The Logic of Tact: How Decisions Happen in Situations of Crisis

Abstract

The mass-migration of refugees in the fall 2015 in Europe posed an immense humanitarian and logistical challenge: exhausted from their week-long journeys, refugees arrived in Vienna in need of care, shelter, food, medical aid, and onward transport. The refugee crisis was managed by an emerging polycentric and inter-sectoral collective of organizations. In this paper, we investigate how leaders of these organizations made decisions in concert with each other and hence sustained the capacity to act as collective. We ask: what was the logic of decision-making that orchestrated collective action during the crisis? In answering this question, we make the following contribution: departing from March's logics of consequences and appropriateness as well as Weick's work on sensemaking during crisis, we introduce an alternative logic that informed decision-making in our study: the logic of tact. With this concept we (a) offer a better understanding of how managers may make decisions under the condition of bounded rationality and the simultaneous transgression of their institutional identity in situations of crisis; and we (b) show that in decision-making under duress cognition is neither ahead of action, nor is action ahead of cognition; rather, tact explicates the rapid switching between cognition and action, orchestrating decision-making through their interplay.

From Corona Virus to Corona Crisis: The Value of An Analytical and Geographical Understanding of Crisis

“…Due to the underlying fundamental uncertainty, ‘the emotional response to crisis is not fear (such as fear from fire) but existential angst, which has no identifiable object that could offer a grip for a learnt response’ (Kornberger et al . 2020, p. 242).…”

Curriculum response to the crisis

“…As noted earlier, crises imply danger but also opportunity (Darling 1994 ); the term crisis in itself suggests that there is time to prevent disaster (Boin and T’ Hart 2007 ). Crises are associated with openness toward the future and the need for radical decision-making (Kornberger et al 2019 ). Following the continuum of education crises (UCCD 2020a ), education systems tend to return to the development phase, where they are forced to question their stability and flexibility, the level of training of education actors, the capacity of the system to cope with an emergency situation, and the need to put in place action plans to return or move to a stable and institutionalized system able to cope with future crises.…”

Unmasking a health care system: the Dutch policy response to the Covid-19 crisis

“…Yet, we show, the government gradually lost control when the crisis became more enduring and conflicting interests and ideologies became more apparent whilst regional actors failed to pick up their regulating role, arguing for a more decisive and central authority. We use logics of decisionmaking during crisis (March and Olsen 1989, March 1994, Allison 1971 and tact (Kornberger, Leixnering, and Meyer 2019) to illuminate how collective action has been orchestrated and challenged in the unfolding Covid-crisis. In doing so, we aim to 'unmask' the institutionalized resilience-capacity of the Dutch healthcare system.…”

“…In doing so, we aim to 'unmask' the institutionalized resilience-capacity of the Dutch healthcare system. A crisis is commonly described as an unanticipated, surprising, and ambiguous event posing a significant threat and leaving only a short decision time (Kornberger, Leixnering, and Meyer 2019). Following the work of Colin Hay, crises are not simply a condensation of contradictions that produce a condition of rupture and breakdown.…”

“…It relies on elements of tradition, rules, routines, identity and emotion, which is both deliberate and future-oriented. Building on these two logics, Kornberger et al (2019) point out the logic of 'tact'. Drawing on an empirical analysis of the refugee crisis in Vienna, they argue that collective actors that do not have shared histories may collectively orchestrate decisions through a way of 'feeling out'; getting a sense of what is going on and switching between cognition and action.…”