Concentration and Emergence Collaboration between First Responders – The Case of the Norwegian Terror Attacks

A much debated question in the crisis management and the public administration literature is how to balance decision power between different hierarchical levels in the organization during a crisis: what is the right balance between centralization and decentralization of decision authority? Then is the issue of coordination, how to coordinate the crisis response within the organization, and with other organizations? This is often examined analytically by distinguishing between strategic and operative level, and horizontal and vertical dimensions, respectively. I argue the aforementioned perspectives have limited explanatory power when examining collaboration in unsettled settings such as crises. Organizations can be viewed as tightly or loosely coupled systems constituted by dynamic organizational structures. Furthermore, as previous empirical case studies have illustrated, it is not a question of either loosely or tightly coupled, but that this can change (e.g. Snook 2002). Following this line of reasoning, I argue collaboration under crises takes the form of concentration and emergence. The question then is two-fold: i) how collaboration between some actors gets concentrated, whereas others not, and why? ii) how novel lines of collaboration between some actors emerge in unsettled settings, and why? The paper takes the appropriateness-framework developed by March and Olsen (1989) as theoretical starting point but develop and nuance it to function as a meso-level oriented theory applicable on intra- and inter-organizational collaboration in unsettled settings. This is done by drawing on the sense-making literature (e.g. Cornelissen, Mantere, and Vaara 2014; Weick 1976, 1993), recent work on organizational routines (Feldman and Pentland 2003; Howard-Grenville 2005; Salvato and Rerup 2011) and empirical insights from psychology research on decision-making (Kahneman & Klein, 2009; Weber et al 2004). The generally formulated research questions are examined in the case of the Norwegian terror attacks in 2011, more specifically focusing on how the police collaborated with other first responders. The case is chosen because it is characterised by general stability in the institutional context and big abrupt change in the situational context, and the fact that it exist a vast data material describing in detail what happened. Also, I have, as the first researcher I believe, been granted access to police’ own material, e.g. logs and transcripts of line communication, individual evaluation reports. In addition, data material consists of interviews and archive studies of internal documents, evaluations and investigation reports.