Chapter 4: Emergency entrepreneurship: creative organizing in the eye of the storm Bengt Johannisson and Lena Olaison Introduction Entrepreneurship is an elusive phenomenon that does not just appear as new business venturing in the market. Within the public sector there is a call for more entrepreneurial bureaucrats (du Gay, 2001) and entrepreneurship is entering the business schools as well as the educational system at large from the university to the compulsory school (Hjorth and Johannisson, 2007) with the political ambition to make all of Europe more entrepreneurial (Lambrecht and Pirnay, 2005). Accordingly, studies on different entrepreneurial endeavours tend to end up with prefixes, such as team entrepreneurship (Stewart, 1989), collective entrepreneurship (Johannisson, 2003), community entrepreneurship (Johannisson and Nilsson, l989; Johnstone and Lionais, 2004), social entrepreneurship (Steyaert and Hjorth, 2006) and public entrepreneurship (Hjorth and Bjerke, 2006). This suggests that it is not possible to conclusively generate models and/or conceptualize entrepreneurship once and for all. Nonetheless, two perspectives on entrepreneurship are frequently used in the literature, namely entrepreneurship as a special kind of management – from Mintzberg (1973) to Shane (2003), and entrepreneurship as forms of social creativity (Hjorth et al., 2003; Gartner et al., 2003). In this chapter entrepreneurship is approached as a societal phenomenon practising creative organizing1. We especially associate entrepreneurship with imaginative ways of dealing with ruptures in the everyday life context. The ‘prosaic view’ of entrepreneurship as suggested by Steyaert (2004) is then interesting to relate to. 1 In previous work we have enquired into the interface between entrepreneurship and social capital as reflecting/reflected in reputation/mutual trust and a rationality based on care (see Johannisson and Olaison, 2007). With this brief review of optional images of entrepreneurship in mind, we want to invite the reader to the drama that the Hurricane Gudrun enacted in Sweden in 2005. Late on the evening of 8 January a heavy storm struck Kronoberg County and its neighbouring region in the south of Sweden, causing blocked roads, tearing power lines into pieces, destroying property and incapacitating institutions responsible for the infrastructure. Hitting 5 per cent of the forestry area of Sweden, Gudrun tore down 80 million cubic metres, equal to one year’s lumbering for the entire Swedish forestry industry. In total 253 000 households and organizations were left without power because of Gudrun, the majority also without any telephone connection. Gudrun caused by far the greatest damage ever to the elaborate Swedish infrastructure. The public institutions and other formal market organizations did not have the resources, capabilities or power to cope with the crisis, especially in the rural areas. Instead, a number of initiatives were taken by civic organizations, communities and individuals that were tied to the place. It is here, in the in betweens of different organizational settings, that our story takes place. We propose that ruptures such as the one caused by Gudrun may initiate processes that uncover and (re)produce entrepreneurship which remain invisible when ‘business as usual’ rules in society. The purpose of this chapter is thus to enquire into localized creative organizing in the face of (natural) catastrophes and to conceptualize ‘emergence entrepreneurship’ accordingly. Next we elaborate upon our understanding(s) of entrepreneurship and how this relates to organization/organizing. In the following section we present the methodology that is practised in the field studies and then the empirical accounts are described. Revisiting the images of entrepreneurship and other understandings of organizing in dramatic settings, we close our discourse in the last section with a tentative conceptualization of ‘emergency entrepreneurship’. Alternative images of entrepreneurship Mainstream research, here addressed as ‘opportunity-driven’, presents entrepreneurship as a proactive rational economic activity, a strategy aiming to systematically identify and evaluate existing opportunities, preferably radical innovations, on the market and allocate the resources needed in such a way that the opportunities chosen are efficiently exploited. This strictly instrumental view of entrepreneurship suggests that boundaries in social space are intentionally crossed by, for example, the proactive introduction of new products or processes or by the opening up of new product or factor markets (for example, Schumpeter 1911/1934). Bounded rationality due to lack of information concerning available opportunities and resources, though, means that entrepreneurial venturing is associated with risk. Reputation/trustworthiness and legitimacy are in this perspective considered as means of accessing resources that would otherwise not be available, a rationale that Starr and MacMillan (1990) address as ‘social contracting’. This concern for systematic renewal and change, organized in a new means-end framework (Shane, 2003), is what makes entrepreneurship stand out and yet remain in the management family. Table 4.1 summarizes the generic aspects of entrepreneurship that we have illustrated with the opportunity-driven view. Table 4.1: Three modes of entrepreneurship – generic features. Aspect Opportunity-driven Entrepreneurship Enactive entrepreneurship Prosaic entrepreneurship Origin of initiative Existing opportunities in the market Coincidences and Challenges in enacted environments everyday life Process characteristics ‘Boundedly rational’ exploitation Playful experimentation Generic coping Pro-action taking risk Interaction in order to Interaction in order exploit ambiguity to keep uncertainty at bay Casual coping with problems/opportuniti es Role and sources of Resourcing relying on social capital calculated trust Relating through mutual commitment to dialogue Reproducing by way of collective identity and blind trust Organising rationale Social creativity Daily activity and interaction New means-ends framework A contrasting image of entrepreneurship, here labelled ‘enactive entrepreneurship’, associates entrepreneurship with social creativity on other arenas besides the market. Whatever the setting, new opportunities are in this perspective interactively enacted, instigated by coincidences and chance, yet ultimately shaping new worlds for many (Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus, 1997). In a socially constructed world of becoming (Chia, 1995) entrepreneurship implies coping with ambiguity (Johannisson, 1992; Weick, 1995). Entrepreneurial processes are initiated by curiosity, organized by spontaneity and intrinsically driven by passion and joy (Hjorth and Steyaert, 2003; Hjorth et al., 2003). Opportunities to explore and associate tactics to exploit them emerge in parallel (Gartner et al., 2003). This perspective on entrepreneurship shifts the focus from organization to organizing, from formal structure to emergent process (Gartner, Bird and Starr, 1992). Ventures crystallize out of personal networks, constituted by genuine relations based on trust and defined as much existentially as instrumentally, used as much for crafting individual and collective identity as for actualizing new business (Johannisson, 2000). Entrepreneurship is accompanied by a general belief in the good will of others and their commitment to participating in dialogues for negotiating new realities. Yet another, third, image of entrepreneurship is following Steyaert ‘prosaic entrepreneurship’. Steyaert argues that the everydayness of entrepreneurship refers as much to a mundane, and – why not – even a boring posture as to a literary connotation where a prosaic – as in the novel – addresses the actuality of becoming, its ongoing becoming effected through conversational processes. (2004: 9) Prosaic or mundane views on entrepreneurship focus, not on model building or general concepts, but acknowledge the importance of ‘the everyday and the ordinary, the familiar and the frequent, the customary and the accustomed, the mediocre and the inferior’ (ibid.). All entrepreneurial processes certainly, however path breaking, include routine activities just as all human beings as adults occasionally engage in entrepreneurial processes. ‘Prosaic’ entrepreneurship at the firm and societal level, for example, appears in the industrial district as a localized small-firm cluster. Westlund and Bolton systematically dissect the concept of ‘localized social capital’, defined as ‘spatially defined norms, values, knowledge, preferences, and other social attributes or qualities that are reflected in human relations’ (2003: 79), and its relation to entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship as organizing is then continuous and carried by the district as a socially embedded collective of business units, that is, not by individual firms (Johannisson, 2003). As traditional family businesses, the latter are neither willing nor able to practise innovativeness and growth. However complex networking, interaction and organizing as conceptual constructs present themselves, their (metaphorical) use obviously contributes to our understanding of why and how entrepreneurship may be practised. While opportunity-driven and enactive entrepreneurship both associate entrepreneurship with dramatic events that are instigated by strategically and tactically alert individuals, prosaic entrepreneurship is hidden behind the apparent uniformity of everyday life. In spite of this wide range of images of entrepreneurship none of them, though, tells us what creative organizing may be triggered by if communities which appear as dormant are challenged by an external shock, an artificial or natural disaster like Gudrun. Experiencing and studying a natural disaster The empirical study was carried out over a ten-month period. In February and March 2005, that is immediately after the disaster, the junior author jointly with fellow master students interviewed ten persons involved in organizing in the wake of the hurricane. We were looking for organizations, temporary or formal, that became visible through their achievements in the restoration work. The aim of the conversations was to find out what kind of organizing the dramatic event had triggered: who got engaged, how, after whom and after what resources the activities patterned themselves. We think that there is a need for a narrative approach and contextually sensitive accounts when trying to grasp how existing formal and informal structures may enforce or hinder potential entrepreneurial initiatives in the face of disaster. Soon enough we understood that our informants in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane could provide no systematically reflected insights, ‘only’ stories. Czarniawska (2004), though, argues that narratives represent modes of knowing and communicating and, what is more, they may guide the enactment of the storytellers’ future lives. Listening to stories through the media and our personal networks we used our personal contacts in the region to get access to local agents (civic associations, authorities and small firms), national incorporated structures and also intermediary organizations which bridge between the other two categories. It so happens that all our ten interviewees are men. This bias does not only reveal that the authors’ personal networks are dominated by men, but also that there were mainly men working with the restoration after the hurricane. Obviously, we have silenced some of the stories that might have been told by women2. 2 This is not to argue that women were not involved in the recovery process, but that their roles remained less visible and that our approach did not invite them. For a discussion about the representation of women in research and media reporting after natural disasters, see Childs (2006). In October and November 2005 the authors of this chapter together revisited five of the original informants for further conversations. The informants were then encouraged to reflect upon their own stories told in the aftermath of Gudrun. We thus used quotations from the original interview to create a conversation with the interlocutor concerning how they had experienced the event back then and again ten months later. Since our conversations concerned issues that were (and are) emotionally loaded, we allow our interlocutors to speak when we communicated our field experiences. Our interpretation of the agents’ immediate and retrospective experiences of the hurricane was organized as follows. First, the two authors independently read the raw interview texts in order to identify statements that reflected (creative) coping with the dramatic events and consequently contributed to the construction of entrepreneurship in such a setting. These primary interpretations were then, according to each category of informants, jointly reflected upon by us. The stories as presented and interpreted are subsequently analyzed further by bringing in Lanzara’s (1983) notion of ‘ephemeral organizations’ and formal (project organization and crisis management) organizations. Our conceptual and empirical work and the images of temporary organizations are used to craft our notion of ‘emergency entrepreneurship’. Our methodology obviously both resembles and contrasts the Eisenhardt (1989) idea of generating theory out of case/qualitative material. We stay with a proposed conceptualization of ‘emergency entrepreneurship’ that may inspire refinement by way of additional theoretical and empirical work. Tales of the field: copying with chaos in everyday life The stories told by the informants are organized into five subsections according to what agency they represent. We shortly summarize their stories accordingly. First, we introduce a spokesman for a civic association representing a rural community and experience how he dealt with the dramatically imposed rupture in his everyday life. Then we listen to representatives of the public organizations which are formally responsible for organizing and governing territorial space, namely the financially strong Swedish municipalities. In the following two subsections we encounter representatives of business organizations: a local small firm and an external corporate structure, for which the area struck by Gudrun is part of their market. Finally, we listen to the stories told by the spokesmen for two intermediary organizations, which, due to their organizing tactics and way of doing business, created new tasks for themselves, enforcing their roles as bridges between different structures. The voices of each group of agents are systematically reflected upon with respect to their way of organizing and will be echoed in the last section for further analysis. Civic associations taking charge Anders Malmqvist, one of the organizers of an informal community group that locally dealt with the emergency, has many stories to tell. On the morning after the hurricane Malmqvist immediately joins other residents from his village who were trying to make their way through the giant jackstraws of trees caused by Gudrun. They keep working intensively, knowing that if they fail there will be no way out of the village. In the evening, when they are about to give up, they hear the persistent sound of a tractor somewhere from the other side of the enormous mess of trees. Now convinced that somebody is trying to reach them, they get energized and continue to work their chainsaws in the growing darkness. When the main roads are clear Malmqvist starts to discuss the restoration work with a retired electrician from E.ON (the dominant power company in the South of Sweden, a corporation that we will encounter again): We asked ourselves: what do we need? We need to establish an information centre, where we can collect information and co-ordinate resources; we must open the gas station to secure fuel and reparations and we need to make sure that everyone working can eat at least every four hours. Malmqvist describes the organizing as an arena for acute problem-solving: ‘We had no right to make decisions, and we didn’t. What we could do was to identify a problem and bring together those who had resources to come up with solutions’. Through the residents’ personal networks they could enact measures even if these were not compatible with the formal norms: ‘I know that we broke some regulations and maybe a law or two to get what we needed, but what could we do?’ Reflections: The stories about the first initiatives after the hurricane tell us about spontaneous and immediate organizing. There was no time to discuss or reflect upon the situation, since people were often both literally and metaphorically working in the dark, whether coping day and night with the jam of fallen and broken trees or trying to muddle through in corporate and public decisionmaking structures. A kind of push-triggered collective (social) entrepreneurship emerged, which released the same kind of creativity that is associated with pull- triggered individual/team commercial entrepreneurship: acting upon gut feeling, using previous experiences to cope with the new situation and network intensely. The moment of truth for the municipality When we meet Claes Göran Carlsson, mayor of Ljungby municipality, at the beginning of March 2005, our conversation largely concerns what can be learnt from one chaotic situation to the next. In the summer of 2004, six months before Gudrun hit the same area, the main streams in Ljungby municipality flooded. During the flooding the municipal executive board, together with appropriate technical units, created a structure to cope with the acute situation: You need to act directly and on a large scale; create a staff so you can speed up the decision-making process. You have to down size the formal processes and move to execution. But the municipal staff have to know that they have the politicians behind them in their decisions. Generally, institutions are afraid to act because of the costs and the risk of being criticized for unauthorized action. But it’s better to be criticized for doing too much than for doing nothing. When revisiting Carlsson in November 2005 we bring up the learning experiences. He then tells us that immediately after the flooding he and the rescue leader were invited to other municipalities and asked to share their lessons with them. After Gudrun these kinds of requests have increased: ‘We are quite satisfied with our achievement. I know we can do it again if necessary.’ Coping with Gudrun enforces the importance of established relations: Not just having the contacts, but knowing that you can work together. When you reorganize and create space for action, you can draw as many organization maps you want, but if the [personal] relationships are not working, nothing can help you in an emergency situation. The social capital is decisive, you need to build the foundation, share the same values, before you have to deal with the emergent situation, both inside and outside the organization. Reflections: Ljungby municipality appears as a role model for organizational learning aiming at flexibility and preparedness for emergencies. Natural disasters vary with respect to their surprise effect and have to be dealt with accordingly. In order to create space for action information has to be rationed – a unique case in an otherwise indifferent and democratic Swedish society. A dual municipal order is practised – one that copes with everyday routine operations and one that enters the scene in case of emergency. These parallel structures seem to jointly infuse entrepreneurship into a public structure. Even more important, trust is tightly connected with previous experiences and reveals itself only when the community faces an emergency. Learning and knowledge creation come from hands-on experience, but also from telling stories to others, sharing experiences. Repeated reflections on one’s own action enforces selfidentity and increases the willingness to act again. Mayor Carlsson recognizes the role of emotion and commitment in the making of organized efforts. The language he then uses is more of an entrepreneurial voice, relieved from the bureaucratic vocabulary that public structures are usually associated with. Small businesses: disconnected from their customers In this section we meet Roland Axelsson, responsible for retail at Rottne Industry Ltd. The company is one of the leading manufacturers of logging vehicles, with its markets in Europe, North America and Australia. On the Monday morning when Gudrun had left southern Sweden, Rottne Industry Ltd immediately starts to mobilize. Emergency organizations, forestry entrepreneurs and forestry owners turn to the company asking for vehicles and drivers. ‘Several organizing solutions have been created in our community to facilitate the reconstruction after Gudrun. They are provisional and will probably dissolve and disappear when they have fulfilled their mission’, says Roland Axelsson. Rottne Industry Ltd also takes an active part in the recovery work. Even though the company uses retailers when business is as usual and never deals with used machinery, they now take advantage of their well established network to gather and disseminate information, search for subcontractors from Europe, and even to work as mediators for second-hand machinery and logging machinery of other brands. Reflections: The hurricane makes Rottne Industry Ltd reconsider what constitutes an important customer, opening up a field between commercially and socially important actions. Self-centredness was replaced with a need to call attention to what heroic contributions have been made by others in the local context. In the face of Gudrun, action is not triggered by emerging business opportunities but by a necessity to contribute to the reconstruction of the everyday life they share with their fellow citizens. Incapacitated corporate structures Gudrun’s impact on the infrastructure in the region, for example E.ON, the major regional power provider, is devastating. When we first meet immediately after Gudrun, Sven Ruther at E.ON is busy organizing the recovery work. He explains that they got reinforcement not just from other power companies in Sweden and Europe but also from local networks. In the 1960s Sydkraft, E.ON’s predecessor, created ‘LRF-supportive groups’ (developed in collaboration with the Federation of Swedish Farmers – LRF) in the rural areas, enacting the ambition to always being able to have staff available locally. Where these groups are still active E.ON uses them to cope with the damages that Gudrun has caused. In other places they re-emerge: ‘Without means of communication you need to have people from the area that can guide electricians, and first, before you can even start to organize the restoration work, you need to clear blocked roads and wires.’ When we meet again with Sven Ruther he is responsible for customer contacts at E.ON. He explains his new assignment to us: E.ON has an emergency organization that gets activated in case of a crisis. Since I live in Älmhult, I know the area and the industrial plants. I was working in Älmhult as early as in the 60s so I know the people personally. In these situations you gain a lot if you know your way around and if they know you. In the aftermath of Gudrun E.ON has learnt about the importance of preserving local knowledge, and the corporation has re-established LRF-supportive groups in every municipality where it operates. Reflections: Corporations such as E.ON have realized the need for a dual structure, one for routine operations and one to implement in case of emergencies, the former increasingly global, the latter increasingly local. Thus a ‘glocal’ matrix organizational structure emerges. A related lesson from E.ON’s experience is the importance of being close, physically as well as mentally and socially. Knowledge originating in everyday local life turned out to be a major source for entrepreneurship in the emergency situation created by the hurricane. That is, coping with Gudrun also exposed collective tacit knowledge and entrepreneurship. Intermediators in broken structures Smaland Airport Ltd is a minor regional airport with limited operations in the middle of the area struck by Gudrun. Like any airport, Smaland Airport Ltd is strictly controlled by laws and security rules, but Jan Fors, its managing director, can also tell many stories about creative organizing. Realizing that the airway is the only operating exit from or entry into the region, he and his staff jointly decide that they are going to keep the airport open round the clock until they know that all land roads have been cleared: The regional actors have not been able to get organized; not even once did they contact us to see if we were all right or if we had the resources needed to keep the airport open. We managed to do it, but isn’t that worth finding out? When we revisit Jan Fors in November 2005 he summarizes what he and his staff have learnt from dealing with Gudrun: The initiative and strength come from individuals; they have the commitment and the wish to help one another. And personally I have learnt to understand life in the countryside. My staff lives there, we talked a lot about their situation and I have realized that we sometimes forget about that kind of life. According to Jan Fors, hands-on action is the most important thing when coping with a crisis, experience and also good relations to people you need to deal with: ‘When there is an emergency, you don’t have time to establish something new, you use what you’ve got, even though it is in new forms’. Our interviewees often have difficulties communicating how they came to organize the way they did. Revisiting Mats Folkesson, coordinator at Farmers’ Services, a kind of rural co-operative employment and staffing agency set up by farmers and bridging between corporate structures and civic society, again tries to explain: I don’t know how it all started, things just began to move. First it was a question of survival, to reach the main road. We started to work three and three, and as we progressed we began to gather more and more people. We never had a discussion about money or whether we should get involved or not. Since Farmers’ Services normally deal with corporate structures, such as E.ON, the National Swedish Road Administration and business firms, they could mediate between the formal structures and the private initiatives. In order to be close to where the action was Farmers’ Services temporarily moved their administration from their town office to a garage in the rural area. Reflections: From coping with the hurricane we once again get proof that large ‘well-structured’ organizations run into problems when surprised by (literally) path-breaking events. Smaller informal organizations, in contrast, quite easily adapt their organization to the new situation. At Smaland Airport Ltd Gudrun even triggers new perspectives on its own organization, recognizing the employees as both goals and means for bridging their core business activities and the societal context. Jan Fors’s stories underline that trust appears when needed actions are embedded in long-term relationships. The crisis situation made visible the need for recombining existing competencies according to need: individuals like Mats Folkesson brought together people and resources at hand and created solutions to problems as they emerged. Because of Gudrun Farmers’ Services were suddenly offered a task environment that was begging for their way of organizing. They were the ones trained to connect between different actors, since their staff were trusted both among local residents and formal structures. Such temporary organizing demonstrates a form of entrepreneurship that is driven by emergency and practised through immediate (inter)action. Searching for the roots of emergency entrepreneurship In this section we shall further analyse our field accounts and search for the origins of the proposed features of what we here, inspired by, among others, Gartner (1993), name ‘emergency entrepreneurship’. We argue that studies of extreme situations will not only reveal entrepreneurial forces that remain hidden under ‘normal’ circumstances, cf. Weick (1990), but generally enrich our understanding of organization/organizing as including entrepreneurship as well as management. Therefore we first tentatively position emergency entrepreneurship in the context of the other images of entrepreneurship introduced above. Since issues associated with coping with surprises and dramas appear in the literature on management as well as on entrepreneurship we then provide a general, yet simple, model for structuring different ways to deal with turbulent environments. We especially elaborate on this theme by juxtaposing the conceptual lessons from our empirical research with Lanzara’s (1983) notion of ‘ephemeral organization’. After that we see a need to qualify Lanzara’s understanding of formal organization and therefore we review the ‘project organization’ and ‘crisis management’ as institutionalized ways of dealing with temporary challenges and/or surprises in the environment. Revisiting proposed modes of entrepreneurship The stories about localized creative organizing in a region facing a natural disaster as related and interpreted above call for a different understanding of entrepreneurship than those presented in Table 4.1. First, it is in our case obvious that there was no omnipotent actor who could practise ‘opportunitybased entrepreneurship’. The hurricane and the needs for reconstruction that it made obvious may possibly be seen as an instant opportunity, but the belief in calculated trust seems alien in a situation which has no precedents. Our notion of ‘enactive entrepreneurship’ also seems inappropriate, since coping with a disaster certainly is not about playful experimentation instigated by a subject in order to joyfully enact new environments out of ambiguous surroundings. The triggering initiative does not belong to the agent, and the experimentation needed to cope with the emergent situation is characterized by genuine uncertainty: what needs to be done first – restoring physical structures – is more than obvious, but the feasibility of alternative action tactics is totally unknown. The notion of ‘prosaic entrepreneurship’ obviously brings limited understanding to how to deal with a natural catastrophe that undermines the everydayness of life. In the case of emergency all initiatives aim at the reconstruction of everyday life, not, as in the case of prosaic entrepreneurship, using everyday life as a basis for instigating (ad)ventures. Our tentative understanding of emergency entrepreneurship is, nevertheless, in some respects related to the other modes of entrepreneurship according to Table 4.1. With opportunity-based entrepreneurship our notion of emergency entrepreneurship shares the importance of social capital in resourcing the measures taken to cope with challenges on their arrival (although emergency entrepreneurship needs bonding rather than bridging social capital; see Johannisson and Olaison, 2007; cf. Davidsson and Honig, 2003). Experimentation was certainly called for as much as in enactive entrepreneurship when dealing with Gudrun, but that was since the situation was out of control and since people desperately asked for more information. That is, uncertainty, not ambiguity, prevailed. Passivity, even paralysis, facing the devastating effects of the hurricane, though, soon enough turned into intense local interaction in order to find ways to reconstruct basic everyday life. Commitment to place and collective identity associated with the territory as a physical and social space encompassing everyday life activated the social capital needed to practise mundane, yet creative, organizing, the hallmark of prosaic entrepreneurship. Organizing under pressure In order to come to grips with ways of dealing with unexpected events that call for (at least) temporary solutions, we have to go one step back and conceptualize a shared ground for entrepreneurship and management, certainly ways of organizing that are different in kind (cf. Hjorth et al., 2003). Here two simple dichotomies are used in order to illustrate qualitative differences between entrepreneurship and management in this context. The two dimensions are ‘structure’ and ‘ways of coping with the environment’ (Figure 4.1). As indicated, organizational structures may be permanent or temporary. Organizations may relate to environmental change proactively or reactively. Typically, entrepreneurship, as well as management, appears in and/or as permanent structures that operate proactively. Incorporated rescue organizations, for instance, are permanent organizations which are managed in such a way that they can, reactively yet professionally, deal with environmental rupture. Even bread-and-butter family businesses which are pushed into existence are entrepreneurial while still emerging, but the entrepreneurial spirit usually vanishes once established reactive behaviour dominates their coping. Figure 4.1: Entrepreneurial and managerial ways of structuring activities and coping with the environment. Our focus here, though, is on the temporary structures. Looking first at entrepreneurship as more or less a proactive, strategic activity, habitual entrepreneurship comes to the fore. The entrepreneurial career may be looked upon as the enactment of a bundle of temporary ventures, cf., for example, Westhead and Wright (1998). Larson and Starr (1993) and Johannisson (2000) look upon entrepreneuring as the flow of (temporary) ventures which sediment out of the personal network of the entrepreneur. Within the field of management ‘project organizing’ is a well-established proactive practice to which we shall return below. We shall also elaborate on ‘crisis management’, that is, routinized ways of reacting to dramatic environmental change. We obviously propose the notion of ‘emergency entrepreneurship’ as an image of entrepreneurship that makes it triggered by external events and calls for immediate and temporary reaction. Enquiring into the l980 earthquake in southern Italy, Lanzara (1983) tells the story about volunteers who immediately entered the region being hit. There they organized their support as temporary ventures, only to exit after a few days when they were succeeded by rescue teams set up ‘from above’ by the public authorities. An institutional order thus soon enough replaced the original spontaneous rescue operations with their ‘ephemeral’ structure, lacking a history as well as a future. Since these two support structures are organized in radically different ways they have, according to Lanzara (1983), to be separated in time. Our story, in contrast, tells of how a disaster was originally dealt with from below and from the inside, that is, by collaborating local and regional agents, involving citizens as well as formal institutions. That is, the notion of emergency entrepreneurship reports on organizational endeavours, where spontaneous organizing and institutionalized structures emerged into collaboration founded in a shared history and with the prospects of a jointly built future. Recently, it has been argued, other forms of temporary organization, such as the project organization, offer a new paradigm in the management field (Turner and Keegan, 1999), where it is usually applied to intra-organizational structuring. Research in the field usually focuses on projects within the boundaries of existing organizations (Heller, 1999). Projects are then broadly defined as ‘organizational processes of planning, organizing, directing, and controlling resources for a relatively short-term objective established to complete specific goals and objectives’ (Shenhar, 2001: 241). Peterson (1981), as early as a quarter of a century ago, used the notion of ‘operative adhocracy’ to present presumably dynamic corporations as bundles of projects. ‘Adhocracy’ was later appropriated by Mintzberg (1988) and Storper (1989), for example, when researching the alleged creative Canadian and American (film) industries. However it has also been argued that firms in the film industry constituted as hosts for projects, in fact, are themselves lacking innovativeness and entrepreneurship (Davenport, 2006). The industry invites to repeatable structures, not to originality. Projects are: (1) set up either in order to proactively exploit creative people (for example, in the film industry) or in order to implement standardized measures more efficiently (for example, in the construction industry), not in order to reactively deal with devastating environmental change; (2) arenas where the participants are expected to use their unique individual competencies, not to demonstrate collective concerns; and (3) settings where creativity, spontaneity and improvization are used to craft new social and mental structures, not in order to restore physical ones. The crisis management literature also appears paradoxical regarding structure and planning. We see this literature as divided into two parts. The first one is concerned with preparing companies for potential crises, predominantly financial crises, by creating temporary structures that can be put in place to restabilize organizations (Loosemore and Hughes, 2001) and possibly use the crisis to develop them further. The second part of the crisis management literature concerns itself with planning for and managing natural disasters, using models primarily from public management and project management (inter alia Moe and Pathranarakul, 2006). These primarily empirical studies repeatedly indicate that local governments (McEntire and Myers, 2004) as well as small businesses lack plans or organizational structures aimed at coping with disasters (Runyan, 2006; Spillan and Hough, 2003). Studies also report that it is citizen responses and personal and social networks that ‘save the day’ (Helsloot and Ruitenberg, 2004; Ok Choi and Brower, 2006; Pardasani, 2006). Nevertheless, critical-management research tries to fill the gap between formal plans and the way networks in a crisis actually work (Ok Choi and Brower, 2006) with models for systematically building preparedness (McEntire and Myers, 2004). We thus state that project organizations and crisis management are settings where the ‘ad hocness’ is very much designed as a tool for management. In Table 4.2 we juxtapose, on the one hand, the project organization and crisis management with Lanzara’s notion of ‘ephemeral organization’, on the other, with our emerging concept of ‘emergency entrepreneurship’. Only marginal adjustments are needed when making Lanzara’s general image of formal structures also include the project organization. Lanzara (1983) states that in a formal (project) organization, internal and external boundaries are distinct, while in an ephemeral organization the boundaries are fuzzy. Further, in crisis management the boundaries are distinct, since it aims at a pre-prepared plan for a specific need. As a territorial phenomenon, emergency entrepreneurship is enacted in a context where the space boundaries are unambiguous to all concerned. General time restrictions tie people and their everyday practices to a place. Many public organizations are also organized by physical space. In case of an emergency the social boundaries inside and between the private and public spheres/sectors, however, dissolve on the micro/individual as well as on the organizational level. General commitment to place triggers residents to take initiatives also in the interest of other local residents – homo economicus turns into homo curans. The dramatically changed natural and social environments produce an ambiguity that invites, or rather requests, people to turn coincidences into opportunities, calling for hidden professional strengths and dormant entrepreneurial capabilities. As a bridging force between organizational structures and individual and local initiatives, emergency entrepreneurship reminds us of ‘situational altruism’ which ‘motivates people to help in ways that are not mentioned in contingency plans. This creates opportunities for organizations and helps let [sic] them work more actively’ (Helsloot and Ruitenberg, 2004: 103). Table 4.2: Alternative structures for temporary organizing. Feature Project organisations Ephemeral organisations Emergency entrepreneurship Boundaries Distinct Fuzzy Spatially distinct, socially/mentally fuzzy Leadership Central, shifting Shifting, lacking Local and multiple Organisational structure Formal, hierarchical Informal, spontaneous Loosely coupled and glocal Information flow Vertical Horizontal Lateral Practical effectiveness Restoration of everyday life Performance criterion Economic efficiency Source: Inspired by Lanzara (1983: 88), Table 1. Devastating events, such as natural catastrophes, trigger and force everybody to take their own initiatives, since residents in the area struck by the disaster can neither exit nor just stay placid or give voice (Hirschman, 1974). Practising a ‘heterarchical order’ (cf. Grabher, 2001), leadership in one’s own field of competence appears as everybody’s right and obligation. The very tactics used for coping with the effects of Gudrun meant instigating initiatives in as many contexts as possible, even in the borderland between the legal and the illegal, trusting others to make similar efforts and believing in spontaneous coordination, in self-organizing. Ephemeral organizing, as illustrated by Lanzara (1983), is initiated from the outside by people driven by general humanitarian concerns. Elsewhere we argue that sustainable development, energized by the making of a collective identity, can only be achieved if organized from below and formed inside (Hjorth and Johannisson, 2003). Even if leadership is shifting (Kasvi, Vartiainen and Hailikari, 2002), paying special attention to success criteria (Westerveld, 2003), leadership in the project management and crisis management literature is concerned with producing general techniques for the leaders from above/outside in order to make possible the centralized control of an ambiguous situation (Moe and Pathranarakul, 2006). Leadership in the context of emergency entrepreneurship is about taking charge of one’s own as well as other people’s lives. Even if the leadership that our stories communicate was local and fragmented, it was appropriate. In case of emergencies of the Gudrun magnitude any established organization structure appears obsolete by definition. There was no need to break out of existing structures, an issue often discussed in the literature on organizational learning and innovation. The structures themselves broke down, indicating a need for a more flexible order. In our case ‘loose coupling’ was practised as a generic organizing principle in the region at large, with local task forces operating autonomously yet interdependently (Weick, 1976; cf. also Heller, 1999). Community-based project organizations adopt a similar structure (Skutle, Iversen and Bergan, 2002). Further empirical accounts from coping with natural disasters report the same insights (Helsloot and Ruitenberg, 2004), indicating that loose coupling is feasible for a broad mobilizing of resources. The need for immediate action and temporary restructuring calls attention to the image of ‘organized anarchy’ (March and Olsen, 1976), where problems and solutions are dating each other. While project/temporary formal organizations, like the permanent organization, carry a formalized administration, there was no time for planning or structuring in the Gudrun case. ‘Glocal’ organizing, implying core local action cells that take advantage of distant (global) resources by way of networking associated with bonding social capital, appears as a generic organizing feature of emergency entrepreneurship. The enormous need for information reflects the huge uncertainty that most people experienced during and after Gudrun. That uncertainty could only be reduced by intense (social) (inter)action and an unrestricted, ‘lateral’ information flow. The sociality of the social capital that embeds economic activity has itself to be pulled out of the bed. In an emergency situation even the dark side of personal networking, the risk that it may violate democratic values and processes, has to be accepted, as much as the idea that civil disobedience may be the only way to cope in critical situations where institutions fail. For all residents in the rural part of the region that Gudrun struck it was more than obvious that on the morning of Sunday 9 January something concrete had to be done. No other performance, but local commitment and general responsiveness to the existential and practical challenges would do (cf. Stryjan, 1987). This immediate need, though, soon enough turned into a demand for specific and certainly localized services. Activating previous hands-on experiences, individuals in local organizations were taking action far from the formal structures framing their normal routines (cf. Sauri, Domingo and Romero, 2003). Ephemeral organizing and emergency entrepreneurship share a pragmatic concern, while project organizations are primarily driven by deconextualized economic efficiency (Halman and Braks, 1999; Davenport, 2006). Crisis management aims at restabilizing and ‘managing disaster with a basic goal to minimize effectively the impact of disaster’ (Moe and Pathranarakul, 2006: 398). Conclusions: towards a definition of emergency entrepreneurship Contemporary dominant views on entrepreneurship propose, albeit using different ontological assumptions and vocabularies and relating to different spaces for boundary-spanning (inter)action, that entrepreneurship is about the creative non-routine organizing of people and resources. Exploring unknown domains makes (business) venturing intrinsically experiential, whether global challenges are exploited in a way that change people’s everyday practices (Spinosa et al., 1997) or, as in the case of emergency-triggered entrepreneurship, established practices have to be reconstructed. Again, entrepreneurial initiative is certainly not just driven by self-interest and concerned with (economic) growth. The Gudrun story tells us that spontaneously organized multi-skilled rural citizens both restored old relations and created new social trails in a physical landscape that had completely changed due to the disaster. The lesson told is that entrepreneurship is also closely associated with generalized responsibility and that ‘common sense’ is important as a means for taking on surprises and challenges and not only as being itself the target for change. The importance of localized social capital with its strong bonds, which promise solidarity and trigger action when most needed, is re-established as well. As indicated, an entrepreneurial career can be described as a set of interrelated project/ventures embedded in the personal networking of the entrepreneur (Johannisson, 2000). The role of personal initiatives is made visible in Lanzara’s notion of ‘ephemeral organization’. Such organizations are instigated by an individual who sees a natural disaster as an opportunity to ‘display his capacity and [that] at the same time the opportunity “creates” the actor, shapes his system of representation, and enhances his capacity for action’ (Lanzara, 1983: 73). Obviously, the notion of ‘ephemeral organization’ connects what we address as enactive, prosaic and emergency entrepreneurship. This is hardly surprising, considering that a disaster breaks down the socially constructed barrier between private and public lives, forcing a new structure to be built from below. Early on, Katz and Kahn (1966) told the story about how the municipal fire brigade emerged out of voluntary collaboration between residents in a community, whenever property was on fire, and successively formalized into its present structure (cf. also Christoplos, 1998). In the absence of a public organization local solidarity and responsiveness to challenges were self-evident. When the everyday physical world is turned upside down by a major disaster, entrepreneurial action, then meaning maintaining and re-establishing everyday practices, has to be instigated. It means immediacy and hands-on (inter)action, evoking the embodied knowledge needed for operatively coping with concrete challenges that leave little time for reflection. In parallel, people locally have to re-establish and activate existing bonds and create new relations to incorporated private and public organizations. Together they have to try to integrate their own measures with those of existing public and market structures (cf. Sauri et al., 2003). Relating then means taking the trustworthiness of others for granted. Research into how people cope with (natural) disasters also suggests that trust becomes personal (Gephart, 1984; Christoplos, 1998; Hurlbert, Haines and Beggs, 2000; Sauri et al., 2003), neither organizational nor institutional (Sanner, 1997). We can now conclusively conceptualize the proposed notion of ‘emergency entrepreneurship’ in the perspective of our introductory three images of entrepreneurship. Above, we already briefly stated that the emergency entrepreneurship is different in kind to them. Regarding the aspects presented in Table 4.3, we first state that the triggering event, the initiative, is external to those concerned, appearing as a natural and/or artificial disaster that creates a rupture in everyday life. The entrepreneurial process is characterized by the need for immediate (inter)action in the face of non-negotiable conditions that put important material conditions and existential values at stake. Once the external shock is recognized, local interaction with the situation at hand appears as generic coping. The roles of social capital, the major potential resource, are multiple: a trigger, a lubricant and a safeguard in spontaneous organizing. Local commitment, instrumental in such a situation, acknowledges the need for and facilitates the use of ‘swift’ trust (Meyerson, Weick and Kramer, 1996) when action has to be taken instantly and incessantly. The organizing rationale appears as a kind of ‘social bricolage’. While the (artisan) bricoleur, according to LeviStrauss (1968/1971), brings together redundant artefacts/resources in order to compose local responses to problems as they present themselves (cf. also Baker and Nelson, 2005), social bricolage means combining and locally – in time as well as in space – integrating chunks of everyday routines according to the events that the drama produces. This indeed means practising an ontology of becoming, according to Chia (1995). Table 4.3: Emergency entrepreneurship – generic features. Compare also Table 4.1. Aspect Emergency entrepreneurship Origin of initiative Rupture in everyday life Process characteristics Immediate (inter)action Generic coping Local interplay with the situation at hand Role and sources of social capital Organising based on local commitment and swift trust Organising rationale Social bricolage Some may argue that it is unnecessary, even inappropriate, to offer yet another image of entrepreneurship in an academic community already swarming with proposed understandings of the evasive phenomenon. However, in an increasingly globalized world, social and economic changes will create sudden and radical emergencies in many local settings, as suggested by chaos theory. As a matter of fact, the most popular demonstration of that theory is that a butterfly’s movement of its wings may cause a hurricane on the other side of the globe! Our lessons from how Gudrun was locally dealt with not only bring insights about how common people may practise their entrepreneurial capabilities. Our research also communicates the potential of the ‘glocal’ tactics adopted by emergency entrepreneurship as a generic means for locally taking on global challenges and thus enriching our general understanding of organization/organizing.