Crisis-induced learning in public sector organizations

Abstract

How do public organizations manage crises? How do public organizations learn from crises? These seemingly basic questions still pose virtual puzzles for crisis management researchers. This dissertation sheds light on the problems regarding the lack of knowledge on how public organizations manage and learn from crises, with a number of critical knowledge gaps in contemporary crisis management as the starting point. It argues that there is a need of increased knowledge not only about crises and how they develop, but also about how they are actually managed by public organizations. For that purpose we need to bring an injection of organizational studies into the field of crisis management research. The overall objective of the dissertation is to increase understanding of crisis response and crisis learning in public organizations. In doing so, I conduct an abductive study of how public organizations respond to crises and how they learn during and after these events. The empirical contribution is a careful process tracing and case reconstruction of six cases involving Swedish public sector organizations: The Swedish energy utility Birka Energi’s management of two cable fires that caused large-scale blackouts in Stockholm in March 2001 and May 2002; The city of Stockholm’s management of the 2001 blackout and the repeated incident in 2002; The Swedish Defence Research Agency’s (FOI) management of hoax Anthrax letters in 2001; and three Swedish media organizations’ (the Swedish public service radio Sveriges Radio, the Swedish private TV station with public service tasks TV4, and the Swedish public service TV station Sveriges Television) management of news work and broadcasting challenges on 11 September 2001. The case studies are further analyzed by two basic strategies: an explorative strategy to deepen theoretical and methodological insights on how to study crisis management and learning processes; and an explanatory strategy to explain why case narratives and processes of decision making differed. The theory generating approach that this dissertation takes on implies that the case studies are ‘heuristic’ case studies. Thus the dissertation aims to promote new hypotheses for further research rather than to produce generalized knowledge. Accordingly, propositions on the relation between public organizations, crisis management and crisis-induced learning based on the case analyses are proposed throughout the study. As a final attempt to bring the propositions and arguments together, a framework of the crisis management and learning process is proposed. Here the role of organizational structures and cultures are discussed in terms of specific organizational factors that impact on organizational crisis management and learning processes, such as previous experience, organizational flexibility and rigidity and centralization and decentralization.