprehend, perceive, and label data and information.

Weick goes on to say that all processes subsequent to enactment work on edited raw materials and whatever events have been bracketed or extracted for closer analysis. Members then engage in selection, a collective sense-making process where they narrow equivocality by labeling their experience, by deciding what to deal with and by deciding what to ignore or disregard. In this process, actors select both schemes of interpretation as well as specific interpretations. Selection processes are composed in order to transform equivocal, raw data into information.

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