Organizing After Modernism : A Certain Equivocality

This essay was commissioned as part of a special issue of the journal Organization Studies, in honor of the work of management scholar Karl Weick. Ever since I first read him in the 1970s, Weick has had enormous influence on both my work and my worldview. Weick sang the praises of equivocality long before it was acceptable to do so, and this paper both celebrates his unique vision and conducts a thorough assessment of the ways in which contingency is an exemplary framework for certain kinds of organizational communication. This paper contains my latest thinking about the relationship between organizational communication and sensemaking. Although I take Weick to task some for his unwillingness to take on issues of power and politics, the broader message lies in his implicit theory of identity. Specifically, I wish to extend Weick’s work to develop a more robust aesthetics of contingency with the potential to improve human relations across a broad range of institutions. As Weick is a central figure in organizational studies, this essay has the potential to impact a large group of scholars and their conceptions of communication.