[1][2] In the wake of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the 1977 Tenerife airport disaster, the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster, and the relatively sudden insertion of personal computers into the workplace, organizational scholar Karl E. Weick coined the term "cosmology episode," as follows, in 1985: "Representations of events normally hang together sensibly within the set of assumptions that give them life and constitute a 'cosmos' rather than its opposite, a 'chaos.'
"[3] The concept of cosmology episodes evolved significantly between 1985 and 1993, when Weick published his now-classic reanalysis of Norman Maclean's study of the Mann Gulch wildland firefighting disaster in 1949.
"[4] Second, Weick clarifies the key phrase "sudden loss of meaning" by linking it to related ideas described by other organizational scholars: "Minimal organizations, such as we find in the crew at Mann Gulch, are susceptible to sudden losses of meaning, which have been variably described as fundamental surprises (Reason, 1990) or as events that are inconceivable (Lanir, 1989), hidden (Westrum, 1982), or incomprehensible (Perrow, 1984).
"[5] Third, Weick expands his 1985 definition — "sudden losses of meaning" — to a more nuanced description: "Cosmology refers to a branch of philosophy often subsumed under metaphysics that combines rational speculation and scientific evidence to understand the universe as a totality of phenomena.
Cosmology is the ultimate macro perspective, directed at issues of time, space, change, and contingency as they relate to the origin and structure of the universe.
Importantly, though, it is possible for a community-level cosmology episode to be catastrophic (e.g. Hurricane Katrina), disastrous (e.g the Red River floods of 1997), a crisis (e.g. the 22 July 2005 Stockwell Subway Shooting), ancillary (e.g. an e coli epidemic for a food company), and metaphorical (e.g. the introduction of new technology in an Italian courtroom).