"mutually shaping circularity of structure and culture."
"Mutually shaping circularity of structure and culture."
This image represents Skrtic's ideas of a "mutually shaping circularity of structure and culture."Created by the BookBuilder authors.

Organizations as Schemas

From the cognitive perspective, an organization is a cognitive entity, a paradigm or human schema, "an abridged, generalized, corrigible organization of experience that serves as an initial frame of reference for action and perception" (Weick, 1979, p. 50). That is, although an organizational paradigm orients the thought and action of its members, the members are active in creating and recreating the paradigm. Through activity, selective attention, consensual validation, and luck, people in organizations unrandomize streams of random experience enough to form a paradigm that — correct or not — structures the field of action sufficiently so that meaningful activity can proceed (Weick, 1979, 1985). Members' sampling of the environment, and thus the paradigms they construct, are shaped by prior beliefs and values, which act as filters through which they examine their experiences. Moreover, activity in organizations, which from the cognitive perspective is the pretext for sense-making, is shaped by material structures like formalization, professionalization, and bureaucracy itself. These structural contingencies shape members' organizational realities because they influence the contacts, communication, and commands that they experience and thus affect the streams of experience, beliefs, values, and actions that constitute their organizational paradigms. Furthermore, the paradigm and its values and beliefs also "constrain contacts, communication, and commands. These constraints constitute and shape organizational processes that result in structures" (Weick, 1979, p. 48). Thus, from this perspective, organization is a mutually shaping circularity of structure and culture. Depending on where one enters the circle, organization is a continuous process in which structural contingencies shape the work activities or organizational members, which in turn shapes the members' value orientation and thus the nature of the organizational paradigms they construct to interpret the organization's structural contingencies.