The article focuses on how rural households cope with blackouts caused by winter storms. We approach household preparedness using a practice theory perspective, and argue that preparedness is mundanely preformed as part of everyday practices. The data material consists of at home visits to 14 households from Norway and Sweden. The results demonstrate that households cope with blackouts by activating and mobilising competences, meanings and materials belonging to different practices, and that this is an ongoing process to ensure the continuation of everyday life during disruption. The article concludes by arguing for the need to bring forward studies on informal preparedness activities, in a research field where household preparedness tends to be framed using a top‐down perspective on crisis management.

In the present article, practices of inclusion of different types of volunteers in the response to a large‐scale forest fire in Sweden are studied. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with three types of voluntary actors. The volunteers were organized to different degrees, from members of organizations and participants in emergent groups to organizationally unaffiliated individuals. Organized volunteers were the most easily included, particularly if they were members of voluntary emergency organizations. It was difficult for volunteers lacking relevant organizational affiliation to be included. Disaster response operations are dynamic, conditions change over time, and tensions between different modes, degrees, and levels of inclusion may arise. However, irrespective of changing conditions, practices of inclusion of highly organized volunteers work best.

Purpose-Incident sites can be described as the joint work site of the emergency services, where one of their challenges is to interact with the public. The purpose of this paper is to study how this interaction is structured by the emergency personnel's jurisdictional claims. Design/methodology/approach-This paper rests upon qualitative method and in-depth interviews. In total, 28 people have been interviewed, out of which 13 are emergency personnel and 15 are unaffiliated volunteers. The interview material has been analysed qualitatively and thematically by the authors. Findings-The findings show that the interaction between emergency personnel and unaffiliated volunteers can be described in terms of three different boundary practices: cordoning off, division of labour and conversation, varying in degrees of inclusion and exclusion. The result shows that the emergency personnel's relationship to volunteers is ambivalent, as they are both seen as an uncertain element at the incident site in need of control and as a valuable source of information. Originality/value-While most other studies have been focusing on the interaction between emergency organizations, the authors have investigated the interaction between emergency organizations and a group previously unstudied: unaffiliated volunteers. While sociologists in the field of boundary work normally describe boundary practices in terms of negotiation, sympathizing with the concept of negotiated order, the results point to the fact that boundaries are not necessarily a subject for negotiation.

Syftet med den här artikeln är att studera hur människor skapar mening av den svenska coronastrategin samt hur de implementerar denna strategi i sina vardagsliv. Artikeln bygger på en intervjustudie med åtta personer boendes i Stockholm. Samtliga intervjuer genomfördes under pandemins initiala fas (april–maj 2020). Artikeln tar sin teoretiska utgångspunkt i ett risksociologiskt intresse för hur människor skapar mening kring osäkerheter, här exemplifierat genom en vardag präglad av coronapandemin och den svenska strategin för att hantera denna. Resultaten visar att intervjupersonerna stödjer den svenska strategin och dess vetenskapliga grund samtidigt som de upplever en stor osäkerhet inför hur strategin ska omsättas i vardagliga praktiker. Denna ambivalens kan förstås i relation till Becks risksamhälle och hans antaganden om människans paradoxala inställning till vetenskap och riskexperter samt mot bakgrund av Tulloch och Luptons sociokulturella perspektiv på vardag och risk.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how spontaneous volunteers make sense of their actions at the scene of accident. More specifically, this paper focusses on the moral aspects of this sense-making process in terms of how spontaneous volunteers justify their own and others actions at the scene of accident through moral positioning. Design/methodology/approach This is done through a narrative analysis of volunteers’ retrospective stories from the scene of accident. The empirical material consists of interviews with 12 witnesses to traffic accidents. Findings The narrative analysis identifies two central storylines: the interviewees frame their own and others’ actions through norms of how one should act, and the interviewees frame their own actions by presenting themselves as a person of a certain type, sometimes positioned against an real or imaginative “other”. Originality/value Disaster sociologists have long argued that emergent behaviours and norms are one of the phenomena distinguishing disasters from everyday emergencies. However, as this paper shows, emergent behaviours and norms are also present at everyday emergencies such as traffic accidents where spontaneous volunteers can play an important role by filling the void before the arrival of emergency services.