Materiality Matters When Organizing for Crisis Management

1. Introduction

Crisis management and sensemaking are two research areas that are often connected because a key factor in crisis management is making sense of what is happening (Landgren, 2005). “Sensemaking provides us with a lens to observe and understands how information is processed within and among organizations” (Muhren, Eede, & Walle, 2008). Multiple actors collaborate to solve crisis situations and each actor involved is expected to create an overview and understanding of an unknown amount of information under time pressure and stress (Lagadec, 2002). Sensemaking as a theoretical perspective is about understanding what happens when something new, unexpected and ambiguous takes place (Weick, 1995). Organizational scholars have produced a large cohesive mass of knowledge of how individuals make sense (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2015; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005) and how collective sensemaking can be understood (Maitlis, 2005; Weick et al., 2005). From a technological point of view, scholars have used sensemaking as a way to understand how information technology (IT) can be understood (Barley, Meyerson, & Grodal, 2011; Henfridsson, 2000; Seidel, Recker, & vom Brocke, 2013) impacting both work and sensemaking. For instance, Paul, Reddy and Abraham (2007) found that articulation was restricted in the practice when digitizing medical journals since the information tools do not enable articulation in the structured form that input field provides.

Scholars argue that materiality matters in sensemaking (Bakke & Bean, 2006), at the same time, Whiteman and Cooper (2011, p. 892) as well as Mesgari and Okoli (2018) argue that there is a lack of technology materiality in sensemaking research. There is a need to use the practice as the unit of analysis (Orlikowski, 2010; Whittington, 2006). By taking into consideration that practice by necessity is an interplay between the environment and the human being (Orlikowski, 2007), it is important to include the practice as a whole (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2015). Artefacts and their materiality are consequential for understanding the practice (Orlikowski, 2007; T. R. Schatzki, 2005).