Mid Sweden University

This study explores the adaptive capacity of managers in street-level organizations (SLOs) in response to global crises. Using a Swedish municipality as a case study, we explore the challenges encountered by managers during the extended COVID-19 pandemic. The abilities required to manage the crisis differ from the challenges and skills typically associated with professional crisis managers. We propose the term ‘turbulence manager’ to describe the unique challenges in SLOs and the skills required to navigate the situation, particularly the delicate balance between crisis management and regular duties. In conclusion, this study emphasizes the crucial role of SLO managers in crisis adaptation, highlighting their ability to mitigate the impact of turbulence by creatively adjusting their existing routines. 

This paper explores the significant role of serious games in the realm of risk and crisis management education for building resilient societies. Games as educational tools in higher education can be used to facilitate active and interactive learning activities, which have particularly strong potential for development of collaborative and functional knowledge among students, such as communication skills, resourcefulness, adaptability, and other action competences. The presented serious game, Under Pressure, is a board game designed to facilitate discussion and transformative learning on resilience among students studying risk and crisis management. The players navigate diverse roles within the broader societal context of the game, gaining insights into negotiation strategies and decision-making processes. The game's overarching goal is to present players with various scenarios, prompting them to gather information, negotiate measures, and coordinate tasks to enhance societal resilience. Under Pressure employs realistic scenarios, offering players a high degree of decision-making freedom within the game environment. Throughout the game, hazardous events strike the society at random, promoting the students to collaboratively seek to advance resilience to a broad range of possible scenarios. The findings suggest that the game effectively stimulates discussion on diverse perspectives regarding societal resilience, emphasizing the collaborative investment and decision-making necessary for synergistic benefits across the entire society.

The civil protection and preparedness conditions in Europe have radically changed in the last couple of decades. Hazards and risks are no longer confined and controllable but global, systemic, and interconnected. Compound, consecutive, and cascading consequences have a mounting impact and far-reaching ripple effects on the social and natural environments. A majority of research in risk, crisis, and disaster management studies urban environments, their infrastructures, and governing structures. Thus, most knowledge and frameworks mainly support urban stakeholders in dealing with risk and resilience. Because of the increasing pace of European urbanisation, there are good reasons for this focus. At the same time, large parts of the continent sit on critical natural resources and hosts considerable, albeit in many cases dispersed, populations. In Sweden, the place for this study, the risk preparedness, legislation, and governance structure have not changed at the same pace as the risk landscape—strong norms and principles in emergency management and civil protection prevail. The ultra-rural Northern inland of Sweden witnessed economic restructuring and a changing demographical structure in the same period as above. In this paper, we study the organising and workings of local authorities in charge of civil protection in this region. The preliminary results from interviews with public officials and policy documents indicate huge challenges due to an imbalance between the available resources and competence, along with the governing of vast geographical areas on the one hand and the same statutory duties and responsibilities as the rest of the country, on the other. The analysis identified four crucial aspects for maintaining local resilience: (i) knowledge of the place, (ii) informal networks, (iii) key-person dependency, and (iv) adaptive capacity. These aspects involve pros and cons in practical application and organising for civil protection and preparedness.

Den här översikten görs som en av fem rapporter inom ramen för projektetSamhällsresiliens i Sverige: styrning, sociala nätverk och lärande (RISE). Rapporternakartlägger forskning, trender och goda exempel inom området samhällsresilienssamt inom projektets tre empiriska studieområden: våldsbejakande extremism,flyktingmottagande och anpassning till ett förändrat klimat. Syftet med dessarapporter är att ge en samtida blick på kunskapsläget, liksom en antydan om denutveckling som sannolikt kommer att ske inom dessa områden underöverskådlig tid. Den tänkta målgruppen, utöver andra forskare, är framför alltprofessionella som verkar inom projektets intresseområden. 

Although research on organizational crisis management is vast, it is sometimes insubstantial, particularly when it comes to understanding how an organization's routine practices are utilized in crisis management. This article presents a conceptual framework of crisis-as-practice to complement the “traditional” crisis-as-event and crisis-as-process perspectives in crisis management research. By turning to practice theory, it is possible to emphasize the importance of apprehending crisis management as an accomplishment shaped by socially shared practices routinely performed in organizations. This article outlines a framework based on two theoretical constructs: (1) the three-element model of practice, and (2) the distinction between integrative and dispersed practices that together can reveal crisis management capabilities generally invisible in other research. The article concludes with a discussion of how the practice-based framework can widen the understanding of what crisis management is, who is viewed as a crisis manager, what crisis managers do, and what can be revealed through an analysis of crisis managers and their practices.