Administration & Society

The Great Recession resulted in fiscal crises for governments across the Western world. Our article explores whether, as a result of the crisis, the relevance of performance information in organizational decision-making increased. Furthermore, we examine how centralizing shifts in governmental decision-making processes influenced the shifts in the relevance of performance information for public sector organizations. Using a survey of senior government officials in 19 European countries, we find that, in line with the predictions of rationalistic decision-making and principal–agent models, the increase in the relevance of performance information in organizational decision-making was positively associated with our measures of greater centralization.

Local and civil society can play decisive roles in disaster response. Yet, the disaster management literature is unclear regarding the conditions that enable cross-sectoral collaboration. Using a collaborative governance framework and 44 semi-structured interviews, this study investigates how trust, pre-existing relations, interdependence, knowledge, and resources affect cross-sectoral collaboration during disaster response in Turkey. The results illustrate how these factors interact with system context factors, such as political compatibility, to facilitate or hinder cross-sectoral collaboration. The study concludes that cross-sectoral collaboration is no panacea for successful disaster response, but empirical examples also suggest that cross-sectoral collaboration can contribute to reducing suboptimal disaster response.

Modern societies are increasingly faced with “unknown unknowns,” Black Swans, and mega-crises. Both public and corporate leaders find it deeply challenging to respond to these crisis events. Existing approaches and tools to cope with crisis-induced uncertainty are of little help in these dynamic environments. This article explores how the principles of Pragmatism may provide the building blocks for a theory of effective strategic crisis management. We argue that these principles, formulated by a group of American philosophers in a time of deep uncertainty, provide a way of thinking that will help practitioners prepare for, and deal with, emerging risks, crises, and disasters.

This study uses the concept of institutional logics and the framing processes emanating from these guiding logics to understand how risk is shifted through public policies. The study concludes that Hacker’s argument that public policies have reconstructed markets to aid the privileged by shifting risk onto the less privileged may have underestimated some of the complexities driving the phenomenon, particularly those stemming from actors having to cope with conflicting logics and ambiguity concerning policy solutions to seemingly intractable challenges. Risk shift does not necessarily involve unilateral transfer of risk from policy makers to risk bearers. Risk shift can emerge out of the complex microinteractions among relevant actors and the framing processes guided by competing logics or belief systems in which the collaborating actors are embedded.

We focus attention on the public policy-making influence of frontline bureaucrats. They are increasingly operating in interorganizational partnerships and networks in which they develop collaborative relations with frontline workers of other public organizations. We theorize that their embeddedness in local interorganizational environments induces and enables them to defy locally inappropriate policies and to pursue locally relevant policies as policy entrepreneurs simultaneously. The case study of policy-making in Dutch civil–military crisis management demonstrates that this “frontline bureaucratic politics” bears considerably on policy outcomes. We conclude that viewing frontline workers as bureau-political actors enhances our understanding of public policy-making in interorganizational arrangements.

In the aftermath of a crisis situation, citizen volunteers play an important role by providing first aid and immediate relief. Little is known about how response organizations are successful in governing citizen volunteers. I propose that, due to the spontaneous and emergent nature of convergence by citizen volunteers on disaster sites, it matters how response organizations resolve governance dilemmas when engaging with citizen volunteers. I theorize that specific responses to governance dilemmas likely lead to successful governance outcomes. To illustrate the argument, I have conducted a multiple case study analysis of the Dutch response to the 2015-2016 refugee crisis.