Making Space for Garbage Cans: How emergent groups organize social media spaces to orchestrate widescale helping in a crisis

During the Covid-19 pandemic, citizens self-organized at an unprecedented scale to support vulnerable people in neighbourhoods, towns and cities. Drawing on an in-depth study of an online volunteering group that emerged at the beginning of the pandemic and helped thousands of people in a city in the United Kingdom, we unpack how citizens co-construct social media spaces to orchestrate helping activity during a crisis. Conceptualizing a novel synthesis of classical garbage can theory and virtual space, we reveal how emergent groups use ‘spatial partitioning' and ‘spatial mapping' to create a multi-layered spatial architecture that distributes decision-making and invites impromptu choice occasions: spontaneous matchmaking, proximal chance connects and speculative attraction. Our insights extend the study of emergent organizing and decision-making in crises. Furthermore, we advance a new line of theorizing which exploits garbage can theory, beyond its existing application in classical decision sciences, to posit a spatial view of organizing that paves the way for its novel applications in organization studies.

Health crisis and the EU’s HERA: amplifying partial organizing with resourcing for stability, agility, and evolvability

What design recommendations can be made for European Union (EU) organizing its health crisis preparedness and emergency response? The EU has recently established the Health Emergency Response and Health Authority (HERA) for coping with crises. However, as an international organization that lacks a legal means of extending its mandate over EU member states, HERA can potentially fail in its mission. To help prevent this potential failure, we make design recommendations that draw on resourcing theory to complement the limited-or partial-organizing capabilities of HERA. The design recommendations are tailored to three schemas that the analysis of the stakeholder feedback suggests: stability, agility, and evolvability. We outline HERA's current actions and deliverables as mandated in its founding and suggest additional examples of ways to amplify crisis preparedness and emergency response. These recommendations stem from the proposed resourcing perspective within the constraints of an international, partial organization. We conclude with implications for future research and practice, focusing on how stability, agility and evolvability can amplify the HERA's ability to meet its expectations.