Barriers towards Resilient Performance among Public Critical Infrastructure Organizations: The Refugee Influx Case of 2015 in Sweden

Abstract

During the autumn of 2015, Europe experienced a sharp increase in refugee influx, and many refugees arrived in the European Øresund Region. Refugees travelled through Denmark and over the Øresund Bridge, arriving in the third largest city in Sweden, Malmö. Private, public and voluntary organizations in Malmö had to change the way they worked to meet the new entry demands. Flexible adaptations to changing circumstances can be described as resilient performance and are supported or hindered by societal and organizational drivers and barriers. Qualitative interview data from Swedish organizations managing the refugee reception in Malmö were analyzed through the theoretical lens of Resilience Engineering (RE). The analysis results showed that necessary adaptations were not supported by the managerial design of the responsible public organizations. The analysis also showed that preconditions created from societal steering hinders value responsiveness at the public management level, i.e., the public management level has barriers towards becoming familiar with the organization’s value structures. Familiarity with the system value and goal structure is essential for an efficient prioritizing of conflicting goals, which is why it is suggested that this aspect be explicitly included in RE principles.

Progress toward Resilient Infrastructures: Are we falling behind the pace of events and changing threats?

“…Thus, it is important to study the way organizations can mobilize and generate additional adaptive capacity when non-routine events threaten to overload (saturate) initially deployable responses as breakdowns spiral into accidents or disasters (Mendonça at al., 2007;Chuang et al, 2021). Recent studies investigating the resilience of organizations in response to 2011 Superstorm Sandy (Zhang and Mendonça, 2021) and the 2015 refugee influx to Sweden (Degerman, 2021) are promising steps in the right direction. Moreover, there is a need to continue investment in training and exercises for developing adaptive capacity at upper echelons of organizations and how these layers synchronize with other organizational layers (e.g., Bergström et al, 2011;Alderson et al, 2022).…”