structure and technology.

structure and technology, are les conspicuous moreover potentially more powerful differences in the capability for collective mind. A smart body does the right thing regardless of its form and regardless of whether the environment is stable or tumultuous We suspect that organic hypothesiss because of their capacity to reconfigure themselves temporarily into more mechanistic manner of makings have more fully developed minds than do mechanistic systems

We also suspect that newer organizational forms, like as networks (Powell, 1990), self-designing plans (Hedberg, Nystrom, and Starbuck, 1976) cognitive oligopolies (Porac, a certain quantity of organizations require nearly error-free operations all the time because otherwise they are capable of experiencing catastrophes. the same such organization is an aircraft carrier, which an informant in Rochlin, LaPorte, and Roberts' (1987: 78) cogitation described as follows:

... imagine that it's a busy day, and you shrink San Francisco Airport to barely one short runway and individual ramp and one gate. Make planes take not upon and land at the same time, at half the instant time interval, rock the runway from side to side, and require that everyone who leaves in the morning go [i]or[/i] come backs that same day. Make certain the equipment is so shut to the edge of the case that it's fragile. Then cause to deviate off the radar to avoid detection, impose strict restrains on radios, fuel the aircraft in place with their engines running, set an enemy in the air, and scatter live bomb and rocket around. Now wet the whole thing down with sea water and oil, and man it with 20-year-olds, half of whom have not ever seen an airplane close-up. Oh and from the way, try not to kill anyone.

Even notwithstanding that carriers represent "a million accidents waiting to happen" (Wilson, 1986: 21) almost none of them do. Here, we examine to what end not. The explanation we wish to explore is that organizations belong toed with reliability enact aggregate mental processe that are more abundantly developed than those found in organizations belong toed with efficiency. By fully bring outed mental processes, we mean that organizations preoccupied with reliability may bestow more time and effort organizing for controll information processing (Schneider and Schiffrin, 1977) mindful attention (Langer, 1989) and heedful action (Ryle 1949) These intensified efforts enable populace to understand more of the complexity they face, which then enables them to answer with fewer errors. Reliable rules are smart systems.

Before we can experiment this line of reasoning we ne to lay open a language of organizational mind that enables us to describe collective mental processe in organizations. ln developing it, we actuate back and forth between universals of mind and details of reliable performance in flight operations in succession a modern super carrier.(1) We use flight operations to illustrate organizational mind for a number of reasons: The technology is relatively simple, the coordination among activities is explicit and visible, the socialization is continuous, agents working alone have les grasp of the entire arrangement than they do when working together, the plan is constructed of interdependent know-how, teams of persons think on their feet and do the "right thing" in novel situations, and the events of any lapse in attention are swift and disabling. Because our efforts to understand clothe operations got us thinking about the possibility that performance is mediated by way of collective mental processes, we use these operations to illustrate that thinking, further the processes of mind we discuss are presum to be inherent in all organizations. What may vary across organizations is the felt ne to cause to grow these processes to more advanced levels

THE IDEA OF assign places to MIND

Discussions of collective mental processe have been rare, despite the fact that the community claim to be studying "social" cognition (eg Schneider, 1991) The preoccupation with individual cognition has left organizational theorists ill-equipped to do abundant more with the so-called cognitive revolution than apply it to organizational transactions one brain at a time. There are a not many exceptions, however, and we introduce our hold discussion of collective mind with a brief review of three late attempts to engage the topic of arrange mind.

Wegner and his associates (Wegner, Giuliano, and Hertel, 1985; Wegner, 1987; Wegner, Erber, and Raymond, 1991) put in mind ofed that group mind may take the form of cognitive interdependence focused around memory processe They argued that nation in close relationships enact a single transactive memory regularity complete with differentiated responsibility for remembering different portions of often met with experience. People know the locations rather than the details of used by all events and rely on single in kind another to contribute missing details that rod their own retrieval. Transactive memory theorys are integrated and differentiated edifices in the sense that be connecteded individuals often hold related information in different locations. When population trade lower-order, detailed, disparate information, they many times discover higher-order themes, generalizations, and ideas that subsume these details. It is these integrations of disparate inputs that present the appearance to embody the "magical transformation" that clump mind theorists sought to understand (Wegner, Giuliano, and Hertel, 1985: 268) The important point Wegner contributes to our understanding of collective mental processe is that assemblage mind is not indexed according to within-group similarity of attitudes, understanding, or language, nor can it be understood without terminate attention to communications processes among form into groups members (Wegner, Giuliano, and Hertel, 1985: 254-255) the one and the other of these lessons will be evident in our reformulation.