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.

Introduction

Crises and disasters are per definition disruptive and destructive events. But they are also, paradoxically, sometimes accompanied with a somewhat festive spirit in response work. This becomes particularly apparent in situations when a society supposedly comes together, engaged in love for the nation (Ahmed 2010) or when “people ‘rise to the occasion'” (Cohn et al. 1998). This, as we will argue in this article, can also affect the work and the sense of professionalism in crisis response work.

When researching aspects of managing crises and disasters, it becomes equally necessary as challenging to frame the concepts. There is an ongoing academic discussion on definitions, dating back to Prince (1920) and Carr (1932), via scholars such as Quarantelli (1995), to more recent work by e.g., Coppola (2015) and Aronsson-Storrier and Dahlberg (2022). A conceptual ambiguity is catalyzed by several heterogenous academic discourses, all wearing different analytical lenses, such as sociology, political science and medicine. Enrico Quarantelli, one of the most influential scholars within disaster sociology, argued (1995) that the lack of consensus caused concerns regarding the intellectual health of the field.

At the same time as we experience conceptual ambiguity, there are arguments suggesting that a changing world and additional perspectives require conceptual problematization and updates (see e.g., Dombrowsky 1995; Oliver-Smith 1999 and Furedi 2007). However, in this article we are guided by the quite broad idea that disasters, crises and similar terms are situations in which series of events have or can have very negative consequences for human beings, societal functions or fundamental human values (Uhr 2009). For the purpose of this article, we see no need for identifying sharp taxonomical boundaries categorizing various “magnitudes” and unique qualities associated with e.g., emergencies, mass emergencies, disasters, crisis and catastrophes (such as is Quarantelli 2000). However, we are empirically focused on events “beyond” everyday emergencies, and will later on discuss what type of events that can lead to a festive spirit. For simplicity, and for engaging researches adhering to various discourses, we will mainly rely on the term crisis, that can be seen as more of an umbrella term putting a center of gravity to our data and discussions, rather than a sharp analytical boundary.

Crisis and disasters follow a preoccupation with what defines the good society, that which must be protected as well as respect for professions who serve with this protection (Young 2003; Ahmed 2004). Crises put society to the test and can make or break the career of professionals and political leaders (Boin et al. 2005). Crises are also invested with hope and fear of social change (Carr 1932; Young 2003; Anderson and Adey 2011; Aradau and Van Munster 2011). Political philosophy, from all political spectrums, has a long record of investing hope in crises and disasters as momentums or events that supposedly would awaken the masses (Malešević 2010; Lilley et al. 2012). For example, sociologist Robert Putnam (2000) puts hope in crisis, including war, as the only thing that could force people to greater solidarity by recognizing our reciprocal dependency. As with the recent pandemic in 2020, the process of coming together as a society and trusting authorities may serve different political ends - in service of authoritarian rule as well as putting issues of social equality at center of the political debate (Caduff 2020).

The recognition that disruptive events are also mobilizing events is not particularly new, but we still lack an elaborated theoretical and analytical approach to how this conditions response work. This article contributes to exploring these territories by engaging with how crisis response professionals monitor the intensification of affect in their work. Based on qualitative data, in the form of observations in response to work teams and interviews with professionals in the field, we engage analytically with the metaphor of “crisis festivals” taking place in command center or similar locations. Festivals and crises (or disasters) are of course diametric concepts. However, in our research we have noticed that the metaphor of a festival is used by participants to share their experiences and describe key qualities of the work. Our first encounter with the metaphor was when a research colleague of ours, who had worked in the major wildfire in Sweden 2014, said that it was “almost like a wildfire festival”. When we later conducted observations and interviews, we noticed similar comments. We then became curious of what this metaphor signifies and why practitioners feel attached to it. In this article we present some tentative conclusions of why this metaphor has such recognition value for response workers.

Our aim is to develop an analytical lens for understanding and acknowledging how the affective atmosphere conditions professionals work and how it relates to gendered norms and power relations. First, we build on work by feminist scholars such as Sara Ahmed and Iris Marion Young who point out that emotions and affect are critical to crisis management, monitoring what people are supposed to fear and be cautious about. With use of Ahmed theoretical perspectives on norms and emotions we hope to contribute to research that stay more attentive to the workings of emotions and affect in order to understand the subtle but powerful exclusions of alternative needs or priorities. This challenges the masculinist idea that professional work has nothing to do with emotions. Second, without recognizing affect we will not be able to explain gendering practices at play in crisis response teams. A festive atmosphere, or lack of it, may influence the focus of the work and determine what kind of problem definitions are recognized as relevant and not. In mobilizing enthusiasm, there are power dynamics such as competing needs, perspectives, and resources being excluded or not addressed. For example, how may the festival atmosphere charge certain forms of direction and rationalities, while positioning others direction and rationalities as inappropriate or distracting? A third gender aspect is the question of why some crisis events seem to attract more festival feelings than others. Gender is not only related to our theoretical approach to affect but also to our understanding of the status given to different crisis situations and the conditions response work.

The outline of the article is that we first present previous research, followed by a presentation of critical theories relevant for our analysis. Then we present the method and material. After this follows our analyses, divided into three parts: the core of the crisis, exclusions, and taboo. The article ends with conclusions where our results are put in the larger context of crisis management.

Research on crisis management, emotions, and masculinity

Most researchers engaging in crisis management research quickly realize the diversity and fragmentation within the field (Boin 2009; Oscarsson 2021). Sociologists, political scientists, cyberneticians, psychologists, and many others conduct empirical studies using a variety of theoretical tools developed in what can be seen as sometimes conflicting discourses. When such a heterogeneous research field reaches similar conclusions, despite varying analytical approaches, the conclusions arguably have strong evidence. One example of such a conclusion is that crisis response very rarely turns out as it was supposed to. The reasons for this might be many, but there are many expressions found in the field, such as “no plan survives the first contact with reality” (an expression that can be traced to traditional military thinkers such as Helmuth von Moltke 1800–1891) indicating that plans or structures will not be followed during a crisis. Within the field of Command & Control studies it is often emphasized that the field partly should be characterized as an “art” (Alberts and Hayes 2006), including functional agility in order to deal with aggregated uncertainties. To handle the uncertainties of crisis response, research suggests that one key aspect of response management is characterized by improvisation and ad-hoc behavior. A well-established typology, introduced by the Disaster Research Center, can be seen as rooted in early empirical findings suggesting “novelty” in organizational behavior (see Dynes 1968, 1969). Research overviews confirm that the concept of “improvisation” is vastly used in studies on crisis response (Frykmer, Uhr and Tehler 2018).

The combination of ad-hoc behavior, along with ideas of improvisation and viewing crisis management as art, could easily lead to the notion that managers find themselves in brand new social environments when a crisis occurs – visioned as the extraordinary or the state of exception. In relation to that, one of the central concerns in this article is to illustrate that the structures that emerge in crisis management are not necessarily negotiated or made in a straightforward way, but rather in subtle ways. One aspect here is to create and maintain a certain atmosphere and an aura of getting things done. Previous research stresses that one of the appealing qualities of engaging with crisis management is the ability to make things happen in circumstances out of the ordinary. For instance, Boin and colleagues conclude that work in crisis management teams involve a certain amount of “adrenaline-enhancing breaks from the daily grind of politics and bureaucracy” (Boin et al. 2005). The work is oriented towards situations when the ordinary structures fail and to acquire agency in reference to an unknown future. In acute situations the chaotic work conditions may create a sense of clear priorities and focus on the core values, standing in stark contrast to the bureaucracy and institutional orders, as the day-to-day work can cause alienation and boredom. In a study of the SARS outbreak Teo and colleagues (2017) found that emergencies push organizations into a liminal space that may open for flattening of hierarchies and increased efficiency based on the acute needs. One of the clinical physicians interviewed expressed that “The organization became stripped of all this ‘fluff’: the things that don’t actually matter […] so a lot of us were actually very happy” (Teo, Lee and Lim 2017, 143).

Although the feeling of “doing” and combating bureaucratic boredom is noticed in research, there are few studies that more critically engage with the power dynamics at play here. The relief is taken at face value, without recognition of the conditions for this liminal state. From a gender or critical perspective, it is possible to further elaborate on the effects of this process and how it influences the available forms of protection (Young 2003; Aradau and Van Munster 2011). It can be asked how some actors benefit from the freedom from organizational constraints (or “fluff”), while other “free-wheelers” are positioned as troublemakers or being perceived as unprofessional when breaking with routines, or as kill-joys who ruin the right festival spirit. The happiness tied to relief from routines is unevenly distributed. In a study by Carley and colleagues (Carley et al. 1993) of the American Red Cross work following Hurricane Hugo 1989 and the Loma Prieta Earthquake 1989, they drew the conclusion that emotions were crucial and would help the understanding of how decisions were made. For example, they argue that coordination-work requires emotional expressions as integral forms of communication. In later years, the emotional aspect of decision making has been highlighted in studies on affect and emergency, either at the abstract level of fear in society (Aradau and Van Munster 2011) or the more concrete monitoring of the right atmosphere when carrying out table-top exercises with crisis response units (Anderson and Adey 2011; Adey and Anderson 2012). In times of impending disasters and crisis (McCann and Granter 2019) also point at the symbolic power of crisis professionals, as heroic figures that influence the public's notion of what they should be afraid of and how they should act in order to be protected.

Theoretical framing

Sociology of organization has stressed that emotions are integral to how organizations work and how they change, or how institutional orders are reproduced (Fineman 2000; Smith 2005) In recent years theory has developed that makes a distinction of emotions from affect, arguing that studies of emotion start from the individual experience while affect theory is more attentive to the networks and environment that emotions are responses to (Anderson and Adey 2011; Fotaki, Kenny and Vachhani 2017). Affect is always present, whether it is simmering in the background or brought out into focus (Wetherell 2012), making the professional context worth exploring. We use the concept of affect to stress that the milieu that constitutes crisis response work needs to be analyzed not just in relation to emotions such as sadness or joy, but also as integral part of an atmosphere within society. The subject is not individual experiencing an emotion but rather the monitoring of what could be called professional affects.

The theoretical approach that guides our analysis is based on gender theorist Sara Ahmed's (2004, 2010) phenomenological approach to affect. According to Ahmed, affect is powerful to the reproduction of social orders, pushing us to align in certain directions, turning towards something but also turning away from other things. Writing in response to the Bush administration's proclaimed war on terror, following the 9/11 attacks, she notes how the state use disasters as a form of healing, as for instance when George Bush in his speech to the nation 2002 expressed that: “It was as if our entire country looked into a mirror and saw our better selves” (Ahmed 2010, 74). The point here is not to dismiss any possible positive approaches, but rather a reminder of how the positive approaches direct our attention towards a certain expression of hopefulness and away from other - thus excluding what kind of hopefulness that can be articulated. Protection of the people tend to be made in discriminatory ways (Tierney 2015; Enarson and Pease 2016) and when protectors turn fear and devastation into love for the nation it also leaves little room for critique. The protected are being asked to be loyal and not question the perspectives of the protector - a subject explored in more detail by Young (2003).

Following Ahmed, affect is to be seen as an aspect of decision making. Rather than emotions being distractions, it conditions and delivers decisions in subtle but forceful ways (often before they are articulate) - giving the impression that there is no alternative. In her book The Promise of Happiness (2010) she develops a critical approach to happiness as a specifically powerful and subtle form of power that directs us towards the future in a specific way: “happiness becomes an exclusion of possibility, and thus a good defense against crisis, as if the decisions about the future are already made” (p. 217). Following Ahmed, emotions are not just responses to a dramatic situation but are active in constructing and directing the event by putting limitations on what can be done and what is deemed threatening or violating the crisis response work.

The theoretical approach of this article is also that response to crises and the organization of crisis management is gendered. Gender is here related to asymmetries in how protection is distributed and what kind of disasters and crisis situations that gain public recognition (Young 2003; Enarson and Pease 2016). This is especially significant because our study is situated in Sweden, a country renowned for its extensive welfare state, gender equality and broad spectrum of public services aimed at protecting the wellbeing of citizens. In this context it is evident that the crisis response system tend to display a form of gender-segregated chain of professions, between masculinity-charged first responders on one end of the spectrum and the feminized caring and supportive profession on the other end, taking care of the wounded and traumatized (Ericson 2014). This spectrum can also be asymmetric, with the operative masculinized profession being recognized as the key players in the game while feminized professions carry out the less romanticized work, such as the ground service and providing (Enarson and Pease 2016; Danielsson and Eriksson 2022). As we will argue, affect is relevant to the analysis of the reproduction of gendered orders, for instance in how some professions are assumed to ruin the festive feel, or how some professions tend to take the boosting atmosphere with them as they leave the scene.

Method and material

Our empirical analysis is based on three forms of data: field notes, semi-structured interviews, and a series of workshops. The material was collected in different stages, starting in 2017 and ended in 2021. The first set of data is ethnographic observations of the work in command centers active during wildfire season 2018. Our researcher (male) followed the work and lived with the staff (about 90 people) for three days and nights, taking field notes. Notes were taken during staff meetings and work activities in the command central, but also during breaks, social gatherings in the evenings and assorted off-work activities which was just as significant for the aura of the work in the command central. The material from this event also includes follow up interviews with 10 individuals who worked in the command center. They represent the rescue service (two women, two men), the county administrative boards (three women), the municipalities (two women), and the national authorities (one woman). Although the metaphor of festival was not noted in this material, the material showed the significance of good spirit and the work invested in monitoring the “right” spirit. The same researcher was also present at an exercise focusing on terrorism and made additional observations.

Based on this material we decided to do additional interviews that focused specifically and explicitly on the metaphor of festival as a way of examining the conditions of this kind of work. Five in-depth interviews were made with individuals, who were chosen based on the criteria of having experience from different crisis response centers, having had key functions in relation to situation such as wildfires 2014, the terrorist attacks in Stockholm 2016, the tsunami 2004 and the refugee crisis of 2015. The interviewer (male) got access to the informants primarily via professional networks. In this round of interviews, four men and one woman were interviewed. Here, they were asked to reflect specifically on the festival-metaphor. Each interview lasted for approximately one hour, and all material was recorded and transcribed. Coding of the interviews was done by separately by all three authors after which coding was compared. In order to identify commonalities and differences were identified, we conducted two joint analysis sessions where results were discussed, and overarching themes agreed upon.

In addition to the interviews, we have also arranged a series of workshops with 24 participants working at the Swedish Civil Contingency Agency in order to examine a more grounded elaboration on and validation of the use of the metaphor. Although we will not use quotes from this workshop in this article, it is still important to note that several (although not all) of the participants who partook in the workshops expressed that they appreciated the metaphor a lot. This confirmed to us that the metaphor is grounded in the work and used as a way of expressing conditions of the work and served to validate our results.

Our method for analyses is a metaphor-led discourse analysis (Cameron 2016), directed at the meanings constructed around the metaphor of crisis response work as a festival. This methodological approach stresses that metaphors, which describe one thing in terms of another, are powerful tools in establishing consensus on a matter or stating how certain things should be approached (Musolff 2016; Huang and Holmgreen 2020). Metaphors are also powerful as they speak to the mind as well as the gut, as the use of metaphors may be used to express unspoken assumptions and a common experience (Lakoff and Johnson 2008). We use the analysis of metaphors here as a way to investigate how people in a community understand their world and their activities (Schön 1979; Gibbs 2008). Our analysis focuses on one specific metaphor, that of a festival, and is directed at how this metaphor may be used to bring new meaning and draw attention to the unspoken qualities and also the somewhat dubious feeling of enjoying a crisis situation. Following Lakoff and Johnson (2008) we analyze festival as an “imaginative and creative” metaphor that “are outside our conventional conceptual system” and which is “capable of giving new meanings to our experience” (p 139).

We acknowledge that directing our respondents and workshop participants to the festival-metaphor, we steered them towards our interpretation and risk excluding other perspectives. However, as the metaphor grew out of the initial ethnographic field observations, we were interested in examining it specifically with other crisis management actors. The different types of data in this contribution reflect the ambition of critical studies to embrace the “messiness” of reality, rather than relying on creating order and specific categories (Basham and Bulmer 2016).

In the following, we present our analyses in three parts. First, we describe the specific aspects of a crisis that qualifies it as a possible festival event. Second, we investigate how mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion operate in the festival. Third, we explore why feelings of a festival sometimes gave rise to discomfort and shame related to unspoken taboos. Our analysis is based on both interviews and observations.

The core of the crisis

What makes a negative event such as an emergency, crisis or a disaster also qualify as a festival? As indicated above not all negative events carry the somewhat contradictory aura of a festivity. When analyzing the interviews in relation to situations we have been observing and engaged in, we realized that such events seem to share some common traits. In our analyses we constructed a scheme of those traits. In this section, we identify three traits: the size of the crisis matters, it needs to be exclusive, and the event needs to be seen as straightforward.

First, the events have to be large enough, meaning they generally need to attract national attention. This was for instance expressed in statements such as “It's [the festival] often when it becomes bigger”. Other respondents said that “big” was connected to the level of attention, not necessarily reflecting the actual severity of the crisis but the attention was some form of exaggeration: “If media picks up the ball and exaggerates it, or if it correlates with what the hot topic on the latest [professional] conferences”. If the crisis was a small and local event, it rarely created the festival feeling - because it was too local and just concerned the actors that were closest or the “usual suspects”. A local event lacked the openness and magnitude of possible additional resources, where people come from far away. In addition, space was one important factor with consequences or ramifications extending beyond the local. However, being large enough was also a matter of transgressing any singular profession and moving beyond work as usual. Here, it is important to notice that the presence of the media played a role, and allowed the crisis managers to connect to a common reference also known outside the professional community. As one respondent told us, a festival occurs in “…larger operations when the audience becomes big, when things become public in one way or another.” This specific construction of big events (in contrast to local and “normal” emergencies) becomes loaded with particular cultural value, such as events that become widely known, allowing participants to say: “I was there”. In this way, they were being credited with contributing to the management of a difficult and challenging threat.

Second, there are temporality factors affecting whether or not a crisis becomes a festival. The type of crises that stirs festival feelings have to be exclusive and come to an end. More common crises or events, where the consequences linger on for a long time, appear to not have the same sense of uniqueness. So, festivals have to be rare in order to be special, and large enough to be noticed. At the same time, they are seldom prolonged events with unclear endings. This was expressed in the interviews, expressed as a need to see that “there is a point of victory”. Sometimes it might be difficult to state a clear victory, but then it was also important to see a change in the intensity and that the situation entered into a new phase, expressing that you have been able to get control of the situation: “I have heard it many times, that ‘now our job is done, you can bring in the other guys’”. At the time of writing this article it became unavoidable not to relate our findings to the Covid-19 pandemic. It is significant to notice that none of our data relates to this international event as something that has caused the spirit of a festival. Even though it is possible that the pandemic initially stirred a festival feeling in some managerial settings when the crisis first “hit”, this potential atmosphere changed as the work became routine and where this crisis became a new normal.

The problem with events becoming too big also had temporal aspects, given that keeping such a big organization going requires structure and routine. As routines start to settle bureaucratization kicks in and drains the atmosphere of the initial excitement. In the interviews it was expressed that individuals in this profession, referring to firefighters and crisis management staff, are drawn to situations where there is action and “cutting to the chase”. This provides actors with a certain space, where “you do not have to do it right, as long as you are trying, and you like it when things go fast”. During the observations our researcher was told about participants that “failed” in conforming to the social rules of this liminal state, for example stories about people from the county board who had refused to send information on decisions because they had no registration code attached to it. In a state of festival, professionals should know such things – like proper procedure or protocol – do not matter. Bureaucratic routines seems to jeopardized the whole endeavor, i.e., the whole festival.

In addition to what has been stated above, a response can also grow too big and thereby loose its appeal of being unique and its qualification to be an event generating festival spirit. In other words, a really large festival runs the risk of losing its exclusiveness, which gradually can decrease the qualities that made it attractive from the beginning. There is a temporal aspect here, where a good festival atmosphere may turn bad when it gets too big and evolves. One of the participants described the work in the big command center established in one area of the severe wildfires in Sweden 2018, stating that he was frustrated with all the “people who want to get there and help and enjoy doing this and that'’. In such a situation he would start reflecting on the whole situation, developing an outside perspective. So, when too many people joined in and the festival became too big this would turn the festival into a “tainted” project, as it pushes away and excludes those who supposedly actually should be there. As a professional you develop a sensitivity to the shift in intensity, telling the difference between the productive festival atmosphere and the hullabaloo of an improperly handled crisis. During our observations in one of the command centers handling the wildfires of 2018, we arrived too late according to this logic. In the field notes there are descriptions such as “You should have been here earlier” and “I was told, again, that what I see now is nothing like what it was last week, then it was really intense and a different atmosphere”. Being there and doing observations as a researcher was obviously not the same as “having been there” and being part of the operation. Our researcher arrived too late, turning the observations as not just lacking in authenticity but possibly itself part of turning the command center into a spectacle (which could also explain, according to participants, why our researcher at first was denied access).

Third, the events need to be characterized by a clarity that allows for straightforward responses and facilitates a sense of unity. In order to be festive there needs to be consensus on what the problem is and what is to be done. In some disasters and crisis situations this proves difficult, such as the conflicting and sometimes counterproductive responses during the Covid-pandemic. Another example mentioned in our interviews was the refugee crisis of 2015. That crisis did not attract festival feelings because there was so much polarization and “this whole value-based opinion package”. One respondent remarked that this crisis was different, compared to wildfires where the actions were less politically charged and no one would seem to question whether putting out fires is any good (but as we will come back to later, there are examples of this too).

Clarity, it should be noted, does not have to do with the situation itself but rather continuity with what you have prepared for. Problems and solutions become “clear” only as long as they converge with the solutions you have available to you. This was expressed in the interviews by using another metaphor: “If you are playing soccer, you want to play a real game”. But in order to be a “real game”, the crisis needs to fit the standard of what you have practiced for. In other words, there needs to be clarity to the event that leaves little room for interpretations or alternatives in relation to the response. This does not necessarily mean that the situations are simple or calm. On the contrary, the context can be turbulent and challenging, but be handled through unity and consensus on what really matters, given that “other” definitions of problems and solutions are accepted as peripheral.

From a gender perspective we can note that all these conditions mount up to a tendency where masculinized boots-on-the-ground enthusiasm is privileged, in contrast to feminized work associated with social work or bureaucracy. In fact, bringing those issues up, such as pointing to the competing needs, the sociopolitical struggle at heart of crisis or asking people in a command center to follow plans or more bureaucratic regulations, for certain will put you in a position of being a killjoy. To conclude, in crisis response work characterized by a drummed-up festival atmosphere it is all too easy to become a killjoy and the warning signs of becoming a killjoy all bear the mark of feminization. It should be noted that gender here has little to do with gender identity but rather with the way feelings are structured and conditions work in crisis response teams.

Wildfires and hugs

In both the observations and the interviews, we noted that the festival-metaphor called attention to the comradeship of the work. In the interviews the metaphor was welcomed because of how it connects the personal to the professional, such as “the need to create a positive spirit, in order for people to feel secure […] because if they are secure, they perform much, much better”. The festival atmosphere required that you be more open and more personal, “being open with mistakes” and also creating “a more inclusive environment” - in contrast to “if it is just all serious”, or “stiff” working environment. Of course, within the scope of our study we do not know if this type of openness makes people perform better, but we can say that this was our respondents understanding of the situation. This link between personal and professionals also works the other way around, where the profession contributes to making you a better person. Put differently, your profession allows you to make a difference in society. The festival-metaphor captured those moments of confirmation: “this feeling of doing good, the feeling of really making a difference” as expressed in one of the interviewees. The festival-metaphor was an exclusive experience where you are “being part of the club of those who were there and who solved the case”.

The exclusivity was also expressed by participants during observations in the command centers during the wildfire in Sweden 2018. The command center had about 80 people working, who arrived from different parts of Sweden. None of them worked in the municipality that was affected. The staff came either from the rescue service or from county administrative boards, arriving for a few days of intense work. In spontaneous conversations with our researcher during the observations people expressed that they really appreciated the positive aura of the collaborative work. One said that “everyone is focused on the same thing: to get things done”. Our researcher was also informed that he was lucky to be part of a very privileged group of people who got the chance to experience something like this. Others said they would be proud of this for the rest of their life. When people left, they received hugs and also occasionally shed some tears, confirming that to leave the community (as well as, in consequence, becoming someone who had now “been there”) was emotional. In fact, some people also refused to leave, staying for some more days despite lack of sleep and intense work - stating they did not want to go back to the “normal life at home”.

In the follow-up interviews some would recognize the double bind of the positive spirit, pulling you into relations of dependency. The festival feel was not just freedom from restraint, but restraints in other forms - now more subtle and dubious. A woman working in a county board recalled that when she first arrived at the camp, she noticed a military officer at the registry and security desk at the entrance who she knew from work and who was very much into his high ranked professional position within the armed forces and would always keep a very professional and distanced approach to her. But now, when they happened to meet at the entrance to the camp when she first arrived his face broke out in a smile and he said “Oh, so you are here too, how nice”. Then he gave her a big and warm hug. In the interview she explained how this warm and friendly hug made her think and reflect on what she got herself into: “it really hit me, that ‘aha, now I am part of the family’”. When asked about what she thought about this inclusion she said she appreciated it, but also made her think of the rules attached to this form of family life: “I have nothing against it, because I think it is a good thing that people have this impulse”, she said, “but at the same time, when you change roles or your way of being, and it is taken for granted in this way, it can be a problem that you become unaware of what you exclude”.

The hug represented a warm and welcoming environment but also the subtle expression of demands on loyalty to the masculinized professions that set the norm in the command center. The back-side of this was evident in other parts of the observations. Our researcher noted how the atmosphere in the room would shift from enthusiasm to irritation when someone questioned how well the organization functioned or what societal values that were considered in the response. For example, a couple of people raised concerns that the organization did not seem able to include other perspectives than the view or demands voiced by the firefighters. Despite the public statement that the direction of the operation was to secure the lives of the people living in the area (thus a more feminized protection value than just protecting the forest or economic values) the staff who had the expertise and responsibility in these areas (such as social security, public health, and cultural heritage) were excluded from the work or were silenced. Social responsibility was reduced to lip-service.

During interviews, respondents told us that they would put a lot of work into collecting information about the cultural values vulnerable to the wildfire, but then found it impossible to find anyone in the command central who cared about or would use this information. Another participant, representing the local municipality, stated that the organization seemed solely directed at fire extinction out in the woods and did not consider the effects on the community. When those issues were raised in the joint meetings, the atmosphere in the room quickly changed and people in central positions responded with silence, yawning and muttering. A manager at the command center that we later interviewed commented these shifts in the atmosphere, claiming that people who brought these supposedly peripheral questions came across as just being unprofessional and refusing to accept their place in the hierarchy. Their frustration, expressed by the shift in atmosphere in the room, made the critical questions seem irrelevant – even though they were in line with the officially stated direction of the operation. Others were more self-critical. One of the respondents, representing the fire service, commented that there was one specific person who continuously disrupted the meetings with difficult questions. She had thought that this person “was just being difficult”. However, afterwards she had started reflecting on what happened, realizing that “Wait a minute, was she really that annoying? Were they irrelevant questions? Or was it just the wrong forum, which made her seem irritating?”.

Right and wrong kind of festivals

When we have presented the festival metaphor to professionals that conform to the norm in this context - people with a long list of experiences from crisis response teams in Sweden as well as international missions, most of them men with background in the rescue service, military or the police - the metaphor triggered them to explore ambivalence and tainted aspects of their work. One of them expressed that “It really hits the nail on the head!”. Others would admit they were provoked and initially took a defensive stance to the subject: “At first, I was very provoked. What the hell, how can you call it [a festival]”. However, after reflecting the respondents would all acknowledge the point of using this metaphor. Their response to our introduction of the metaphor shared some characteristics. No matter if they were familiar with it or provoked by it, their response was to start reflecting on distinctions they wanted to make between a good festival atmosphere and a bad one that spoils the sense of professionalism. For us, this signaled that they too were aware of the subtle power of affect and the importance of monitoring the right atmosphere. Maintaining the right atmosphere required a lot of work and a well-developed sensitivity to the subtle shifts that may turn honorable work efforts into tacky and unrespectable spectacles. Obviously, the monitoring of affect was not just a concern for those who run the risk of being excluded from “the family” but also those who enjoy a more secure or privileged position.

The dirty aspects of a festival mentioned in these interviews have many faces. To begin with, a festival attracts people, but not always the right ones. It appears that participants who are perceived to only be in it to build their own resume are viewed with great skepticism, while at the same time several respondents emphasize the necessity of having experience in order to work efficiently in the challenging environment. Along this reasoning, ideas of heroism are not completely rejected as a bad thing, but the festival can serve as a hotbed for stimulating the “wrong” heroes to emerge. Attending a festival for having the chance of being visible, “crowd surf”, and standing in the media spotlight is negative. This corresponds with our other interviews and observations, where respondents criticize colleagues who tend to turn up at every major event and who go to great lengths to be “where the action is”, even without any clue of their function or their mandate to claim this space. In interviews with a fire chief, it was commented that some colleagues seem to collect merits from response teams almost like collecting badges, boosting their own persona rather than focusing on the work to be done.

We also have examples of this phenomenon from our observations. During participant observation of a major exercise of collaborative work between several professions and authorities, two of our researchers noted that personnel from the military showed up in one of the hot-spots, the central operation room, uninvited and seemingly without a clue of their specific tasks. This was surprising given that the number of participants with specific access to the central operation room was very limited (about twenty people). The room itself was also secured and not easy to get access to. When the military staff was asked why they showed up unanticipated, they responded that they were instructed to attend by their superiors as they perceived themselves to be an obvious actor in this context. In doing so they took up space in the now crowded room and also ended up eating other professionals’ lunches since their presence had not been anticipated. In later interviews, without mentioning this specific incident, we learnt that similar incidents had happened during a real operation in response to an actual terror attack - where people would flood the central operation room to an extent where those heading the operation had to lock themselves away, in a separate room. With too many people showing up there was a festival feel, but also impossible to keep up the work routines. The work became tainted as people seemed lost without direction of their action - even though they might have felt that at least they were in the right space.

The dirty, but somewhat thrilling side of the festival spirit, can also be associated with a permissive atmosphere not normally encouraged within the restrained norms that characterize public administration, from which many of the participants are traveling from. The festival-metaphor signified a space where you were allowed to “go all in”, express gallows humor, rough jargon, and unload energy. It was not just “adrenaline-enhancing breaks from the daily grind of politics and bureaucracy” in terms of break from routines, but also the intensification of affect, as a temporary redemption. But this required sensitivity to the timing of such redemption. The good spirit would turn bad when exposed to outsiders: “I believe it may have devastating consequences if there is a festival spirit in the command central, and suddenly an external actor steps in and sees it”. To be professional, you have to be attentive to these differences - the festival spirit that makes the work less stiff must also be kept out of view from external parts. Several discussants also emphasize the unethical aspects of exposing the festival for people who are victims of the crisis originally calling for a societal response.

Conclusions

Festivals and crisis situations are diametrical concepts. However, as we have demonstrated in this article, the metaphor opens up for the possibility to examine the power dynamics of crisis response systems. In our analysis we have demonstrated how intensification of affects and the general atmosphere in crisis response teams, influence the work and how professionals in the field are also attuned to this aspect of their work. To be professional you need to understand and gauge the atmosphere, but also make sense of the subtle shifts and noticing when a good spirit may turn bad. The metaphor of a festival expresses professional codes and conditions for a professional ethos. But, as we have argued, it also encourages the exploration of gendered power relations and norms that conditions the work in crisis response teams and how crisis situations are defined. Crisis that attract masculine professions tend to spur enthusiasm while a crisis that include more feminized professions and goes beyond the usual suspects – the police, the military, the fire brigade – tend to lose their spark. Participants in our study obviously noticed and reflected on these aspects.

In a major societal crisis, many different needs will emerge and often there will be more needs than there are resources to meet them. Thus, prioritizations have to be done from a holistic understanding of what can be seen as a quite complex setting. We suggest that such efforts may be hindered by a festival atmosphere potentially leading to the exclusion of individuals, and thus perspectives, and by neglecting formal protocols that are designed just to avoid a too narrow-minded focus. These decisions are gendered and corresponds to masculine action-oriented boots-on-the-ground enthusiasm – in contrast to the feminized crisis response work associated with bureaucracy, dialogue and social politics that only ruins the festival feel. This means that a potential downside of a festival atmosphere can be lessened operational effect, at least a narrower one, where some individual and societal needs become overlooked or ignored. Our results indicate that the inclusion of people, values, and priorities is done so at the expense of values and priorities that are deemed less important by the festival managers. This uneven and often unsanctioned exercise of power can also lead to issues in the aftermath of a disaster, where calls for transparency and accountability in the priorities made can be difficult to justify. These are strategic tools for recognizing and reminding of the need for a critical awareness of how affective intensification is integral to decision making, channeled in subtle and unspoken processes, as decision making that is literally in the air.

In our conclusion we would like to return to Ahmed's critique of how happiness directs us to the future “as if decisions are already made”. The significance of festival atmosphere points to a new way of assessing the “effect” of the operation, recognizing that decisions on what counts as effects and not show a continuity with the festival atmosphere, with little possibility to recognize that things could have been different. The festival atmosphere constructs and sets the conditions for possible futures. Skipping the formal rules in order to achieve a sense of freedom from restraints, simultaneously creates new but different bonds (Ahmed 2010). In our data, the sense of urgency and agency became tangible, characteristics that can be seen as masculine, leaving little room for the inclusion of different, perhaps more feminine, perspectives. We acknowledge a cause-and-effect relation between festival spirit, direction of operation(s) and effects, suggesting that a deeper investigation into the festival as an expression masculine agency and directness might be conducted in future research. From a gender perspective this also challenges the masculinist view on emotions and affect as incompatible with rationality and professions.

A final conclusion is that the establishment of a festival feel is a complex and elusive achievement. It does not spring from one point of decision. We would argue that any attempt on deciding on a “festival feel” is doomed to fail - betraying its spontaneous, intuitive and bottom-up modality. Although decisions can be made that feed into the festival feel, the festival is never in the hands of “official” decision makers - but in the hands of the evolvement, or the creation of “affective co-subjectiveness” (Anderson and Adey 2011, 116). Irrespective of whether the outcome of a festival spirit is good or bad (or both) we argue that there is a need to account for the significance of a festival spirit in relation to the outcomes, as a key rationality of how decisions are made and how the work is directed. It is also needed to raise concerns of the significance of a festival spirit in relation to how some crises but not others tend to stir a festival atmosphere, or how some crises run the risk of passing from a moment where people rise to the occasion into a moment of falling short to frustration, ignorance, or acceptance of some crisis as merely ordinary crisis. We therefore recognize that there most likely is a cause-and-effect relation between festival spirit, direction of operation(s) and effect. By using metaphors, we can develop strategies to handle and monitor affective atmospheres like the ones identified in empirical study. These can be used as strategic tools for recognizing and reminding of the need for a critical awareness of how affective intensification is integral to decision making, channeled in subtle and unspoken processes, as if decisions are already made.