Out of the Garbage Can into the Fire

Paper Contact Details Abstract This paper is a brief case study of the establishment and progress of Business Ventures, the business arm of Eccles College. It is structured to reflect work on the role of retrospective rationalisation in management thinking. I propose to consider the situation of establishing the Business Ventures Unit in terms of the garbage can model and associated loose coupling. In his more recent writing, Weick has absorbed the earlier garbage can concepts into his theories of sensemaking, and these too prove useful.This paper is a brief case study of the establishment and progress of Business Ventures, the business arm of Eccles College. It is structured to reflect work on the role of retrospective rationalisation in management thinking. I propose to consider the situation of establishing the Business Ventures Unit in terms of the garbage can model and associated loose coupling. In his more recent writing, Weick has absorbed the earlier garbage can concepts into his theories of sensemaking, and these too prove useful. The paper attempts to make sense, in Schon’s and Weick’s terms, of the case study of the establishment of Business Ventures at Eccles College. It has used the concept of the garbage can to illustrate how an organisation can be developed in a flexible manner, utilising opportunities as they arise in a dynamic situation. It does not argue that readers should now reject all their rational planning approaches, but that they should consider that there is a very strong element of retrospective rationalisation in every account of how an organisation achieved its current status. Also, in order to make sense of situations in which they find themselves, readers may find that use of a garbage can type analysis can help them to formulate a problem for subsequent resolution.