Improvising Organizational Structure and Process: The Case of Post-disaster Debris Removal Operations

Abstract

Organizations are often called upon to restructure their work processes—and themselves—in nearly real-time to deal with unplanned-for contingencies. However, researchers are seldom present at the right place and time to deploy specialized instrumentation and thus capture appropriate data on these improvisations. Somewhat paradoxically, now more than ever, organizations are producing vast quantities of data on work process and structure. The goal of this work is to draw upon one such data set—on post-disaster recovery operations—to explore the interplay between improvised organizational structure and processes. The result of this work shows the pattern of organizational improvising behavior and elicits the relationship between ideation and decision making - two elemental processes of organizational improvisation. Future work directions are also discussed.