Wandering Through Crisis and Everyday Organizing; Revealing the Subjective Nature of Interpretive, Temporal and Organizational Boundaries

Abstract

The results of a 6‐year action research study on developing crisis management preparedness in Swedish municipalities reveal strong connections rather than sharp distinctions between crisis and non‐crisis on interpretive, temporal and organizational dimensions. Confusion and debate about what is labelled as a crisis, when everyday ends and crisis begins, and who and who are not involved, may illuminate different views on what the scale, scope and inherent complexity of ‘our’ system is in crisis and in non‐crisis. Crises are not only a brutal audit for the practitioners involved, but also for the scientific theories that explain crisis behaviour. Current definitions of crisis understate the subjective nature of interpretations of crisis and organizing. To better understand the muddiness of organizing, crisis management researchers might aim for portraying more feed‐forward messiness in crisis study descriptions and applying less hindsight bias in their analyses. Such images could help practitioners realize that organizing is more complex and less controllable than currently might be pictured and assumed. A deeper exploration of concepts like duality, competing values and complex adaptive systems could serve both practitioners and researchers.

The Leadership Process During an Organizational Crisis

“…Specifically, previous research has proved that organizational crises: (1) are highly ambiguous situations where causes and effects are unknown (Boin et al, 2005;Pearson, Roux-Dufort, & Clair, 2007;Quarantelli, 1988), creating a sensemaking process that is carried out while the crisis unrolls (Laere, 2013;Patriotta & Gruber, 2015;Weick, 1988); (2) have a low probability of occurring, although pose a major threat to the survival of an organization (Bazerman & Watkins, 2004;Roux-Dufort & Lalonde, 2013) and to organizational stakeholders (Alpaslan, Green, & Mitroff, 2009); (3) offer temporal constraints, giving little time for the leaders to make decisions and respond to the crises (Boin & Smith, 2006;Shaw et al, 2007); (4) disrupt the organizational status quo, presenting a dilemma in need of decision that will result in change for better or worse (Fink, 1986;Sommer & Pearson, 2007); (5) change the existing relationships between leaders and followers, as the followers become more easily influenced by their leaders under the crisis stress (Halverson et al, 2004). This is, of course, an academic shortcut on the way toward understanding organizational crisis.…”

A port in a storm: Spontaneous volunteering and grassroots movements in Amsterdam. A resilient approach to the (European) refugee crisis

“…The crisis governance lens also reveals another mechanism: crisis evokes spontaneous, unexpected, and emergent collective actions (Laere, ; Roux‐Dufort, ; Solnit, ). Europe's refugee crisis was no exception, as many spontaneous volunteers started to organize themselves through civil society initiatives.…”

Rebuilding Tourist destinations from Crisis: a comparative Study of Jammu and Kashmir and Assam, India

“…Albattat and Som (2014) advised that tourist destinations in hazardous areas should adopt emergency planning or “early detection systems” to promote safety awareness. The major challenge for destination managers is to balance significant early warning signs with false alerts (Van Laere, 2013; Becken and Hughey, 2013). Rittichainuwat (2013) observed that tourists perceive overt safety measures generate fears and negative feelings about the destination.…”