The aim of this study was to examine the practices of crisis management adopted by operative staff when facing a crisis situation in their workplace. This research is based on interviews with personnel from social services and staff from homes for unaccompanied youth. The interviewees asked respondents about their actions in caring for young refugees during the refugee situation. The results are structured around three themes: everyday practices, crisis work, and the process of normalization. Three practices for handling the situation—improvisation, prioritization, and creating alternatives—served as crisis management‐as‐practice. The staff members' everyday practice for solving problems became the basic method employed during the crisis to normalize everyday work.

The goal of this study was to examine the interaction when a workplace suffers an emergency and the emergency responders temporarily deploy their workplace inside the affected workplace to address the emergency. The research is based on semi‐structured interviews with personnel from fire and rescue services and personnel from schools and elderly care centers. The results are structured around four boundary work practices that govern the interaction: emergency containment, division of responsibility, division of labor and crossing the boundary. These boundary work practices provide structure and enable both parties to concentrate on their own work. It also enables support over the workplace boundaries. Thus, the interaction may be described as a cooperation mutually accomplished by both parties.

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This paper explores how a social services unit in Sweden coped with the large influx of unaccompanied children during the refugee situation in 2015. Crisis management is approached using social practice theory to examine how everyday work practices and their constituent resources informed personnel's management of the chaotic circumstances. The research data consist of practice‐based interviews with managerial staff from social services and operational staff at homes for unaccompanied children, as well as manuals and printed routines. The analysis demonstrates that they coped with the challenges posed by the refugee situation by adopting competences, mobilising meanings, and adapting material resources belonging to different practices of everyday work. The paper concludes by emphasising the importance of studying crisis management from a practice‐based perspective as a complement to framing it as a static asset of organisations—governed by institutionalised practices—which has implications for defining what constitutes crisis management and who can become crisis managers.