Trust and Organization: Integrating Responses to Freshwater Contamination within the Everyday Work of a Care Organization

Abstract

In order to cut the word count I rewrote the entire abstract. Please replace with: Crisis management literature regularly focuses on large-scale incidents, crisis management organizations, and a managerial top-down approach. In reality, many crisis situations are small scale and local, involve non-emergency organizations, and often affect the entire organization. This chapter addresses this lacuna by fleshing out the empirical case of the outbreak of a waterborne parasite in a small municipality in Northern Sweden. The analysis showed that the outbreak affected the whole organization and was managed by the active agency of operative personnel and central experts. Additionally, findings suggest that spheres of action and different time-spatial framings were decisive elements in managing the crisis. The study concludes that issues of trust and the organizational setting influenced the framing and handling of the outbreak. In particular, the level of vertically directed trust established before the outbreak, along with the relatively high independence of the different units at operational level, played a decisive role in the integration of the outbreak in the everyday work of the organization. The paper calls for the development of organization theory addressing non-emergency organizations, small-scale events, and the integration of adverse events in the formal and social structures of everyday work.

Crisis management in practice: a dynamic process intertwined with daily work performance

“…Penrose, 2000). This is consistent with the assumption that the degree of formalisation in crisis management decreases further down the hierarchy (Danielsson, 2016, 2020; Oscarsson and Danielsson, 2018; Sparf, 2018). As noted in previous research, at the operational level, it is important to adapt to changing situations with resources at hand—a normalisation strategy of and through practice that creates structure and security for operational staff ( cf.…”

“…By understanding how a crisis is integrated and absorbed on the operational level, it is possible to capture better how such events are managed throughout organisations and, consequently, what characterises the work of operational staff. Or as Sparf (2018, p. 76) expresses it:…”

“…They created a map that helped them to navigate necessary actions when circumstances became chaotic. Similarly, Sparf (2018) examined a Swedish municipal healthcare department's management of parasite contamination in the freshwater system by integrating and absorbing uncertainties into each unit's everyday work. Such management was possible due to strong downward‐directed trust between the managerial and operational levels.…”

Boundary Work to Conduct Business as Usual: Interaction at the Boundary Between the Affected Organization and Emergency Responders

“…It appears that theory development is based primarily on the processes of extreme events in which emergency services are the primary objective. Sparf (, p. 1) asserted that this “preponderance [of focus] … has not only limited the theoretical development but also led to the lack of practical knowledge applicable to local incidents and minor emergencies.”…”

“…To the best of my knowledge, there is no single definition of a non‐emergency organization in previous research. In this article, a non‐emergency organization is an organization with a permanent workplace with work tasks that do not normally include addressing emergencies, but when an emergency occurs must take the necessary steps to maintain its activities and normalize the situation, regardless of the extraordinary circumstances: for example, an eldercare center that continues to care for its elderly residents even if the center has burnt down, lacks electricity or lacks water (Danielsson, Sparf, Karlsson, & Oscarsson, ; Sparf, ). Such actors may also be the actual first responders, since they work at the location of the emergency and must therefore begin to address the situation before the emergency responders arrive.…”