This week’s post was inspired by Steve Boese on his HR Technology blog. Writing about Mark Granovetter’s 1973 paper The Strength of Weak Ties, Steve asks for recommendations on other classic works we swear by. I have several that provide first principle underpinnings of the approaches and techniques The Smart Work Company uses when working with clients.

Anyone who knows me professionally may be sick of hearing me refer to the daddy of all inspirational books on organising, the always and increasingly relevant Social Psychology of Organising by Karl Weick. My edition was published in 1979, McGraw Hill. I have referred to it, unsurprisingly, in previous posts. For example in Reflecting on Chaotic Action and Management Reformation.

The Social Psychology Of Organising

Why? At first I thought I might review and summarise what the book is about. I can’t. It is so dense with insight that my copy is defaced with highligher marks and asterisks on every page. Where would I start?

It is the opposite of so many prescriptive, easy to digest business books that profess no silver bullet solutions and then proceed to do just that. Weick says:

“This entire book … has been written to evoke lines of theorizing from the reader, to serve as grist for the reader’s free association mill and to release lines of arguement that previously may not have been given much attention.

The book is about ways of talking about organisations, and it is intentionally focused in this way in the belief that as ways of talking and believing proliferate, new features of organisations are noticed.

That’s why the book is more concerned with metaphors and images than it is with findings.”

He talks of organising as being about flows of human experience and says that relationships, rather than people, are the critical control points in an organisation. Again he says:

“Most ‘things’ in organisations are actually relationships, variables tied together in systematic fashion. Events, therefore, depend on the strength of these ties, the direction of influence, the time it takes for information in the form of differences to move around circuits.

The word organisation is a noun, and it is also a myth.

Events linked together, that transpire within concrete walls … are the forms we erroneously make into substances when we talk about an organisation. Just as the skin is a misleading boundary for marking off where a person ends and the environment starts, so are the walls of an organisation. Events inside organisations and organisms are locked into causal circuits that extend beyond these artificial boundaries.”

Isn’t that great?

Social Networking, Social Media And Workplace Trends

So here we are in 2009. The world is changing at warp-speed. Physical walls are no longer relevant; social networks extend across demographic, cultural, geographical, organisational and professional boundaries. Weick refers to the time it takes for information to move around circuits. That is now instantaneously.

The world changes, technologies change, contexts change. Human dynamics do not. A final quote from Weick:

“Conformity, independence, and social pressure are mainstays in any sets of concepts about human interaction, and all of the dynamics associated with these processes unfold in the cycles where two or more individuals hammer out their differences concerning what’s up in the organisation and what should be done about it.”

So much food for thought. What do you think?