The time Is right when You make It right: Coordinating routine clusters in sustained crises

Abstract

This article examines how organizations coordinate routines to achieve reliable collective action in sustained, temporally complex crises. We conducted an observational study of the Uganda Red Cross Society’s Ebola emergency response operation, which lasted for almost two years. Our findings reveal that sustained crises necessitate both the enacting of clusters of interrelated routines to achieve reliable operations and the accommodating of unexpected events when coordinating these clusters. Thereby, this study contributes to research on coordinating routines in sustained crises in two ways. First, we challenge traditional views of routine clusters as stable and path dependent, arguing that tolerating temporal conflicts between routines enables the flexible coordination of routine clusters during sustained crises. Second, we introduce the concept of temporal manipulation, which challenges existing thinking about the need for temporal alignment of routine performances. Temporal manipulation is the ability of routine participants to exercise agency by altering the past and/or future to successfully coordinate routines with diverging temporalities. This suggests that manipulating time, rather than aligning it, can be an effective means of coordination in sustained crises.