Spontaneous administrative transformation. Crisis leadership through language and decisions in Norwegian Public Administration

For public administrations, as many other organisations, the crisis that occurred with Covid 19 often implied an acute, unplanned and fundamental business transformation without a known time horizon. In this paper, we analyse internal corporate governance in Norwegian public administration during the pandemic's first 10 weeks. The aim of the article is to shed light on how such an incident affects the administration's governance, decision-making, adaptability and production. We highlight how language, trust and expectations are both shaped and at work in this context. We approach the phenomenon as a Grand challenge, ie an event that is complex, uncertain and where the value of different outcomes depends on assessment and perspective (Ferraro et.al. 2015). The study is based on the co-authors' logging of management group activity, internal communication and decision-making in four Norwegian State level public administrations (Competence Norway Agency, the University of Stavanger, Norad and the Government Pension Fund) through their own participation in the first phase of the pandemic. The analysis emphasizes language and rationality, decision-making processes and the emergence of understandings of the event as a crisis that affects a society, and in connection with the company's purpose and production. The purpose of the article is to provide new knowledge for resilient and adaptive institutions, by strengthening the understanding of public administration’ encounters with crises and crisis management. By involving co-authors who analyse auto-ethnographic logs in retrospect, we recognize that situations that appear unstructured can be seen as sensemaking activities, actions in the search for understanding and interpretations, and that action and interpretation are complexly integrated. Rather than an evaluative approach with a focus on quality and causes, we study management as a situated and pragmatic administrative practice where the mechanisms behind understandings of reality and actions are at the centre. We relate crisis management research to the concept of decision making from pragmatic (Weick 1993) and neo-institutional (Padgett & Powell 2012) theory, where decisions are assessed in terms of its impact, acceptability ( March & Olsen 1979 ) or tact (Kornberger 2019). We suggest possible mechanisms that through management activities link distributed action and new solutions to major problems (Padgett & Powell 2012, Ferrano , Etzion & Gehman 2015). We look further at the relationship between centralized and decentralized interpretation and action, and how language is used as a creator of meaning and as an action in relationships characterized by uncertainty, trust and expectations.