Coordinating the Uncoordinated Giant: Applying the Four Flows Model of Communicative Constitution of Organizations to the United States Weather Enterprise

Abstract

The US weather enterprise includes academia, the private weather industry, and government-funded forecasting, research, and dissemination agencies. While not an organization in its own right, the enterprise behaves like an organization of organizations. This thesis applies the communicative constitution of organizations, and McPhee and Zaug’s four flows model in particular, to the US weather enterprise. Each organization in the weather enterprise behaves like individual members of an organization would, which extends this theory to a conceptualization of organization that increases innovation, collaboration, and coordination. The weather is a constitutive force which calls the US weather enterprise into being. Finally, CCO is extended to other collaborative, coordinated efforts among the public and private sectors, indicating the possibilities of CCO as an attractive answer to the great organizational questions of the 21st century and beyond. Future research areas are considered, including how the US weather enterprise manages the unexpected and reduces uncertainty organizationally. Also, considerations as to how CCO can be applied to the incident command structure, often called forward during high-impact weather events, will be made.