No abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

No abstract

A qualitative meta-analysis of 164 citations to the phrase “cosmology episode” was conducted in order to create an evidence-based reconceptualization of the concept, yielding three findings. The first finding is the literature has moved towards the study of cosmology episodes at multiple levels: i.e. individual, team, organizational, community, and national cosmology episodes. The second finding is the literature has moved towards the study of cosmology episodes as resilience processes: i.e. anticipating, sense-losing, improvising, sense-remaking, and renewing. The third finding is the literature on cosmology episodes has diversified toward five distinct types: i.e. catastrophic, disastrous, contextualized, ancillary and metaphorical cosmology episodes. Taken together, these findings constitute a reconceptualization of the concept of cosmology episode.

Weick's theories of organizing and sensemaking help enrich the assumptions in the organization design school. This study builds on Weick's theories of sensemaking to illustrate how three fundamental organization design assumptionsdominant variables, causal laws and executive dictates -were found to be restrictive in the explanation of redesign processes in the 1976 reorganization of the US intelligence community. The assumption of dominant variables was challenged by the appearance of a multitude of events, or enactments, which were selected by organization members for further attention. The assumption of causal laws was challenged by the appearance of individual-level cause maps which were filtered, through sensemaking processes, into organization-level workable realities. The assumption of executive dictates was challenged by the appearance of attempts to punctuate redesign processes as organizational decisions. The study suggests value in moving from simple organization design assumptions to more reliable findings drawn from detailed observations of redesign processes.