p.9 Anyone who samples the literature on organizations will soon notice a term that occurs over and over again, "rationality." This concept does not necessarily mean that organizational actions are logical or sensible, but rather that they are intended, thought about, planned, calculated, or designed for a purpose.
p.10 if one assumes that the actors have limited rationality, then it follows that decisions will be made in terms of localized disturbances to which abbreviated analyses will be applied, with short-term recommendations as the result.
p.26 There are several investigators who make the convincing argument that responses or actions can be viewed as sequences of component acts which run off intact once they are triggered (e.g., Mandler, 1964; Roby, 1966). This assumption can be coupled with the further one that people select or notice those stimuli that enable response sequences to be run off. George Herbert Mead (1956) states this latter assumption: "An act is an impulse that maintains the life process by the selection of certain sorts of stimuli it needs. Thus, the organization creates its environment. The stimulus is the occasion for the expression of the impulse. Stimuli are means, tendency is the real thing. Intelligence is the selection of stimuli that will set free and maintain life and aid in rebuilding it" (p. 120). To rephrase Mead's point, man notices those stimuli which permit him to do what he wants to do. What he wants to do is to continue living, to protect the "essential states" (Ashby, 1956) that enable living to continue... Mead's point is that response repertoires control noticing.
p.27 Rather than talking about adapting to an external environment, it may be more correct to argue that organizing consists of adapting to an enacted environment, an environment which is constituted by the actions of interdependent human actors.
p.29 If the relevant environment for the organization is described in term of information, then it is possible to argue that organizing is directed toward resolving the equivocality that exists in informational inputs judged to be relevant.
p.31 If a person interlocks some of his behaviors with someone else's, and if these interlocked behaviors are protected by structural assurances, then it is possible that this subset of behaviors will become meaningful and attain closure when viewed retrospectively.
p.32 Unless a concept refers to something that can be observed, one can never know whether a property is present or absent and in what amount. The only way to understand anything is to watch it, and this means we have to know what "it" is... once a concept is anchored in something that other people can observe for themselves, the investigator is free to construct whatever explanation he wants.
p.33 Given that interdependence is the crucial element from which a theory of organizations is built, interacts rather than acts are the crucial observables that must be specified. The unit of analysis is contingent response patterns, patterns in which an action by actor A evokes a specific response in actor B which is then responded to by actor A. This is the pattern designated a "double interact" by Barker and Wright (1955), and it is proposed by Hollander and Willis (1967) as the basic unit for describing interpersonal influence. Since organizing involves control, influence, and authority, a description of organizing must use the double interact as the unit of analysis for specifying observable behaviors.
p.37 Control is a prominent process within organizations, but it is accomplished by relationships, not by people. It is relationships and not people that impose control in an organization... Control of the ways in which processes unfold and their consequences for other processes is determined by the specific, mutually causal relationships that are present in the system... in the end it is the relationships, not the people, that constitute the control network.
p.37 Goals are sufficiently diverse, the future is sufficiently uncertain, and the actions on which goal statements could center are sufficiently unclear, that goal statements exert little control over action.
p.40 The basic raw materials on which organizations operate are informational inputs that are ambiguous, uncertain, equivocal... there are many possibilities, or sets of outcomes that might occur. Organizing serves to narrow the range of possibilities, to reduce the number of "might occurs."
p.40 as Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety (1956) states, it takes variety to destroy variety. This means that processes must have the same degree of order or chaos as there is in the input to these processes.
p.45 "The give-and-take of two reciprocating individuals... is a cycle in which the behavior of each receives closure from, and is bound through reciprocation to, the behavior of the other within a collective structure made up of the two" (Allport, 1962, p. 13).
p.46 the elements potentially available for a collective structure consist of the behaviors that can be produced by A and the behaviors that can be produced by B. The only possible source of these behaviors is the participants. It is in this sense that lower levels constrain higher levels. The collective structure can involve only those behaviors that A and B are capable of producing. A collective structure exists when behaviors of two or more persons become interstructured and repetitive. The unit of analysis now becomes the interact or double interact (e.g., Barker and Wright, 1955, p.328) and not the act. To identify instances of collective structure, we look for instances in which, with regularity, A emits an act which is followed predictably by an act from B, and B's act then determines A's subsequent act.
p.46 It is vital to note that it is behaviors, not persons, that are interstructured.
p.46 Thibaut and Kelley's (1959) concept of the Comparison Level for Alternatives (CLalt)... the concept states that if a group member has some standard of acceptable outcomes, such that if the outcomes he attains are above this point, he will be dependent on the group and will remain a member. However, if outcomes fall below this point, he will search for other groups where higher outcomes can be achieved.
p.48 a property not found in isolated individuals, namely, repetitive interstructured behaviors.
p.54 The interlocked behaviors discussed in the previous chapter are the basic elements which are combined in different ways to compose the processes that accomplish organizing.
p.55 [...Donald T. Campbell quote...] The essential ideas in the preceding quotation are: (1) three processes - variation, selection, and retention - are responsible for evolution; (2) variation in behaviors and genetic mutations are haphazard, and those variations are selected and retained that receive greater reinforcement or provide for greater survival; (3) the processes of variation and retention are opposed... ; (4) resort to a concept such as "plan" or "external guidance" is unnecessary to explain the course of evolution; (5) moderate rates of mutation are necessary for survival and for evolutionary advantage.
p.64 Instead of discussing the "external environment," we will discuss the "enacted environment." The phrase "enacted environment" preserves the crucial distinctions that we wish to make, the most important being that the human creates the environment to which the system then adapts. The human actor does not react to an environment, he enacts it. It is this enacted environment, and nothing else, that is worked upon by the processes of organizing.
The concept of an enacted environment derives from a number of sources, including Mead (1956), Allport (1967), Skinner (1963, 1966), Bem (1965, 1967), Garfinkel (1967), Schachter (1967), and especially Schutz (1967), whose concepts comprise the bulk of this discussion... The chapter in which Schutz develops the most important portions of his analysis is entitled, "Meaningful Lived Experience."
p.64 we can know what we've done only after we've done it. Only by doing is it possible for us to discover what we have done... only when a response has been completed does the stimulus become defined.
p.64 It is only possible to direct attention to what has already passed; it is impossible to direct attention to what is yet to come. All knowing and meaning arise from reflection, from a backward glance.
p.65 An action can become an object of attention only after it has occurred. While it is occurring, it cannot be noticed.
p.66 the meaning of the actions is determined by the projected act as a whole (Schutz refers to this as the project).
p.67 the meaning of anything is the way it is attended to and nothing else... Since the attitude to life is a pragmatic one, attention is pragmatically conditioned. Whatever items are singled out of the flow of experience for closer attention will take on whatever meaning is implicit in the pragmatic reflective glance. Whatever is now, at the present moment, underway will determine the meaning of everything that has already been accomplished. Meanings, in other words, shift as a function of the projects underway in a here and now.
p.69 Variation does not produce equivocality; rather, it is the primitive stage at which some equivocality is removed from the ongoing experience - removed by the reflective glance which singles out and defines more sharply some portion or portions of the past experience. It is these primitive meanings, these bits of enacted information, that constitute the informational input for subsequent processes of selection and retention. For a human organization, the variation process could be renamed the enactment process.
p.69 A meaning that arises in the enactment phase and seems obvious may become problematic when viewed from a later moment in time. The meaning of the enacted information is not fixed, but fluid. It is fluid precisely because its interpretation varies as a function of the temporal distance from which it is viewed (Schutz, 1967, p. 74)
p.69 "No lived experience can be exhausted by a single interpretive scheme" (Schutz, 1967, p.85)
p.71 The enactment process is more concerned with doing... The only constraint it operates under is that of making interpretable those actions that have already occurred. Remember that we are trying to preserve within the enactment process the basic properties of the variation mechanism in evolutionary theory... Although we have made it more orderly, our version of the variation process is still a way of producing many diverse variations.
p.72 we can postulate that any process contains two elements, assembly rules and interlocked behavior cycles. Assembly rules are rules for assembling the process out of the total pool of interlocked cycles that are available within the organization.
p.73 If an input is equivocal, there is uncertainty as to exactly what it is and how it is to be handled; this makes it more difficult to judge what the appropriate cycles would be. As a result, only a small number of rather general rules are used to assemble the process. However, if the input is less equivocal, there is more certainty as to what the item is and how it should be handled; hence a greater number of rules can be applied in assembling a process to deal with this input.
p.80 When the actor makes decisions about future acts and choices, he can treat that retained content as largely equivocal or largely unequivocal; he does so by enhancing either its equivocal or its unequivocal properties. The argument we are proposing - and it will be developed more fully in the next two chapters - is that unless the actor treats retained content as both equivocal and unequivocal, the system in which he is involved will not survive. In order to maintain the balance between stability and flexibility necessary for system survival, he must treat retained content as equivocal in one of his two decisions about future acts or choices, and treat it as unequivocal in the other decision.
p.91 Organizing consists of the resolving of equivocality in an enacted environment by means of interlocked behaviors embedded in conditionally related processes.
p.91 organizing is directed toward information processing in general, and more specifically, toward removing equivocality from informational inputs. This resolution is a two-stage procedure, the execution of which requires that equivocality be first registered and then removed. In order for equivocality to be registered, the order within the process to which the information is an input must match the degree of order in the input. In order for equivocality to be removed, the orderliness within the process must be greater than that in the input. These seemingly incompatible demands are accommodated within the process by the number of cycles applied to the input (these remove equivocality) and the number of assembly rules used to compose the process (these register equivocality).
The information environment on which processes operate is an enacted environment that is based on retrospective interpretations of actions already completed. These actions are partially under the control of past knowledge and partially under the control of external events. However, only those portions of the environment exist which are constituted by the individual through retrospective attentional processes. It is in this sense that members of organizations actually create the environment to which they then adapt. It is actors and actors alone who separate out for closer attention portions of an ongoing flow of experience. It is their making of experience into discrete experiences that produces the raw material for organizing... Interlocked behaviors are the basic elements that constitute any organization.
p.103 Organization theory is often more prescriptive than descriptive.
p.107 When a group is without a project and is confused, the emission of actions which can be viewed reflectively increases the chances that the group may discover what it is doing. But in the absence of action, there is little chance to clarify the confusion.
