Organizational Cooperation in Crises

Book excerpt: The public expects organizations to come together and cooperate in times of crisis, yet we know that organizations often fall short of this anticipation. Today inter-organizational structures are the most common form of crisis response. Lina Svedin presents a systematic examination of organizational cooperation in crises. Bringing together three distinct research traditions on cooperation, the author draws on these traditions to examine how their variables fare empirically when applied to a wide set of cases and decision situations. The book outlines how organizations cooperate in crises by empirically identifying a number of theoretically cross-cutting cooperative behaviour and strategies. The patterns are established using categorical principal component analysis (CATPCA), correlations and case illustrations. Through its interdisciplinary approach, its timeless yet topical focus and the study's relevance for practice, this book should be of interest not only to students and researchers in several academic disciplines but also to practitioners tasked with organizing for crises.