Markus, Mattias, Thomas, Martin and Elmar participates in the workshop co-arranged by TripleED, GePS and Ceros. Extremely interesting line-up in terms of researched contexts and theoretical elaborations. See program here: 201401009_Progam_WorkshopExtremeContexts and description below.
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Description: In a global world characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity, managers, workers and stakeholders have to deal with extreme situations « where risks of severe physical, psychological or material consequences (e.g., physical harm, devastation or destruction) to organizational members or their constituents exist » (Hannah et al., 2009). These situations impacts major loss or damage, directly (material, people) or indirectly (human health, economic situation, etc). Examples are major political or financial collapses, disasters, catastrophic environmental accidents, risk-taking events, expedition and rescue work, emergency situations and so on. As these contexts are outside the norms, practitioners have to perform their tasks according to a high level of stress, imagination and performance. Therefore, these contexts are of great relevance for better understand how they are strategizing and organizing in their day-to-day activities and practices. Ironically, practice researchers have until now pay scant attention to these contexts as they continue to look at conventional corporate and organizational settings.
The workshop will gather researchers interested in studying strategizing and organizing practices and activities happening in extreme contexts. Three types of contexts will be looked at: disruptive, risky or emergency. Disruptive contexts refer to environments in which individuals and groups have to deal with unexpected crises, accidents or unforeseen events that are outside the scope of their “normal” activity, such as (e.g. war, natural disasters, acts of terrorism, cyber attacks, nuclear accidents, or humanitarian situations). Risky contexts has to see with environments characterized by a high-level of uncertainty and potential danger that might can threaten the personal safety or have huge material, physical or psychological consequences for organization members who are performing their tasks in these contexts, (e.g. polar- and mountaineering expeditions, military operations, spatial explorations, oil exploitation in Artic or other high-risk management situations). By emergency contexts, we particularly refer to professional organizations that are daily engaged in managing emergency situations and where the risk concerns mainly the “client” or are part of their “normal” routine tasks (e.g. hospitals, police, firemen and so on). The workshop will be devoted to share theoretical and methodological expertise and related to the challenges and opportunities of researching in extreme contexts through a practice lens.
The workshop will be organized around plenary and parallel sessions related to each context. Plenary session will be devoted to presentation by researchers having already published some work related to these contexts. In parallel sessions, researchers will share their project, researches and work in progress together.
TripleED are in a flow, this is another happy funding face! Today Thomas Biedenbach received funding from USBE Research Institute for studying how local firemen makes sense of risk. The funding will cover a pre-study of named setting but also include some networking activities that hopefully will allow us to develop the research agenda further. Congratulations Thomas!
