Title: Resilience in sensemaking and control of emergency response

Authors: Jonas Lundberg; Eva Törnqvist; Simin Nadjm-Tehrani

Addresses: Department of Science and Technology, Linköping University, Campus Norrköping, 601 74 Norrköping, Sweden. ' Department of Thematic Studies – Technology & Social Change, Linköping University, SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden. ' Department of Computer & Information Science, Linköping University, SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden

Abstract: This paper proposes a model for describing resilience in emergency management of irregular events. The purpose of our model is to describe three parallel developments in an emergency response scenario. Namely, changes in the ongoing events processes, the actors' sensemaking and control functions, and the technologies used for sensemaking and control. Focusing on the three separate developments enables identifying resilience in the choice of control functions and technologies in response to foreseen and actual process changes, their consequences and new disturbances. Our model was created following an emergency exercise that proved to be difficult to analyse with respect to resilience using existing models. We use the exercise to illustrate and apply our model through a qualitative analysis.

Keywords: resilience; sensemaking; situation awareness; boundary spanning; cross-scale interactions; buffering capacities; ICT; information technology; communications technology; resource management; distributed cognition; cognitive control models; requisite variety; emergency responses; irregular events; parallel developments; ongoing events; control functions; separate developments; foreseen changes; actual changes; process changes; consequences; new disturbances; emergency exercises; QDA; qualitative data analysis; Sweden; storms; electricity outages; disaster management; emergency management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEM.2012.046009

International Journal of Emergency Management, 2012 Vol.8 No.2, pp.99 - 122

Received: 14 Sep 2010
Accepted: 02 Aug 2011
Published online: 27 Mar 2012 *

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