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.
Syftet med denna rapport har varit att studera den sektorsövergripande samverkan som sker mellan räddningsorganisationer och organisationer vars verksamhet är att ha omsorg om äldre eller barn, när dessa organisationer möts under en räddningsinsats. Resultatet visar att sektorsövergripande samverkan försvåras av att det i mötet mellan dessa organisationer saknas kunskap om de rutiner som styr den plats där händelsen sker och förståelse för den uppkomna situationen. Vidare att ansvaret för räddningsinsatsen ofta helt lämnas över till räddningsorganisationerna.
• Vid sektorsövergripande krishantering har de ingående organisationerna kunskap om olika faktorer under händelsen. Organisationer utan krishanteringsvana kan ha svårt att förstå situationen när en kris drabbar deras organisation. Däremot har de kunskap om platsens förutsättningar. Räddningsorganisationer har inte alltid kunskap om platsens förutsättningar när de kommer till en skadeplats, däremot kan situationen var känd och något de ofta möter.
• Uppgiften att avhjälpa själva krisen till exempel släcka en brand, har räddningsorganisationerna erfarenhet av. Uppgifter relaterade till platsen, till exempel att möta de behov som barn och äldre har och de rationaliteter som gäller den här typen av arbete, har omsorgsorganisationerna kunskap om. Den organisationsknutna kunskapen delas dock inte över sektorerna.
• Omsorgsorganisationer och räddningsorganisationer utgår från olika logiker i sitt arbete. Omsorgsorganisationer har sällan krishanteringsvana när det gäller ordinära kriser och de utgår i sitt arbete från en omsorgslogik med fokus på värnandet om elever eller äldre; räddningsorganisationer utgår i sitt arbete från kommunikativ eller incidentkontrollerande logik och ofta ser de krisen som en vardagskris. Detta gör att personalen vid de olika organisationerna förstår samma händelse på olika sätt.
• Vid en händelse är det inte ovanligt att de olika organisationerna inte samverkar under krisen utan att var och en gör sitt och anpassar sin verksamhet enbart till händelsen.
The aim of this study was to examine how the interaction works when a workplace suffer an emergency, and the emergency responders temporary deploy their workplace inside the affected workplace to handle the emergency. The research is based on semi-structured interviews with personnel from fire and rescue services and personnel from schools and elderly care centres. The results are structured around three boundary work practices that governs the interaction: emergency containment, accountability and division of labour. These boundary work practices provides structure and enables both parties to concentrate on own work, and thereby can the interaction be described as a cooperation mutually accomplished by both parties.
The goal of this study was to examine the interaction when a workplace suffers an emergency andthe emergency responders temporarily deploy their workplace inside the affected workplace toaddress the emergency. The research is based on semi-structured interviews with personnel from fireand rescue services and personnel from schools and elderly care centers. The results are structuredaround four boundary work practices that govern the interaction: emergency containment, divisionof responsibility, division of labor and crossing the boundary. These boundary work practicesprovide structure and enable both parties to concentrate on their own work. It also enables supportover the workplace boundaries. Thus, the interaction may be described as a cooperation mutuallyaccomplished by both parties.
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.
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.
Exerted from the top down, organizational crisis management is a concept with strong connections to rational and normative approaches. While acknowledging that these approaches form a solid foundation for crisis management, this thesis formulates a critique of this conceptualization. A primary critique rests in the fact that this perspective has rendered invisible the capabilities of actors on the fringes of crisis management. In addition, it rarely acknowledges that coping with crisis consists of more than is typically associated with rational attributes. This thesis aims to increase theoretical and empirical knowledge in two areas based on this research gap. This research seeks to contribute empirically by studying non-emergency organizations and their operational level’s coping with crises that affect their core operations. Theoretically, it aims to highlight the role of social practices in our understanding of crisis management. The main objective is to move beyond rational, normative, and top-down approaches in order to provide in-depth knowledge regarding the role of everyday work practices in understanding organizational crisis management. This approach means looking at how existing work practices and their constituent resources assist in forming crisis responses. The thesis consists of four individual studies (papers I-IV) that relate differently to the main objective of the thesis. To varying extents, all four studies take theories of practice as points of departure, allowing for various examinations of how non-emergency organizations manage crises in practice. The first three studies are qualitative, using interviews as their primary methodology. In study I, the interviews are complemented by accompanied tours of workplaces and internal organizational documents. The fourth study is conceptual, aiming at theory development. The first and second study focus on how a social services unit in Sweden coped with the large influx of unaccompanied children during the 2015 refugee situation. The first study shows how the staff, through their experience and professional competence, continually adjusted their operations to suit the prevailing situation, thus managing the new conditions successfully. The study explains the results by offering a model of crisis management as dispersed practices, telling us that crisis management is, to various degrees, interwoven within the performance of everyday work practices. Building on the first study’s results, the second study highlights three crisis management practices: improvisation, prioritization, and the creation of alternatives. These practices played a significant part in creating new routines or adjusting existing ones, eventuallyxcontributing to normalizing the situation. The study also shows that operational staff received inadequate support from higher management, having to rely on their own ability to solve problems. The third study complements interviews of non-emergency organization staff with interviews of emergency personnel. The study examines the interaction between non-emergency organizations and emergency services. It considers a situation in which a non-emergency organization suffers an emergency, and emergency services temporarily deploy their workplace inside the affected workplace to address the situation. Theories of boundary work and boundary practices demonstrate how cooperation between the parties allows for a mutually accomplished form of boundary work, enabling both parties to strive for business as usual. The fourth study is a theoretical discussion and argumentation of practice theory in research on crisis management. The study offers a theoretical framework of crisis-as-practice that complements existing research’s focus on crisis management based on rational and structural starting points. The framework provides tools for studying crisis management in light of the ordinary resources that organizations possess when performing their everyday work; this approach allows for a more comprehensive view of crisis management and understanding of whom can become a crisis manager. The overall findings in the thesis indicate that the social and material resources that organizations possess through performing their everyday work contribute to the coping and management of various disruptions and adversities posed by crises—despite the fact that these resources seldom have been defined as capacities during crises. The findings also show that these resources allow crisis normalization by enabling adaptations of the organizing mode. Based on these findings, this thesis concludes that, even though non-emergency organizations might seem unprepared according to the prevailing institutionalized norms of crisis management, they perform practices relevant to crisis management and maintain their core activities despite both disruptive and emergency events.
This article explores how a social services unit in Sweden coped with the large influx of unaccompanied children during the 2015 refugee situation. 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 situation. The research data consist of practice-based interviews with managerial personnel from social services and operational staff at homes for unaccompanied children, as well as manuals and printed routines. The analysis demonstrates that the staff coped with the challenges posed by the refugee situation by adopting competences, mobilizing meanings, and adapting material resources belonging to different practices of everyday work. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of studying crisis management from a practice-based perspective as a complement to framing crisis management as a static asset of organizations—governed by institutionalized practices—which has implications for defining what constitutes crisis management and who can become crisis managers.
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.
Previous crises shows that a variety of actors must address a crisis and its consequences. However, when a society encounters disturbances, it is primarily the rescue services, such as fire-fighters, emergency care and police that are responsible for serving as crisis managers. But how about all the non-emergency organizations conducting important societal services, e.g., eldercare centres? A shortage of knowledge remains regarding how these organizations normalize a crisis and by which practices it is done. This PhD project aims to reduce this shortage by studying different aspects of non-emergency organizations involvement in crises.
Crisis management is often understood as the role of emergency managers or security managers at governments. This picture is reinforced in institutional structures, crisis plans and also in media, were pictures from a crisis often show emergency responders in action. What other professionals do during or after the crisis is less recognised. The aim of this study is to investigate the role and work of professionals within elderly care and schools during a crisis. Interviews was conducted with rescue personnel, school and elderly care personnel involved in handling a crisis. The result show that the exciting picture of the crisis manager is reinforced by involved actors. Even though parallelism between emergency personnel and schools and elderly care personnel was the dominant pattern during the crisis, it was also the case that the direct crisis management of the emergency personnel took precedence over the indirect crisis management of school and elderly care personnel, e.g., when the school and elderly care personnel left the incident scene to the rescue workers, but the school and elderly care personnel dominated when re-establishing everyday life for their dependant – this kind of crisis management is today unrecognised.
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 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.
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.