| 1. |
- Ullberg, Susann, 1968-
(författare)
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Watermarks : Urban Flooding and Memoryscape in Argentina
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The relationship between social experience and action in the context of recurrent disasters is often thought of in terms of adaptation. This study problematises this assumption from an anthropological perspective by analysing the memoryscape that mediates past experiences of disasters. The inquiry is based on translocal and transtemporal ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2004-2011 in the flood-prone city of Santa Fe in Argentina. The study examines how past flooding is remembered by flood victims in the middle- and low-income districts and by activists of the protest movement that emerged in the wake of the 2003 flood. It deals with flood memory in the local bureaucracy, in local historiography, myths and popular culture. The analysis reveals that the Santafesinian flood memoryscape is dynamically configured by evocative, reminiscent and commemorative modes of remembering, which are expressed in multiple forms, ranging from memorials and rituals to bureaucratic documents, infrastructure and everyday practices. The study addresses the relationship between memory, morality and social inequality and discusses the implications for questions regarding vulnerability, resilience and adaptation.
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| 2. |
- Brown, Christer
(författare)
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The 2005 Hurricane Katrina response failure : Seeing preparedness for foreseeable complex problems through a neo-institutional lens
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Governmental organisations often fail to prepare themselves adequately for complex problems such as natural disasters. This is remarkable because these threats are usually studied intensively and governments do develop plans for such situations. Christer Brown demonstrates in his thesis that the complexity of governmental systems and the mutual interdependence of various government organisations hinder the preparations for something like a natural disaster. This particularly applies to government organisations which have to operate in a many-layered administrative system. Brown investigated the case of the American Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which appeared to be insufficiently prepared to respond adequately during the disaster caused by hurricane Katrina in Louisiana in 2005. This was apparently due to a shift in political attention from natural disasters to terrorism within the FEMA, and this forced the agency to establish different priorities for its policies.
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| 3. |
- Brändström, Annika
(författare)
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Crisis, Accountability and Blame Management : Strategies and Survival of Political Office-Holders
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Crises are an integral part of our modern world; they are breaking points that disturb our sense of normalcy. While some of them are treated as ‘normal incidents’ that are bound to occur in a vast and complex array of governmental activities, others spark a blaze of media attention, public emotions, and political upheaval. This thesis explores how political office-holders respond to incidents that are perceived as blameworthy and how crisis-induced accountability processes affect their political careers. In an attempt to determine this, a series of case studies containing elements of high-pressure crisis-induced accountability were examined. Strategies employed by top political actors in coping with accountability and blame are identified and discussed. Crises often trigger discussions on accountability and top political actors engage in a framing contest over defining the causes of the crisis and who or what should be held responsible. This is a staged and dynamic process in which key actors employ different strategies in several arenas for managing and ultimately assigning blame for the unwanted event. These processes are shaped in relation to issues regarding causality, agency, and responsibility. In addition to the fact that crises can be managed on different ‘levels’ and arenas, we can also see that certain contextual and situational factors (such as personal experience and the constitutional framework of the cabinet) can constrain or enable how blame is managed and ultimately what the consequences will be for the careers of top political office-holders.
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| 4. |
- Daléus, Pär, 1979-
(författare)
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Politisk ledarskapsstil : Om interaktionen mellan personlighet och institutioner i utövandet av det svenska statsministerämbetet
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation examines key characteristics and factors shaping the leadership style of Swedish Prime Ministers (PMs). Based on the research of the American presidency, an interactionist framework is developed which draws upon institutional theory and political psychological theory. The analysis is advanced by exploring multiple sources and is based on four cases of leadership styles: two single party Social Democratic PMs, Ingvar Carlsson and Göran Persson, as well as two center/right coalition PMs, Thorbjörn Fälldin and Carl Bildt. Leadership style is studied through a focused comparison of the PMs’ performance of four functions. Thus, the four PMs are studied as staffers and organizers of the cabinet and the Government Offices, decision makers, communicators and crisis managers. The results indicate that the office of the PM is elastic, accommodating a wide-ranging variation of leadership styles. The Social Democratic PMs display the most uniform leadership styles, but, rather surprisingly, they also have the most dissimilar leadership styles among the four cases. The center/right PMs’ approaches differ to a great extent from one another, displaying mixed forms of leadership styles. The analysis explains how the PMs’ leadership styles are shaped based on the interaction between their distinct personal characteristics and surrounding institutions. Thus, the dissertation concludes that leadership theories developed in a presidential setting are largely applicable in a parliamentary setting and that political behavior is not dictated by institutions such as formal structures or norms. The results encourage a reassessment of how personality, as an explanatory factor, is applied in mainstream political science. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the need for reconsidering the presidentialisation thesis and the notion of dominant leadership as there are alternative pathways to prime ministerial influence which are disregarded in the debate.
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| 5. |
- Ullberg, Susann, 1968-
(författare)
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The Buenos Aires Blackout : Argentine Crisis Management Across the Public-Private Divide
- 2005
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This case study offers an empirical contribution to the understanding of how accidents in complex technical systems in urban settings can become societal crises with severe economic and political consequences. Infrastructural crises are particularly interesting to analyze in terms of private-public decision-making, since a number of socio-technical sectors have been subject to processes of privatization in large parts of the world during the last few decades. Studies of accidents involving these sectors are therefore likely to reveal how corporations today view questions of social responsibility, how different actors interact and how political decisions are made when urban infrastructure fails.
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
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Designing Crisis Management Training and Exercises for Strategic Leaders
- 2014
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Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Strategic leaders — those who sit at the apex of organizations and have primary responsibility for charting the course and achieving positive short and long term results for their various constituencies — play a crucial role in crisis situations. It is increasingly recognized that they, like other key players in crisis management and societal (homeland) security need to be prepared for this responsibility and that training and exercises are a fundamental part of this preparation. While significant attention in recent decades has been devoted to developing techniques and designs for operational training and exercises, rather less attention and ink have been devoted to problems of designing crisis management training and exercises for strategic level leaders in governmental organizations — the focus of this report.This publication is a result of a unique partnership between academic, private sector, and governmental experts from the United States and Sweden. It was developed through a series of collaborative bilateral workshops held in Stockholm and Washington, D.C. during 2013 and 2014.
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| 8. |
- Deverell, Edward, 1971-
(författare)
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Crisis-induced learning in public sector organizations
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- How do public organizations manage crises? How do public organizations learnfrom crises? These seemingly basic questions still pose virtual puzzles for crisismanagement researchers. Yet, the interest of the academic and practitionerrealms in crisis management has grown in recent years. In this doctoral dissertationEdward Deverell sheds light on the problems regarding the lack ofknowledge on how public organizations manage and learn from crises, with anumber of critical knowledge gaps in contemporary crisis management as thestarting point. In the last few decades the interest in crisis management as a scholarly fieldhas grown. This developing field is composed of an increasing number of looselyconnected social science scholars concerned with issues of extraordinary events,their repercussions and the way in which they are managed by authorities,organizations, policy makers and other key actors. However, there are severallacunae to be dealt with in the emerging field of crisis management research.This dissertation sets the spotlight on four of these limitations of the crisis managementliterature to date. First, influential scholars within the field call for increased structuration andfeasible models to help us understand and explain various important factorsinfluencing the crisis management process. In this dissertation I try to bridgethis gap by developing theory on crisis response and learning. Crisis responsesignifies organized activities undertaken by a stakeholder when a community ofpeople – an organization, a town, or a nation – perceives an urgent threat to corevalues which must be dealt with under conditions of uncertainty. Crisis-inducedlearning refers to purposeful efforts, triggered by a crisis event and carried out bymembers of an organization working within a community of inquiry, that leadto new understanding and behavior on the basis of that understanding. Second, organizations play a key role in crisis management. Surprisinglyenough, however, crisis management research have only occasionally built theoryon how organizations respond to crisis. So far, the literature tells us moreabout crises as events than on how these events are actually managed. One reasonis the focus within crisis management research on highly unusual, big catastrophicevents and industrial accidents. Therefore, this dissertation explorescrisis episodes that affect specific organizations rather than entire communitiesor national governments. In addition, the dissertation brings together debateson crisis management and crisis-induced learning from a public managementand organizational perspective. Third, crisis management researchers have to date dealt mostly with acutecrisis response and issues of preparedness, while the issues of crisis aftermathsand crisis-induced learning are still relatively unknown. However, althoughthis study recognizes the importance of crisis planning and sense-making, thisshould not lead to a relative neglect of the issue of learning from crisis. Crisisinducedlearning is important as crises are rare events with huge repercussions.Thus crises are opportunities to draw lessons in order to improve future managementand crisis response, and to mitigate the risk of future crises. Fourth, the relatively few studies that have dealt with crisis-induced learninghave focused on learning after the crisis (intercrisis learning), while theoryon learning during crisis (intracrisis learning) is not as developed. My interestin both inter- and intracrisis learning obligates me to study crisis response andcrisis learning in conjunction. This means studying how organizations respondto crises and how they learn during and from these episodes. By focusing onprocesses of crisis response and learning under pressure – rather than pre-crisisplanning, threat perception, risk management and preparedness – the dissertationlooks into how organizations and their members manage the challenge ofcrises and how they take on, make use of and implement lessons learned fromone crisis to the next. The lacunae outlined above are theoretical points of departure for this dissertation’sinterest in the extent to which public organizations learn from crises.Accordingly, the overall objective of the dissertation is to increase understandingof crisis response and crisis learning in public organizations. In doing so, Iconduct an abductive study of how public organizations respond to crises andhow they learn during and after these events. The term ‘abductive’ refers toa research strategy which is characterized by continuous movement back andforth between theory and empirical data. The first step of the research process was grounded in the empirical world.The empirical contribution is a careful process tracing and case reconstructionof six cases involving Swedish public sector organizations. In the methodologychapter (Chapter 3) I describe the basis of the empirically bounded case study approach and case reconstruction and process tracing method. Six case studiesof organizational crisis management and learning were selected for furtheranalysis. The case studies were based on a variety of sources including posthoc accident investigations, articles, organizational documents and 129 extensivesemi-structured interviews with key crisis managers. The process tracingand reconstruction efforts led to case narratives, which were then dissected byidentifying dilemmas and critical decision-making occasions that were studiedin more detail. The following cases are explored in the dissertation: TheSwedish energy utility Birka Energi’s management of two cable fires that causedlarge-scale blackouts in Stockholm in March 2001 and May 2002; The cityof Stockholm’s management of the 2001 blackout and the repeated incidentin 2002; The Swedish Defence Research Agency’s (FOI) management of hoaxanthrax letters in 2001; and three Swedish media organizations’ (the Swedishpublic service radio Sveriges Radio, the Swedish private TV station with publicservice tasks TV4, and the Swedish public service TV station Sveriges Television)management of news work and broadcasting challenges on 11 September 2001(and to some extent following the murder of the Swedish Foreign MinisterAnna Lindh in September 2003). As the case selection reveals, all organizations under study are not puregovernment organizations. Rather three organizations (Birka Energi, SverigesRadio and Sveriges Television) are publically owned corporations, while one(TV4) is a privately owned media organization. Accordingly, this dissertationclaims that ownership is not the only measure of ‘publicness’. Media organizations,for instance, are of great importance for democratic societies. The term‘public organization’ is thus in this dissertation not used in the sense of equatingto government, but rather in reference to the degree of which political authorityand influence impacts on the organization. The theory generating approach that this dissertation takes on impliesthat the case studies are ‘heuristic’ case studies. The dissertation aims to promotenew hypotheses for further research rather than to produce generalizedknowledge. To this end the case studies are further analyzed by specific theoreticalapproaches suggested by prior research. This second step of the researchprocess is dealt with in some detail in the literature review. The literature reviewin Chapter 2 aims to bring an injection of organizational studies into the fieldof crisis management research. The review presents relevant studies from thefields of crisis management studies, organization studies (with special attentiongiven to organizational learning theory) and public administration and management.The review puts forth a twofold argument: There is a need of increasedknowledge not only about crises and how they develop, but also about how theyare actually managed by public organizations. However, prior crisis managementresearch with bearing on public management organizations are mostly based on either political executive foreign policy decision making or on veryspecific high reliability organizations operating in the pre-crisis phase. Hence,organization studies and public management studies should play a greater partin crisis management research. The review also provides an overview frame for the study by highlightingrelevant research. The chapter discusses the problems of defining, categorizingand operationalizing key concepts such as crisis, crisis management and organizationallearning. In the third step of the research process, the case studies are further analyzedusing theoretical approaches aimed at proposing propositions on how publicsector organizations may respond to crises, and how they may learn from theircrisis experiences. These analyses have been carried out with an aim to producestand-alone articles aimed for publication in international scholarly journals.Thus this dissertation differs somewhat from the typical public administrationdissertation as it is comprised of an analysis of several articles, as opposed to amonograph. The journal articles are published or accepted for publication inthe Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, the Journal of HomelandSecurity and Emergency Management, Public Management Review, and RiskManagement. The articles are reprinted in four empirical chapters (Chapters4-7), which make up the core of the dissertation. Introductory and concludingchapters aimed at bringing the discussion together have then been added.I present the first empirical analysis in Chapter 4. It looks into how organizationalculture affects strategy and adaptability in crisis management. The keyresearch question is: What mechanisms affect organizations’ ability to restructurein order to cope with acute crisis management challenges? In the study I propose atypology of temporal organizational responses to crises in public perception. Thetypology is based on organizations’ abilities to
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Deverell, Edward, 1971-
(författare)
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The 2001 Kista blackout : Corporate crisis and urban contingency
- 2003
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The study examines the management of the blackout in Stockholm’s northwestern suburbs, most importantly in Sweden’s center for high-tech industry in Kista, on March 11, 2001. The blackout, which was a result of a cable fire, was one of Sweden’s most comprehensive power disturbances ever and its effects were dramatic for the residents, the accountable power company, and the city leadership.The crisis management displayed by the operational units, public administrations, municipal companies and private corporations is examined, and the communication between these actors is considered throughout the report. Seven decision occasions are selected and scrutinized. The case is then analyzed and compared to similar cases studied by CRiSMART researchers, most notably: the blackouts in Auckland, New Zealand (1998) and Buenos Aires, Argentina (1999), and the power outages which followed the wake of the ice storm in eastern Canada (1998). Some examples of best practices in crisis management are also presented based on the case findings.
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