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THE IMPERMANENT ORGANIZATION



enactment (Weick, 1979, pp. 147–169) as a process was separated from its product,

an enacted environment, to make the point that people are shaped by their own shaping of circumstances. The idea that creations create the creator in organizational life was

elaborated by Weick (2001, pp. 176–236). A typical assertion reads, ‘People act their

way into clearer identities by learning from retrospective interpretations of the improvisations necessary to handle discontinuous work assignments’ (Weick, 2001, p. 177).

That summary sentence includes several properties of organizations that are affected by

organizational designs: prescriptions for action, identities deemed legitimate, climate for

learning, clarity and acceptability of retrospective interpretations, latitude for improvisation, and continuity in work assignments. Under conditions of impermanence all of these

properties assume some form, which then shapes what organized people confront.

In 1995 enactment was repositioned as one of seven properties of sensemaking

(social, identity, retrospect, cues, ongoing, plausibility, enactment) in order to underscore that sensemaking is not simply a matter of idle thought (Weick, 1995). The

insightful work of Mary Parker Follett was added to the growing number of scholars

who described the complexity of enactment. She noted, for example, that:

. . . the activity of the individual is only in a certain sense caused by the stimulus of the

situation because that activity is itself helping to produce the situation which causes

the activity of the individual. . . . My farmer neighbors know this: we prune and graft and

fertilize certain trees, and as our behavior becomes increasingly that of behavior towards

apple-bearing trees, these become increasingly apple-bearing trees. The tree releases

energy in me and I in it; it makes me think and plan and work, and I make it bear edible

fruit. It is a process of freeing on both sides. And this is a creating process (Follett, 1924,

pp. 118–119, cited in Weick, 1995, p. 60).



Chapter 11 continues the elaboration of enactment, this time as part of a point–

counterpoint debate with institutional theorists P. Devereaux Jennings and Royston

Greenwood (2003). If one assumes that cognition lies in the path of the action, then

the question arises as to which cognitions and which actions are salient, legitimate, and

permissible when people organize. The answer from enactment seems to be that any

old cognitions and actions are permissible. That’s nonsense say institutional theorists

and they are right. In Westwood and Clegg’s (2003) words, ‘What institutional theory is

said to add is a rich consideration of context, agency, structure, and mediated causality’

(p. 184). In addition, ‘enactment theory appears to provide a more complete explanation

of the internal worlds and cognitive understandings of the intraorganizational members of

interorganizational systems. Rich ethnography can thus be the appropriate if restricted role

for enactment theory’ (Westwood and Clegg, 2003, p. 184).

The notion of enactment implies more than action. It connotes the creation of structure as in the enactment of regulative legislation. Enactment is about agency ϩ consequences. We do something and the situation is forever changed, and those changes

affect us.

There is no ducking the point that there are times when enactment sounds motivational as well as coolly cognitive. Enactment implies a sort of David and Goliath narrative.

Small wins (Weick, 2001, pp. 426–443) can make a large difference, and sometimes the



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underdog wins. This can sound like naïve whistling in the dark. However, organizational

life, in some of its more gritty moments, is a little like being thrown into someone else’s

mess and then, through enactments, making it your own more orderly mess (p. 197 in

the following reprinted article). In a world connected by weak ties, order writ small need

not stay small.



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Enacting an Environment:

The Infrastructure of Organizing

Karl E. Weick

The following article was published as Chapter 6(a) in R. Westwood and

S. Clegg (Eds), Point/Counterpoint: Central Debates in Organisation Theory, London,

Blackwell, 2003, pp. 184–194. Reprinted with permission.



The idea of an enacted environment is a roomy framework in which it is easy to get

tripped up by nouns. For the sake of a point-counterpoint format I want to describe

not so much an “official” version of what enactment might mean, but rather a depiction of what themes it stands for, how it serves to remedy blind spots in organizational

theory, and how it creates its own blind spots. The idea of enactment seems to be useful shorthand, which theorists ignore at their own peril. That claim is the sense in

which the following discussion has a debative quality. But there is more than enough

ignorance to go around, and to act as if anyone formulation has the truth is to drown

in hubris.

Chapter 6(a) unfolds in the following manner. First, I will present a roomy initial

version of what enactment is about, using Nigel Nicholson’s description as the point

of departure. Second, I discuss briefly the context within which the idea of an enacted

environment evolved in order to illustrate that, historically, it synthesized several

salient themes of die 1960s and 1970s. Third, I ground the concept and history of

enactment with a handful of examples. Fourth, I discuss several aspects of the idea

that seem to have staying power because they correct blind spots in theories currently

treated as mainstream. And I conclude by discussing shortcomings in the idea of

enactment.



A Conceptual Delimiting of Enactment

Nigel Nicholson’s (1995) informative entry on enactment in the Encyclopedic Dictionary

of Organizational Behavior provides a solid base from which to begin. He describes

enactment as a concept developed:

to connote an organism’s adjustment to its environment by directly acting upon the environment to change it. Enactment thus has the capacity to create ecological change to

which the organism may have subsequently to adjust . . . [The enactment process is discussed] in the context of active sensemaking by the individual manager or employee . . .

Enactment is thus often a species of self-fulfilling prophecy . . . [Enactment is also about]

the reification of experience and environment through action . . . [The idea] has found

most use in strategic management to capture the dynamics of relations between organization and environment. . . One can expect enactment processes to be most visible in large

and powerful organizations which have market-making capacity, but they are no less relevant to the way smaller enterprises conceive their contexts and make choices about how

they will act in relation to them. (p. 155)



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Having touched on most of the key properties of enactment, Nicholson concludes:

As an operational concept, enactment lacks precision and therefore cannot be expected to

be much further elaborated in organizational analysis. However, it embodies an important

recognition of how agency and constructive cognitive processes are essential elements in

our understanding of the behavior of individuals and organizations, (pp. 155–6)



Nicholson catches a number of nuances that are often missed. Enactment is about

both direct and indirect adjustment. Adjustment occurs directly through changing

that which is confronted, and indirectly through changing oneself. Enactment is about

direct action on an environment. Enactment occurs in the context of both organizing

(it is action that induces and is shaped by ecological change) and active sensemaking,

and in both instances resembles the mechanism associated with self-fulfilling prophecies. It is the resemblance to self-fulfilling prophecies that explains why enactment,

which may begin as an expectation embedded in a reification, often has material consequences. The concept seems best suited for strategic management as expressed in

large-scale initiatives deployed by powerful actors. Nevertheless, the idea remains useful to describe activities on a smaller scale as well. Enactment makes it legitimate to

talk about issues of agency and construction in organizational theory, but apparently

at an individual level analysis, as suggested by Nicholson’s reference to enactment by

“an organism,” “the organism,” and “the individual manager and employee.”

Nicholson’s judgment that the concept lacks the precision that would make for further

elaboration is partially weakened by his own evidence that several different properties of

organizing are encoded as a configuration by the word “enactment.” “Precision” may be

less tightly coupled with “susceptibility to elaboration” than is suggested.

But there is an important sense in which Nicholson is right. Some of the “lack of

precision” that concerns him is attributable to the fact that there is an unclear figureground relationship among at least the terms “organizing,” “sensemaking,” and

“enactment.” We see this in Jennings and Greenwood, who, like others, tend to use these

words interchangeably but with some hesitance. I separate these three terms and treat

“organizing” as the modified evolutionary process of ecological change—enactmentselection—retention. These amendments to evolution are spelled out abstractly in 1969

and more organizationally in 1979. Sensemaking, as described in 1995, is not unrelated

to organizing, but it makes a very different point. The seven properties of sensemaking

align with the processes of organizing in a straightforward fashion: ecological change

and enactment in organizing ϭ ongoing updating and enactment in sensemaking;

selection ϭ retrospect, extracted cues; retention ϭ identity, plausibility; feedback from

retention to subsequent enactment and selection ϭ feedback of identity and plausibility

to subsequent enactment and selection. And all of these organizing and sensemaking

events are presumed to be social. The concept of sensemaking differs, however, from

organizing in the sense that it is intended to break the stranglehold that decision making

and rational models have had on organizational theory. Sensemaking implies that key

organizational events happen long before people even suspect that there may be some

kind of decision they have to make. Decision making is incidental, sensemaking is paramount. To focus on decisions is to miss most of what it means to reduce uncertainty and

most of the ways emergent organizing attempts this reduction. Finally, the third concept,



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“enactment,” is the “glue” that joins organizing with sensemaking. Enactment is the

stubborn insistence that people act in order to develop a sense of what they should do

next. Enactment is about two questions: What’s the story? Now what? When people act

in order to answer these questions, their acting typically codetermines the answer. Thus

action alters what people face. It enacts part of their world, even if all that amounts to

is an alteration of themselves. Enactment, at a minimum, changes the actor from inactive to active and, in doing so, deepens the actor’s stake in what is being done and in its

outcome. These are collective, social phenomena between people, not isolated individual

phenomena inside a single head.

Complicated as all of this may appear, it boils down to a straightforward theme: people

are in a complex reciprocal relationship with their environments. The italicized words

emphasize that the referent is collective rather than individual, that causality is mutual

rather than unilateral, and that the circumstances people confront are malleable and

multiple, rather than monolithic and singular.



A Historical Delimiting of Enactment

A deeper understanding of what enactment means may be possible if the idea is situated in the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s, when it was first articulated. The juxtaposition of

the first book-length statement of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), an attempt to

synthesize social psychological research on consistency among attitudes and behavior

(e.g. Abelson et al., 1968), a surge of interest in existentialism (e.g., Maclntyre, 1967),

and disenchantment with the passive actor in stimulus-response psychology, all converged on common themes such as action defines cognition, existence precedes essence,

attitudes are draped supportively around prior actions that are tough to undo. Those

themes were heretical in the context of organizational theories that presumed that top

management personified rationality with their enlightened decision making, flawless

forecasting, and omniscient planning.

The convergence in social science around the idea that cognition lies in the path of

the action was not just heretical. It was also prophetic. These ideas coincided with a

growing societal realization that administrators in Washington were trying to justify

committing more resources to a war in Vietnam that the United States was clearly losing. One could not escape the feeling that rationality had a demonstrable retrospective

core, that people looked forward with anxiety and put the best face on it after the fact,

and that the vaunted prospective skills of McNamara’s “whiz kids” in the Pentagon

were a chimera. It was easy to put words to this mess. People create their own fate.

Organizations enact their own environments. The point seemed obvious. What wasn’t

so obvious was the complications this picture created. People resonated to the idea that

they were in control and could have an effect on the world. What they resisted was the

further suggestion that, having changed the world, they had then become the authors

of their own problems. Blaming came full circle, and people now confronted perils of

their own making.

Enactment made sense in and of the 1960s and 1970s when it first appeared. The

debating point is, does enactment still make sense in the circumstances of the new millennium? I think it does, because the basics of organizing, as well as the realities of pervasive



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uncertainty, unknowable and unpredictable futures, learning by trial and error, and the

inevitable lag of sensing behind motor actions (I see only what I’ve already done) haven’t

changed that much. The content is different. But the forms through which the content

flows remain pretty much the same.



An Illustrative Delimiting of Enactment

To ground these initial descriptions of enactment, I want to describe some examples.

These examples provide a feel for the phenomenon, suggest scenarios that are tough for

mainstream positions to explain, and serve as templates to spot enactment in other settings. Iatrogenics, physician-induced disease, occurs when diagnostic tests, lines of questioning, or faulty procedures create sickness that was not present when the patient first

consulted with a physician. The physician enacts a sicker and more complicated environment than first confronted him or her. Efforts to lessen the severity of wildland fires

through preventative controlled burns usually (but not always) enact a safer wilderness

for both firefighters and visitors by removing flammable underbrush that can produce

hotter, taller, more explosive fires. An air traffic controller creates a holding pattern by

stacking several aircraft in a small area of air space near a busy airport and, in doing so,

enacts a cluttered display on the radarscope that is more difficult to monitor. Rumors that

a stock trader has an unusually high hit rate often draw attention to that person’s trading, which leads others to duplicate the trader’s pattern of buying, which increases the

action around a stock, which often raises its value, which seems to confirm that

the trader is “hot,” which attracts more buyers and purchases and temporary upticks. The

fact that a bandwagon effect drove up the share price, and not the quality of the stock,

suggests a powerful pathway for enactment in the investment community. Abolafia and

Kilduff ’s (1988) fascinating reconstruction of attempts to corner the silver market show

in detail the ways in which enactment in financial markets can build on itself. NASA

enacts a lean, mean environment in which overworked employees fail to convert metric units into the same units of measurement used in the rest of the project. As a result,

an entire mission fails in public view, credibility is questioned, and whatever “savings”

were gained through lean operation are lost in irretrievable hardware and the addition

of time-consuming damage control. When Mercedes-Benz merges with Chrysler, and

Travelers merges with Citibank, these so-called “mergers of equals” administered by coCEOs enact an acquisition of unequals in which the stronger CEO consolidates his (all

four CEOs were male) initial advantage and soon ends on top. Hospitals refuse to report

medical mistakes for fear of losing business and in their refusals enact new suspicions

that keep away the very people they feared they would lose by disclosure. Proctor &

Gamble initiate merger talks that enact shareholder flight from the stock, which drives

down both share price and P&G’s attractiveness as a merger partner. Organizations that

encourage closeness to the client enact a permissive world that encourages outrageous

customer demands that can be remedied only by firing the client they tried so hard to

recruit. An arrogant management team from the Union Pacific Railroad fires personnel from the newly acquired Southern Pacific Railroad and in doing so loses expertise

needed to run the tricky railyard in Houston, manage to gridlock not only the yard but

the southwest region, paralyze infuriated shippers, and create a lingering suspicion



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of the entire railroad industry. Campaign contributions enact a more selective administration of regulative environments. Successful lobbying of Congress to start daylight saving time earlier in the year increases hours of daylight in the spring and sales of garden

supplies climb, but sales of candy at Hallowe’en plummet because people are unwilling

to go trick-or-treating in the dark.

So what do physicians, firefighters, air traffic controllers, traders, aerospace engineers, CEOs, hospital administrators, and lobbyists demonstrate? They show that discretion and strategic choice, implemented in ongoing work, can change the conditions

of that work. They show that individual work can enact conditions that other people

and other systems have to cope with. For example, iatrogenic disease does not stop

at the physician’s door as the newly troubled patient walks out. Instead, the altered

patient walks into the medical care system, where the consequences of the initial treatment spread and where the patient’s problems with the physician become other people’s problems as well. Enactment creates contingencies as well as events. The initiating

conditions seem small in comparison to macro events only because these examples

articulate the local turning point, the point of bifurcation, the moment of initiation.

These triggering moments often serve to implant small but uncontained outcomes in

larger systems. These embedded, uncontained outcomes continue to grow undetected

until they spawn unanticipated consequences that threaten legitimacy, competence,

and control. In each of the examples it is also important to note that the actors are

not passive. They do not simply scan or notice or detect or perceive or sense the environment. Instead, they probe the circumstances into which they have been thrown.

These probes are not blind, since experience, socialization, job descriptions, and culture influence them. These influences are relative, however, in the sense that they still

leave considerable latitude. People still act with discretion, often with only a vague idea

of what they are doing and what effect it will have. Their discretionary acting is intertwined with what they sense, although it is rare for busy actors to sort out the relative

contributions. But whether actors reflect on their creations or not, analysts need to be

mindful that organizational environments are not just an occasion for selective perception. They are also an occasion for selective intervention and shaping. Thus to change

an organization is not simply to change what people notice, but how they notice. Active

noticing leaves traces. Those enacted traces are drawn up into systems as problems for

others. Thus any attempt to increase effectiveness will fail if all it tries to affect is what

people notice, and not what they do as well.



Presumptions of an Enactment Perspective

But what does an enactment perspective enable people to see and say about organizations that they miss when they invoke the modern trinity of transaction costs,

institutional theory, and population ecology (TIP)? One thing enactment does is that it

buys conceptual flexibility. (One man’s “imprecision” is another man’s “roominess.”) All

three of the current mainstream positions make sense only so long as we presume that

stasis rather than dynamics are what we need to explain, that reification of an invisible hand is a legitimate conceptual move, that everyday interacting and conversing

are inconsequential, that there is an ontological difference between macro and micro



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levels of analysis, that people tell the truth when they fill out survey instruments or

make entries in archival records, and that people are not distracted, preoccupied,

or careless when they evaluate their options, try to follow precedent, or get thrown into

the middle of someone else’s mess.

Enactment helps people see constructive activity as well as maintenance and routine, because it is about verbs. Enactment is about operants, acts that operate on the

world. It is about a set of words such as efferent, impose, project, shape, proact, control, manage, and establish, all of which imply agency or acting one’s intentions into

the world. Enacting is visible in emerging organizational structures, redesign, and

reorganizing. The conversation analyst Deirdre Boden (1994) illustrates this emphasis

nicely in her description of the foundational nature of turn taking as a structure in

organizing. For her, the organization becomes a real and practical place:

only as the consequence of a recurrently generated ongoing conversation, multiply laminated, a world of telephone calls, meetings, planning sessions, sales talks and corridor

conversations by means of which people inform, amuse, update, gossip, review, reassess,

reason, instruct, revise, argue, debate, contest and actually constitute the moments, myths

and through time, the very structuring of the organization . . . [T]he structuring properties of turn-taking provide the fine, flexible interactional system out of which institutional

relations and institutions themselves are conjured turn by turn . . . The business of talk

in the technical sense, is thereby transformed into business that gets done through talk.

(Excerpted from Taylor and Van Every, 2000: 220)



To enact a conversational environment, close in, is to breach or bend the orderliness

of turn taking. To enact opportunities and constraints into organizing is to interrupt a

partner who is talking, to stay silent, to ignore, to affirm without warning, to attend,

to mitigate, to reconcile, to cancel, or to close. Acts like these transform social circumstances into novel conversational texts, and these texts then provide an enacted platform

for further action.

Enactment helps people see the environment as something other than resources,

institutional precedents, promises, uninterpreted information, niches, models to mimic,

markets, liabilities, and costs. The “something other” is that all of those preceding features are names, punctuations, and interpretations imposed in the interest of meaning.

If one is puzzled, then “finding” an organization to mimic, an institutional guideline

to follow, a resource to be hoarded, a market to be saturated, or a liability to be skirted

are ways to make sense and allocate effort. What makes any one of these quite diverse

punctuations plausible is that they are imposed on circumstances that amount to

a pun. People in organizations notice circumstances precisely because something unexpected occurs or something expected fails to occur (Mandler, 1982; Heidegger, 1962;

Louis and Sutton, 1991). How one acts in the face of puns influences what will have

been seen and done. For example, the bridge crew on a ship running at night, who are

unable to agree whether another ship ahead of them is moving toward them or away

from them, by their own actions enact the traffic they face. By positioning their own

ship based on the erroneous assumption that the ship in front is moving away from

them, that they are overtaking it, and that they should pass it on its port side, they

change the relationship between the two ships. This change now enacts a pun for the



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oncoming other ship. (That ship looks like it is passing us both on our starboard and on

our port.) As the ships, which are actually coming toward each other, close faster and

take “evasive” action based on opposite views of what is unfolding, they steer into one

another (Perrow, 1984). What began as an equivocal pun for one party – a ship ahead

with an equivocal pattern of running lights that could mean either that it is coming

or going and that we should meet it by passing either right or left – becomes a pun for

the other party, and ends with the clarity of a collision. The issue is not decision making. The issue is what people thought they faced, a perception that was clarified by the

actions they took, what those actions made salient, and the repertoire of interpretations

available to them as a result of past experience and their current conversations.

The point here is simply that more than perception is involved. Perceptually, the crew

faced an equivoque. Their actions to resolve the indeterminacy produced a more determinate environment. The fact that the determinate environment led to bad outcomes

is not the only issue. Equally important is the issue of what happened on the input side.

How did people develop a sense of what they faced, what prevented their updating of

that initial sense, how did their own actions affect their sense of certainty, how much

of the data remained outside their explanation, and what were they doing while all of

this happened? Questions like these are common when the world is treated as an indeterminate place that people make more sensible by acting their way into it. An indeterminate world is not a random world. Instead, it is loosely coupled, amenable to multiple

interpretations, malleable to action, and contingent. Indeterminacy means differentially

determinant, an “obvious” partition being that technology and other material artifacts

are more determinant than are social resources. I put quotation marks around “obvious” because the world does not often sort itself neatly into those two categories. Latour

(1988) has made this clear in his insistence that the pairing of tools with people does

not create an aggregate. Instead, it creates a fused hybrid that is unified through action,

a hybrid similar to what Heidegger seems to have in mind when he describes readyto-hand being.

The discussion up to this point is noteworthy in the sense that it illustrates a third

way in which enactment captures what the big three miss. The typical referent in most

discussions of enactment tends to be small: the dyad, the small group, the double interact, the conversation, the principal-agent relationship, the imagined other, the individual, the team, face-to-face interaction, the partner, the confidant, and the co-leader.

Units of this size tend to be lumped together as a micro level of analysis and then dismissed as inconsequential in a world of large organizations, substantial power distance,

tall hierarchies, top management teams, interlocking directorates, scripts and routines,

outsourced work, organizational fields, alliances, webs, and cultures. Regardless of the

imagery, it is common to separate the organization as entity from individuals as its components. Having done so, investigators then argue that communication occurs in the

container of an organization, or that the organization is produced by communication,

and therefore can stand alone once communication stops. It is less common to read that

organizations emerge in communication and are shaped momentarily by the nature

of the relationship and the forms in the language that are realized when organizing is

talked and acted into existence.

This is a long-standing issue that keeps getting lost on people who reify large arbitrary

assortments of people into acting entities. The issue is whether macro and micro are



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distinct entities. The answer from enactment is that there is no ontological difference

between micro and macro, a position that is also articulated by Giddens and Latour

(Taylor and Van Every, 2000: 141–72). Organization is realized in moments of conversation and joint action that are embedded in day-to-day interactions. Conversation

is the site of organizational emergence, and the text generated during the conversation, its surface (Taylor and Van Every, 2000). Thus what an organization will have

become is a property of communication and is read from the conversing. Said differently, organization is talked into existence again and again through conversations that

overlap in time and space. Plausible summaries of these conversations that give conversants an identity, and their conversations some coherence, are fed back to participants

by macro-actors. These moments of enunciation, which enable people to see what they

have said and what it might amount to, occur when macro-actors (people who act on

behalf of distributed conversations) are doing such things as writing an annual report,

holding a press conference, issuing an order to employees, arguing for a position in the

senior management committee, writing an internal report, talking employees into a

strike, writing a column for an influential business publication, and so on (Taylor, personal communication, May 21, 2000).

There are constraints on enactment just as there are constraints on the big three. But

the constraints on enactment are lodged in quite different places. There are constraints

in the grammar of the language that is used to convert interaction into text, constraints in the discipline of interaction, and constraints in the texts that are reflexively

treated as evidence that shared images are being produced, accepted, and elaborated.

To take the big three seriously is to translate their mechanisms into language, interaction, and shared images, and to pinpoint where and how they get talked into existence.

Enactment thrives quite well without a macro/micro split. It does not waste time trying

to, first, separate the organization as entity from the individual as component, and then,

second, reconnect them. The economy of enactment lies in its treatment of organization as a form of social life that is:

invariably situated, circumstantial, and locally realized in a finite time and place involving

real people . . . [M]anagerial interventions are not exogenous at all, but merely another

locally realized, personally communicated act expressed in language (a speech act), with

this special characteristic, that they are meant to be, and are treated as being, declarative

[declarative = communication that causes a state of affairs to exist, e.g. a priest saying, “I

declare you man and wife,” marries the couple]. (Taylor and Van Every, 2000, p. 143)



Portraits of organization that posit autonomous structures, interorganizational relationships, and populations as containers filled with reactive individuals are convenient

fictions behind which the containing gets worked out and changed through acting,

conversing, and textualizing. Continuities in framing, in action, and in language from

conversation to conversation, coupled with adjustments on the spot to the vagaries of

interaction, produce distributed understanding that is more intelligent than is evident

in any one conversation (Weick and Roberts, 1993). When macro-actors feed portions

of this understanding back to the conversationalists, the feedback enables the conversationalists to talk organization into existence more readily and more prominently. The

idea that organizations as well as environments are enacted is missing from many discussions of enactment, although not from those of Giddens and Latour. If conversation



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