p.6-7 Husserl (1964, 1976) built on the philosopher Kant's perception that there are features of experience, such as our perception of time, space, and causality, that must already be present, a priori, in categories of the mind. Otherwise, the familiar shapes of the world around us would not appear to us to be shape-like (but merely a meaningless array of uninterpreted information)... The subjective structures of meaning do not just come into play, passively, at the moment of perception, as a filter, but rather actively participate in the constitution of the perceived world (something Karl Weick, much later, would call "enactment")... we are actively engaged with a world of objects that we know about, have feelings about, and manipulate - objects that are of our making. The result is to change the focus of attention from the world (positivism) to our knowing of the world (phenomenology).

p.8 [Alfred] Schutz said to himself, people do communicate easily, naturally, without any sense of artificiality. How can this be? ...Part of the answer, he thought, is that the commonsense categories and constructs that we unthinkingly employ to experience our personal world were already social to begin with... It is not just that we can only communicate the unique character of our experience through a code that turns it into generalities, that is, typifies it; it is that even the original experience had to have already been mediated by that code... our experience was framed in a shared language from the start... people treat understanding each other not as a technical or a scientific or a philosophical problem, but as a practical problem to be solved in a practical way.

p.24 We can see only that which we are predisposed to see: We are caught in an epistemic loop. What we are predisposed to see reflects our particular purposes and involvements. There is no value-free knowledge.

p.24 Gregory (1966,p. 11), for example, puts it this way: "Perception is not determined simply by the stimulus patterns; ...[T]he senses do not give us a picture of the world directly; rather they provide evidence for checking hypotheses about what lies before us." The hypotheses come, of course, from us, not the world outside

p.25 Recall from our earlier discussion of Schutz that language is a system of typifications that are treated by people in conversation not as tokens to which it happens that we assign an arbitrary meaning... but as a transparent window on the world.

p.34 Narrative furnishes a framework of understanding of action and its objects, of agents and their relationship, of... codes, which makes it possible for organizational members to comprehend and to deal practically with their own and others' actions and situations. It provides the modality they need to signify, to legitimate, and to control both the material and the social world and to be controlled by either or both (Giddens, 1984).

p.35 Narrative thinking does not just represent a world; it instantiates it. When we have understood how people narrativize experience, we understand how they can enact it.

p.40 If the finality of conversation is to sustain interaction, the finality of text is to produce a collectively negotiated interpretation of the world: to turn circumstances into a situation that is comprehensible and that serves as a springboard for action.

p.41 There is a tendency to think of narrativity as limited to explicit storytelling, especially because there is a well-developed research literature on the functions of stories in organization... Bruner and Greimas... both see the narrative form as a basic trait of all forms of cognitive processing of social information: "how we go about constructing and representing the rich and messy domain of human interaction" (Bruner, 1991,p. 4)... Bruner's hypothesis is that... "we organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative - stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, etc." (Bruner, 1991, p. 4).

p.52 So the point Greimas is making is that much of narrative is about motivating people to act and mobilizing the resources to make their action possible

p.58 We see communication as an ongoing process of making sense of the circumstances in which people collectively find ourselves and of the events that affect them. The sensemaking, to the extent that it involves communication, takes place in interactive talk and draws on the resources of language in order to formulate and exchange through talk... symbolically encoded representations of these circumstances. As this occurs, a situation is talked into existence and the basis is laid for action to deal with it. Communication thus concerns both descriptions of existing states... and what to do about them... Communication is how situations are resolved interactively at the level of the cognitive.

p.65 To a phenomenologist, language is not a window through which to observe social reality but a canvas on which it gets painted.

p.65 Cheney and Tompkins (1988), for example, cite Burke (1966, p. 466) as urging us to realize "just how overwhelmingly much of what we mean by 'reality' has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems." As they say, "our symbol systems construct what we call the reality of a given situation, and words are the most taken-for-granted facts of these constructions."

p.83 Through communication we orient, direct, promise, and sanction the performance of activities, both our own and others'.

p.102 The meaning of communication lies not on the textual surface, to be measured objectively, but is rooted in the structure of rights, duties, and obligations that bind people together into permanent patterns of association and frame a discourse-world. It is those "patterns" that anchor the organization and extend it beyond the localized conversation. They orient the sequence of communication, and they are negotiated and renegotiated in communication.

p.104 To summarize, we claim that organization does not precede communication, nor is it produced by it... It emerges in it. Communication is produced as a conversation... It is experienced by participants as an ongoing discourse-world, constrained by conversational and textual form, that generates a recursively framed conversation-text, or text-world, in which a common ground is brought to bear and endlessly renewed. The organization being generated in that discourse-world is only recognizable when it is itself translated into a text-world... That which makes discourse interpretable as organization is its action character.

p.125 Burke (1966, cited in Wess, 1966) wrote: "An 'ideology' is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways; and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it" (p. 1).

p.125 For Burke "only a tiny sliver of reality" is experienced firsthand, the larger picture being a construct of our symbol systems: "[C]an we bring ourselves to realize... just how overwhelmingly much of what we mean by 'reality' has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems?" (cited in Wess, 1996, p. 2).

p.144 Weick's thinking gravitates between two poles: enactment and loose coupling. The concept of enactment is based on an idea he has often defended: that organizations actively construct the environment that "impinges on them" and to which they then react. They "impose on that which subsequently imposes on them"; they "implant that which they later discover and call 'knowledge' " or "understanding of their 'environment' " (Weick, 1977, p.267). This perception in turn rests in another: that what is fundamental in all human activities is the centrality of action, and specifically, action designed to control. It is the action and its consequences that become "the raw materials from which a sense of the situation is eventually built" (p. 272). The organization discovers "what it is up to" only in retrospect, as it makes sense of its own actions... For the organization to even have an environment, it had to have built it... it is only by acting that it learns about the environment... It is this mutual interdependence of action and thought - this chicken-and-egg indefiniteness of finality - that Weick is out to capture in his theory of enactment.

p.145 Organizing processes are then merely the dynamics of enactment as they work themselves out over time: enacting... in order to create a sensible environment, selecting what to pay attention to therein, consigning the result of your action to memory, and then acting again. What activates the dynamic is that the effects of enacting are never predictable... your environment remains forever equivocal

p.147 He [Weick] sees advantages in this loose coupling: a capacity to preserve more diversity, a simpler and thus less expensive system of control, and a sensitivity to a wider range of changes in the environment.

p.147 His way of dealing with this ontological indeterminacy - very characteristic of Weick's thought - is to describe it as ambiguity (Weick, 1985,pp. 121-126). Nevertheless, he says: "A loosely coupled system is not a flawed system. It is a social and cognitive solution to constant environmental change, to the impossibility of knowing another mind, and to limited informational-processing capabilities" (p.121).

p.147 The way for managers to "reduce ambiguity to tolerable levels" is to "make meanings for people," to "act as if loosely coupled events are tied together just as they are in a cause map" (Weick, 1985,pp. 126-7, emphasis added).

p.148 "A significant portion of the environment," he says, "consists of nothing more than talk" (p.128). "Raw talk," he writes elsewhere (Weick, 1977, p. 280), "is the data on which subsequent sensemaking operates. The talk - the saying, the soliloquizing - is what is meant by the activity of enactment." "Organizations talk to themselves" (p.281) and, as they do, the organization is talked into being, almost in spite of itself.

p.148 The advantage he sees in loosely coupled systems is that they "preserve many independent sensing elements and therefore 'know' their environments better than is true for a more tightly coupled system" (Weick, 1976,p. 6).

p.161 a human is able to enlist - to mobilize - a multitude of objects to enable him or her to achieve his or her purposes. But after an object is made an accessory to action (that is the whole point of technology) it has the curious feature that it can now act independently, in the absence of its human partner. Latour uses the example of a speed bump - a "silent policeman" - to illustrate. The speed bump was put there by someone with the purpose of slowing down traffic, but after it was installed, it goes on acting with no human source remotely in view. [JLJ - a speed bump is properly described as an engineering design constraint - such as HOV lanes which silently encourage you to form a carpool and punish you by a slower speed if you do not. The driver is confronted with a choice - proceed at high speed or not - your choice - if you drive fast over the speed bump you will be jostled and inconvenienced. Drive slow and you will be lesser inconvenienced. Your choice. The driver chooses and is inconvenienced accordingly. The net effect is to alter behavior. Police threaten to issue tickets to fast drivers from unmarked cars. Your choice. Drive fast and get a ticket or drive slow and do not get one. Choose the behavior and therefore choose the consequences of the behavior. The speed bump "acts" - essentially, as an agent of the community that placed it there and lets it remain there - but as part of a human "scheme". It performs a service in the absence of a human, much as a thermostat regulates temperature.]

p.163 According to Latour, then, human interaction mobilizes constellations of objects which endure after and extend beyond the time and place of the interaction, and, as they do, serve to frame future interactions... The originality of Latour's approach lies in his recognition that objects participate in interaction - indeed mediate it - yet at the same time, they form an integral part of the network that extends beyond the interaction, in time and in space... interactions mobilize objects that mediate and thus structure, reflexively, these same interactions at the same time they they surpass them.
 Objects express agency and, thus, act.

p.163 What exists is an organizing, an ongoing process of mediation in which the objective world where we live and interact both frames what we do and supplies us with the material for our own reconstruction of it. What we think of as an organization is what is left over as a trace or memory of yesterday's organizing... by the time we recognize the organization it is no longer there. What is there is our transformation of it; what makes it recognizable - recognizable - is precisely its no longer existing.

p.170 yesterday's communicational experience (recorded in text) now becomes a guide to and the basis of today's organizational frame that makes interaction (through texting) feasible.

p.174 However loosely coupled the parts may be, they are nevertheless coupled to compose a more or less coherent totality, or organization.

p.207 Using data recorded in naturally occurring situations... they [Weick and Roberts, Hutchins] have tried to show how groups composed of individuals with distributed-segmented, partial-images of a complex environment can, through interaction, synthetically construct a representation of it that works; one which, in its interactive complexity, outstrips the capacity of any single individual in the network to represent and discriminate events... Out of the interconnections, there emerges a representation of the world that none of those involved individually possessed or could possess.

p.275 Sensemaking is a way station on the road to a consensually constructed, coordinated system of action.

p.287 In the communication view, the map is what provides an image of a surface... and thus gives that surface a meaning that it would not otherwise have. It is available to many people; it is a tool they may all indiscriminately, if selectively, use to guide their locomotion from one location to another in the course of their activities.

p.325 We perceive the process of organization to be a restless searching to fix its structure through the generation of texts, written and spoken, that reflexively map the organization and its preoccupations back into its discourse, and so, for the moment, produce regularity... It is the existence of such texts and the text-worlds they constitute that makes the organization visible and tangible to people.