Organizations as Enacted Systems: Learning, Knowing and Change
MIT Sloan's graduate course examines organizations as enacted systems, structures that humans continually create and that in turn shape human action. Core sessions build up fundamental concepts of sensemaking, then apply them to four domains central to contemporary business: how organizations learn, how knowledge is created and shared, how change unfolds, and how meaning gets constructed under uncertainty. Materials on MIT OpenCourseWare include the syllabus, weekly readings drawn from organizational theory and sociology, and assignment prompts used in the MIT classroom. The course treats organizations not as fixed charts but as ongoing processes of interpretation, useful for students of management, sociology, or systems thinking who want the theoretical scaffolding behind terms like organizational learning and sensemaking. No enrollment fee and no certificate are offered, since this is a self-paced OCW archive of course materials rather than a live instructor-led offering.