Title: A Social Constructionist Exploration of Incident Response Management: How is Effective Management Rapidly Constructed?

Engaging in ethnographic co-research with experienced managers, talking about their experiences with three different types of large incident response (wildfires, oil spills and regional, non-fire/spill disasters), what can I learn about how an especially large, complex, effective response management system is rapidly constructed? And what praxis can I develop from my learning to help the people I conducted co-research research with (and others) be more effective, more rapidly in the future?

This topic reflects my interest in how people make meaning together in challenging organizational settings.  The generalized incident-response setting is one that brings together individuals who form temporary teams and asks of those teams that they become effective quickly.  By conversing with experienced incident response managers, I hope to build my own notions of what contributes to rapid construction of effectiveness.  Once I have produced a text that describes my understanding, I plan to go back to my co-researchers, share the text with them and try to construct with them a description of what enables rapid effectiveness in this setting.

If you want to see my meanderings and ruminations as I move forward, my blog is located at http://nealsphd.blogspot.com