The European Journal of Management Studies is a publication of ISEG, Universidade de Lisboa. The mission of EJMS is to significantly influence the domain of management studies by publishing innovative research articles. EJMS aspires to provide a platform for thought leadership and outreach.
Purpose
Since Weick’s (1993) seminal Mann Gulch paper articulated a collapse of sensemaking, scholars have repeatedly investigated sensemaking downstream of enactment. Motivated by another wildland firefighting tragedy, the tragic loss of 19 firefighters in Arizona in 2013, this study aims to look at enactment itself and reveals that the endogenous creation and re-creation of the wildland fire caused a fatal feedback loop of “trigger traps” leading to perpetual enactment that short-circuited sensemaking. Wildland fires can have unpredictable consequences, which triggers in individual sensemakers a fatal and continuous return to the beginning of the sensemaking process.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper’s approach is a case study based on a textual analysis of sources investigating the 2013 Yarnell Hill fire. The authors also carefully compared the Yarnell Hill and Mann Gulch disasters in search of breakdowns in sensemaking that could help us understand why we continue to lose firefighters in the line of duty.
Findings
The simultaneously volatile and complex environment at Yarnell illustrates sensemaking antecedents to the study of enactment. The findings suggest ways that organizations – those fighting wildfire or those fighting a global pandemic – can avoid getting trapped in the early stages of enactment and can retain resilience in their sensemaking.
Originality/value
This paper introduces the concept of “trigger traps” to help explain the fatal feedback loop of repeated environmental triggers in the early stages of sensemaking in volatile environments.
students find purpose: The campus guide to meaning-making. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. ISBN 978-0-470-40814-8, 320 pages. C. John Sommerville. (2009). Religious ideas for secular universities. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. ISBN 978-0-8026-6442-0, 189 pages.The secularization of higher education has created a complicated context for discourse about religion and spirituality in most public and some private universities (Marsden, 1994;Taylor, 2007). Yet the growing orientation toward spirituality and faith among undergraduates calls for a renewed openness to matters of beliefs and values in college classrooms, a topic these three books address, providing insights into why it is important to create open discursive space for dialogue about values in higher education and ways institutions are moving toward this aim. We review these three new contributions and reflect on some of the issues they raise. John Sommerville's new book, Religious Ideas for Secular Universities, provides a framework for understanding the complexities of discussing faith in this new age of globalization. Sommerville is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Florida who is still engaged in the discourse on faith in higher education. This book combines insights from his recent books with other topics about which he has lectured and written.The four chapters in part 1 consider why secularization has become a problem in relation to the emergence of the corporate university in the global period. Sommerville is at his most
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