Emergency responders’ moral sensemaking: the influence of compartmentalization

Abstract

PurposeEmergency organizations allocate specific tasks to responders in an attempt to resolve increasingly complex incidents. Many studies take a pragmatic perspective by studying how emergency organizations can more effectively compartmentalize response tasks. Yet, the effects of compartmentalization on responders' sensemaking of moral issues (i.e. moral sensemaking) has received almost no attention.Design/methodology/approachBased on existing research, the authors bring together different insights on the relation between compartmentalization and emergency responders’ sensemaking of moral issues.FindingsThe authors demonstrate that emergency organizations may undermine the moral sensemaking of responders through introducing moral blind spots and moral dissociation or, instead, enable moral sensemaking through enhancing moral agency and awareness. The authors argue that emergency organizations need to induce moral sense-discrediting among responders to enhance their moral sensemaking. Finally, the authors conclude with discussing two types of compartmentalizing tasks, functional concentration and the holographic metaphor, to show that the latter is most likely to enhance moral sensemaking among emergency responders.Originality/valueThis study introduces moral sensemaking to the emergency management literature and investigates how organizational design influences it.