Weick's Sentences (2)

Picking up from where we left off in Friday's post....

When people theorize about any facet of organizing, including sensemaking, they focus on conceptual properties that are thought to be crucial.

The first thing I notice about this sentence is the uneasy relationship between the general and the specific. The sentence talks about three activities:

1. theorizing about a facet of organizing;
2. theorizing about sensemaking;
3. focusing on conceptual properties that are thought to be crucial.

People who do the second are, of course, doing the first. And the sentence rightly captures this with the word "including". But this actually draws our attention to the words "of organizing"; providing a specific example emphasizes the more general category. We are expecting to learn next what people who theorize about organizing do. But what we get is something that applies at least to all theorizing in the social sciences and, arguably, to all theorizing.

Notice the difference in the following sentence:

When people theorize about a facet of organizing, or any other social practice, they focus on conceptual properties that are thought to be crucial.

Or still better:

When people theorize, they focus on conceptual properties that are thought to be crucial.

You can then write another sentence that actually gets down to business:

Some crucial conceptual properties of sensemaking are retrospect, framing, and ambiguity.

Alternatively, you can follow through on the gesture you started with, moving smoothly from the general to the specific:

When people theorize about any facet of organizing, including sensemaking, they focus on conceptual properties that are thought to condition how people work together to reach the goals they share.

That's still not a great sentence, however, mainly because "conceptual properties" sounds odd, especially next to "facet of organizing". To see this, consider this question: What are the conceptual properties of a facet of organizing? I think "properties" would do here. But even then we would be talking about properties of facets. It's one of those sentences that seems to be saying something very precise, but really just defers the question of what it means for later.

One last post on sentences on Wednesday. Then something completely different. (Actually, not quite completely different: I've just decided to focus on sensemaking in April.)