Toward a typology of boundaries in crisis management

Abstract

Why do so many organizations fail to respond to crises effectively, and what can be done to improve their crisis response? We aim to address these questions by developing a typology of boundaries that can help us understand and better prepare for future crises. Building on the existing literature on crisis management and boundaries, our typology seeks to address the critique of current crisis management models, such as these being too prescriptive and placing too much emphasis on assumptions that only the decisions made by the crisis management team (i.e., centralized decisions) will impact the crisis response. We address this critique by elaborating on four categories of boundaries that are relevant to manage crisis response, such as physical, mental, social, and temporal. Examples of these boundaries could include access to properties (physical), interpreting whether a crisis is happening (mental), shifting relationship dynamics (social), and the urgency of response time to a crisis (temporal). Our typology offers a lens to consider crisis management by taking into consideration the complexities and nuances that linear crisis management models have not yet adequately addressed. We argue that by identifying, defining, and understanding different configurations of boundaries, one can better manage crises toward a desired outcome.