Managing coordination in an extreme situation: tensions in electronic communications and an organizational vacuum in the response to the 2003 heat wave crisis

Abstract

This study focuses on email use in extreme situations, in particular organizational crisesin disaster settings. Despite abundant empirical evidence of intensive email use in crisis res-ponse, the question of the overall support from email to coordination in critical settings hasremained unanswered. Filling this gap, we draw on grounded theory principles to conductan exploratory investigation of email use during the 2003 French heat wave crisis response.We propose a thorough analysis of the crisis responders’ electronic communication prac-tices when they attempted to address what we label organizational emptiness. Through thenarration of four episodes, our findings outline electronic communication tensions duringthe 2003 French heat wave crisis response: email was used by the crisis responders in ahelpful as well as damaging way. Our discussion outlines four contradictory behaviorsamong email users - immediate communication but delayed action, centrality in informa-tion processing but absence in collective action, email use and avoidance, efforts for resi-lience despite persistent patterns of communication – that impeded organizational empti-ness resolution, thereby burdening coordination during crisis response. This study enrichesliterature in three manners. First, we extend the scope of investigation of extreme situations.Second we propose organizational emptiness as an original conceptual lens to comprehen-sively analyze IT use in crisis coordination. Third, we offer insights on technology enact-ment in extreme situations.