Sensemaking in Organizations - Karl Weick

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

The Nature of Sensemaking (Ch 1)

1995

Contents

Introduction to the Series

Preface

Sensemaking is tested to the extreme when people encounter an event whose occurrence is so implausible that they hesitate to report it for fear they will not be believed. In essence, these people think to themselves, it can’t be, therefore, it isn’t. Just such an event is the battered child syndrome.

The battered child syndrome (BCS) was first suggested in 1946 by John Caffey, a pediatric radiologist, in an article based on six cases where parents gave “histories” that were silent about how the injuries, seen in X-ray photo¬ graphs, had occurred. Some cases in the article were reported 8 years after they had first been observed

Awareness did not change until October 1961 when Frederick Silverman chaired a panel, “The Battered Child Syndrome,” at the American Academy of Pediatrics. What made this event significant is that data from a national survey of 77 district attorneys and 71 hospitals were reported, and in this report 749 cases were identified. The results and an editorial were then published in the Journal of the American Medical Association under the title “The Battered-Child Syndrome.” Public reaction was prompt, and within a few years, laws in all 50 states required that suspected cases of BCS had to be reported. By 1967, when better reporting channels had been established, it was estimated that there were 7,000 cases. This estimate climbed to 60,000 by 1972 and to 500,000 by 1976 (Westrum, 1982, p. 392).