The Collective Framing of Crisis Management: A Ventriloqual Analysis of Emergency Operations Centres

Abstract

Crises are omnipresent in the organizational world. To face these situations, organizations rely on their crisis management teams to better manage these situations. How do members of these teams succeed or fail to succeed in understanding each other and in collectively framing the crisis situation, when everyone's background differs? Based on an interactional perspective, the current study proposes to respond to this question by analysing a selection of audiovisual excerpts taken from three crisis management exercises conducted in Ontario, Canada. These analyses help describe the role certain figures play in the framing of crisis management. It was found that only when these different preoccupations are articulated, taken into account and negotiated can the framing of the crisis situation evolve collectively.