Christain Uhr and Misse Wester has, together with our colleague Mathias Ericson at Göteborg University, has published a paper in the International Journal of  of Mass Emergencies & Disasters.

The paper, 'Wildfire festivals - How crisis management professionals monitor affect, power relations and the right spirit', investigates how the metaphor of a festival can be used to describe and understand why certain crises are more interesting than others. 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.

You find the open journal online (Sage Journals).