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Chapter 17: Organizational Information Theory
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
Chapter 17
Organizational Information Theory
Chapter Outline
I. Introduction
• As options for new communication channels increase, the number of messages that people
send and receive, as well as the speed at which one sends them, increases as well.
• Not only are organizations faced with the task of decoding the messages that are received,
but they are also challenged with determining which people need to receive the information
to help achieve the organization’s goals.
• Karl Weick developed an approach to describe the process by which organizations (like a
college or university) collect, manage, and use the information that they receive.
• Rather than focusing on the structure of the organization in terms of the roles and rules that
guide its members, Weick emphasizes the process of organizing.
• Weick sees the organization as a system taking in confusing or ambiguous information
from its environment and making sense out of it.
o Therefore, organizations will evolve as they try to make sense out of themselves and
their environment.
o Weick’s Organizational Information Theory (OIT) directs attention to the steps that
are necessary to manage and use information for the BankNG project.
II. The Only Constant is Change (in Organizations)
• Weick’s theory focuses on the process that organizations undergo in their attempt to make
sense out of all the information that bombards them on a daily basis.
o Weick states that “organizations and their environments change so rapidly that it is
unrealistic to show what they are like now, because that’s not the way they’re going
to be later” (1969, p. 1).
o The focus of Organizational Information Theory is on the communication of
information that is vital in determining the success of an organization.
▪ It is quite rare that one person or one department in an organization has all the
information necessary to complete a project.
▪ This knowledge typically comes from a variety of sources.
▪ The task of information processing is not completed simply by attaining
information; the difficult part is in deciphering and distributing the information
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that is gained.
A. General Systems Theory
• To explain the influence of information from an organization’s external environments
and to understand the influence that an organization has on its external environments,
Weick applied General Systems Theory in the development of his approach to studying
how organizations manage information.
o Systems theorists argue that there are complex patterns of interaction among the
parts of a system, and understanding these interactions will help understand the
entire system.
• Organizations are usually made up of different departments, teams, or groups.
o Although these units may focus on independent tasks, the goals of the
o It’s important to remember that this information can be either positive or negative.
o The organization and its members can then choose to use the information to
maintain the current state of the organization or can decide to initiate some
changes in accordance with the goals that the system is trying to accomplish.
o The decision of the organization to request or provide feedback reflects a selective
choice made by the group in an effort to accomplish its goals.
▪ This process reflects a Darwinian approach to how organizations manage
information.
B. Darwin’s Theory of Sociocultural Evolution
• A second perspective that has been used to describe the process by which organizations
collect and make sense out of information is the theory of sociocultural evolution.
• The theory of evolution was originally developed to describe the adaptation processes
that living organisms undergo in order to thrive in a challenging ecological
Chapter 17: Organizational Information Theory
environment.
o Charles Darwin (1948) explained these adaptations in terms of mutations that
allow organisms to cope with their various surroundings.
• Campbell (1965) extends this theory to explain the processes by which organizations
and their members adapt to their social surroundings.
• Weick adapts sociocultural evolution to explain the process that organizations undergo
in adjusting to various information pressures.
III. Assumptions of Organizational Information Theory
• The first assumption states that organizations depend on information in order to function
effectively and accomplish their goals.
o Organizations establish goals that require them to obtain information from both
internal and external sources.
• The second assumption proposed by Weick focuses on the ambiguity that exists in
information: Messages differ in terms of their understandability.
o An organization needs to determine which of its members are most knowledgeable or
experienced in dealing with particular information that is obtained.
o Karl Weick (2015) argues that when things are ambiguous, people will do their best
to work with it.
o Equivocality refers to the extent to which messages are complicated, uncertain, and
unpredictable. Equivocal messages are often sent in organizations.
▪ Because these messages are not clearly understood, people need to develop a
framework or plan for reducing their ambiguity about the message.
o Eric Eisenberg (2007) reminds that equivocality is not necessarily problematic.
o Eisenberg states that rather than viewing equivocality as difficult, “Weick turned this
idea on its head, arguing instead that equivocality is the engine that motivates people
to organize” (p. 274).
▪ Eisenberg further clarifies that equivocality may “make coordinated action
possible” (p. 274).
• The third assumption of the theory proposes that organizations engage in joint activity to
make information that is received more understandable.
o Weick (1979) sees the process of reducing equivocality as a joint activity among
members of an organization.
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give-and-take of information.
IV. Key Concepts and Conceptualizing Information
A. Information Environment: The Sum Total
• Every day, people are faced with literally thousands of stimuli that they could
potentially process and interpret.
• It is unrealistic to think that an organization or its members could possibly process all
the information that is available.
• The availability of all stimuli is considered to be the information environment.
• Essentially, organizations have two primary tasks to perform in order to successfully
B. Rules: Guidelines to Analyze
• In Organizational Information Theory, rules refer to the guidelines that an organization
has established for analyzing the equivocality of a message as well as for guiding
responses to information.
• Organizations have rules for determining the equivocality of the information and for
identifying the appropriate way in which they should respond to the messages.
• Weick provides examples of rules that might cause an organization to choose one cycle
of information or feedback over another for reducing the equivocality of messages.
o Duration refers to a choice made by an organization to engage in communication
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C. Cycles: Act, Respond, Adjust
• If the information that is received is highly equivocal, the organization may engage in a
series of communication behaviors in an attempt to decrease the level of ambiguity.
following three stages:
o An act refers to the communication statements and behaviors used to indicate
one’s determination to reduce ambiguity.
o A second step in the communication cycle is response.
▪ Response is defined as a reaction to the act. That is, a response that seeks
clarification in the equivocal message is provided as a result of the act.
o As a result of the response, the organization formulates a response in return as a
result of any adjustment that has been made to the information that was
originally received.
▪ If the response to the act has reduced the equivocality of the message, an
adjustment is made to indicate that the information is now understood.
▪ If the information is still equivocal, the adjustment might come in the form
of additional questions designed to clarify the information further.
• Weick uses the term double-interact loops to describe the cycles of act, response, and
adjustment in information exchanges.
o Double-interact loops refer to multiple communication cycles that are used to
assist the organization’s members in reducing the equivocality of information.
o Weick suggests that the relationships among individuals in the organization are
more important to the process of organizing than the talent or knowledge that any
one individual brings to the team.
V. The Principles of Equivocality
• An organization must analyze the relationship among the equivocality of information, the
rules the organization has for removing the equivocality, and the cycles of communication
that should be used.
o If a message is highly equivocal, chances are that the organization has few rules for
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the cycle of communication that should be employed to reduce the ambiguity.
• The more equivocal the message, the fewer rules that are available to guide cycles of
communication; the less equivocal the message, the more rules that are available to assist
the organization in reducing equivocality, thus reducing the number of cycles that are
needed to interpret the information.
VI. Reducing Equivocality: Trying to Use the Information
• According to Weick (1995) and W. Timothy Coombs (2015), organizations evolve through
stages in an attempt to integrate the rules and cycles so the information can be easily
understood and is meaningful.
• The process of equivocality reduction is essentially an interpersonal process and occurs
through the following three stages: enactment, selection, and retention.
A. Enactment: Assigning Message Importance
• Enactment refers to how information will be received and interpreted by the
organization.
• Andrew Herrmann (2007) states, “Enactment starts with the bracketing or framing of a
information.
▪ Existing rules are reviewed in making decisions about how the organization
will deal with the ambiguity.
▪ If the organization determines that it does not have a sufficient number of
rules for reducing the equivocality, various cycles of communication must
be analyzed to determine their effectiveness in assisting the organization in
understanding the information.
o Weick believes that one affiliate of enactment is sensemaking, or the attempt to
create understanding in situations that are complex and uncertain.
▪ For Weick (1995), sensemaking includes “the placement of items into
frameworks, comprehending, redressing surprise, constructing meaning,
interacting in pursuit of mutual understanding, and patterning” (p. 6).
▪ Sensemaking “starts with chaos” (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2009) and
covers many forms of communication, including routines, arguments,
symbols, commitments, and other actions and behaviors (Salem, 2007).
▪ Weick finds sensemaking activities in all three stages (enactment, selection,
retention), enactment is most often identified with sensemaking.
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B. Selection: Interpreting the Inputs
rules and cycles that will be used.
o If the information is still ambiguous, the organization has to look into the
resources that it has available and determine if it has any additional rules that
could help in reducing the ambiguity.
C. Retention: Remember the Small Stuff
• Once the organization has reviewed its ability to deal with ambiguity, it analyzes the
effectiveness of the rules and cycles of communication and engages in retention.
• In the retention stage, the organization stores information for later use.
o This stage requires organizations to look at what to deal with and what to ignore
or leave alone.
VII. Integration, Critique, and Closing
• Karl Weick’s Organizational Information Theory has been identified as a powerful
theoretical framework for explaining how organizations make sense of the information
thus, centralizing communication as a key focus of the “theoretical latticework”
(Herrmann, 2007, p. 18) associated with OIT.
A. Logical Consistency
• Weick’s theory seems to fail the test of logical consistency.
• Individuals are not always so conscious or precise in their selection procedures, and
their actions may have more to do with their intuition than with organizational rules.
• An additional criticism underscoring the problems of logical consistency is that
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Chapter 17: Organizational Information Theory
o These researchers challenge Weick’s view by noting that “at no point are inherent
contradictions in organizational structure and process even remotely evoked” (p.
275) in his research.
B. Utility
• Organizational Information Theory focuses on the process of communication rather than
on the role of communicators themselves.
which makes this a rather useful theoretical undertaking.
C. Heurism
• Organizational Information Theory is heuristic and has prompted considerable scholarly
discussion.
• The theory has inspired thinking in research on a variety of topics, including
environmental flooding (Ulmer, Sellnow, & Seeger, 2007), nomadic work (Bean &
Eisenberg, 2006), surgical procedures (Rosness et al., 2015), organizational humor
(Heiss & Carmack, 2012), leadership in high schools (Carraway & Young, 2015), and
cohesion in the U.S. Army (Van Epps, 2008).
Classroom Activities
1. Fill in the Blanks
Objective: To demonstrate for students the methods used to “fill in the gaps” of missing
information to reduce equivocality
Materials: A newspaper or magazine article that has phrases and information blacked out
(This can be presented in the form of a handout or a document on an overhead
projector/document camera.)
Directions:
1. Instruct students to fill in the blanks in the passage.
2. Discuss the strategies students used to reduce the equivocality of the passage.
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
2. You Be the Judge
Objective: To provide students with the opportunity to reduce their equivocality about a
situation and to arrive at a decision
Directions:
2. Ask students to decide how they would rule if they were the judge. They should be
able to support their decisions by citing information obtained from the video.
3. As a class, discuss the rulings made. Point out the importance of obtaining and
3. Transmitting Information
Objective: To demonstrate for students the potential for information distortion (and further
2. Ask the student assigned the number “1” to remain in the room while all other
volunteers leave. Read the news story to the student assigned the number “1.”
3. Bring the student assigned the number “2” back into the room, and have the student
who is assigned the number “1” repeat the story from memory.
4. Bring the student assigned the number “3” back into the room, and have the student
who is assigned the number “2” repeat the story that was told by the student assigned
• How much of the story was distorted in the telling and retelling?
• Which parts of the story were the most memorable, and which were accurately
retold? Which aspects of the story were quickly forgotten?
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Chapter 17: Organizational Information Theory
• If you had the opportunity to organize yourselves for this task, what rules
would you establish for enhancing the accuracy of the repeated information?