Wildfire festivals - How crisis management professionals monitor affect, power relations and the right spirit

Abstract

In disaster management, some crises receive more attention than others. In this article we try to unpack what specific factors make one crisis more interesting than another, by focusing on the experiences of crisis management professionals. In the article, we use a broad set of data including participant observations, interviews and workshops, working with the metaphor of a “festival” to illustrate this phenomenon. We find that the festival metaphor works well to capture distinctive features of this specific kind of crisis, that in turn affects the response. Our results indicate that the festival spirit enables a clarity, where managers feel that they can prioritize the proper response and need not include a range of different perspectives. At the same time, they are aware that positive feelings, in the sense of getting things done, are not to be publicly expressed. We conclude with a discussion on the implications for crisis response and the possibility of working with metaphors.