ウェイクの「緩やかに連結した組織」について

創造の組織過程についての試論

抄録

　Recently some sociologists have challenged the traditional views of the organization in which organizations are regarded as orderly constructions. They suggest orders in the organization should be more ambiguous and more temporary than expected. Weick, who has made so significant contributions among those sociologists that some of his works are reviewed here, lays much emphasis on "loose couplings" in order to show organizations perform a creative function which individuals, if unorganized, could not perform. He says such functions have not been properly theorized with the traditional images of "tightly coupled" organizations.
　The creation in a loosely coupled organization is supposed to be made in an uncertain way. It is convenient, therefore, to analyze the creation process into two "arbitrary", or unpredictable, steps; first, organization members come into an unintended interaction with others, who may have been somewhat strange to them, and then, through the interaction they manage to construct some meaning or reality, which may not have been expected to come out by any members including the participants in the interaction.
　Creation has a paradoxical character in that although it is defined as the emergence of something that has been known by no individual, it must be made by some individuals. We propose that one of the clues to the paradox should lie in the arbitrariness of the organizational processes of creation. That is, since the processes are not well predicted, an unpredicted outcome is possible to emerge. The evidence of this proposition is found in observing the creation process in the field of science.It is worth mentioning that scientists often constitute a loosely coupled organization, and that the way in which they process scientific knowledges is identical with the organizational process discussed above.