Cosmology episode

A cosmology episode is a sudden loss of meaning, followed eventually by a transformative pivot, which creates the conditions for revised meaning.

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." Sudden losses of meaning that can occur when an event is represented electronically in an incomplete, cryptic form are what I call a "cosmology episode." Representations in the electronic world can become chaotic for at least two reasons: The data in these representations are flawed, and the people who manage those flawed data have limited processing capacity. These two problems interact in a potentially deadly vicious circle."

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. In the 1993 article, Weick positions cosmology episodes within a constructivist ontology, he links the term to a variety of similar concepts, and he provides a better-developed definition than he was able to provide in 1985.

First, Weick makes it clear that cosmology episodes occur within a constructivist ontology of the world, rather than the more familiar objectivist and subjectivist ontologies:

"The basic idea of sensemaking is that reality is an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs.... Sensemaking emphasizes that people try to make things rationally accountable to themselves and others. Thus, in the words of Morgan, Frost, and Pondy (1983: 24), "individuals are not seen as living in, and acting out their lives in relations to, a wider reality, so much as creating and sustaining images of a wider reality, in part to rationalize what they are doing. They realize their reality, by reading into their situation patterns of significant meaning."

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