Weick submitted an article based on this research to The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, but it was rejected by the editor, Dan Katz.
In an unlikely turn of events one of the referees, Arthur R. (Bob) Cohen, wrote the editor indicating that he would like to change his appraisal of the article.
[4] Weick notes that while at Purdue, he was fortunate to develop close ties with faculty in the Krannert School of Management.
[7] Loose coupling in Weick's sense is a term intended to capture the necessary degree of flex between an organization's internal abstraction of reality, its theory of the world, on the one hand, and the concrete material actuality within which it finally acts, on the other.
A loose coupling is what makes it possible for these ontologically incompatible entities to exist and act on each other, without shattering (akin to Castoriadis's idea of 'articulation').
In this sense-making, Weick pays attention to questions of ambiguity and uncertainty, known as equivocality in organizational research that adopts information processing theory.
The effective adoption of collective mindfulness characteristics by an organization appears to cultivate safer cultures that exhibit improved system outcomes.
The term high reliability organization (HRO) is an emergent property described by Weick (and Karlene Roberts at UC-Berkeley).
Highly mindful organizations characteristically exhibit: a) Preoccupation with failure, b) Reluctance to simplify c) Sensitivity to operations, d) Commitment to Resilience, and e) Deference to Expertise.
His structuring of his research was purposefully complex and ambiguous because Weick believed you cannot impose order on a world that is constantly spiraling toward entropy.
Weick specifies that environment is not limited to a physical space, but expands into informational realms, especially in reaction to the development of the internet.
[12] Basbøll and Graham later remarked that Weick's defense violates some of the assumptions of his theory of sensemaking,[13] also noting: "The American Historical Association acknowledges the existence of this common defence in specific cases of plagiarism, tersely remarking that it "is plausible only in the context of a wider tolerance of shoddy work".