What can the classic zombie movie, Day of the Dead, tell us about leadership? In our analysis of this film, we explore leadership behaviours in an extreme context - a zombie apocalypse where survivors face persistent existential threat. Extreme context research presents methodological challenges, particularly with regard to fieldwork. The use of films as proxy case studies is one way in which to overcome these problems, and for researchers working in an interpretivist perspective, 'social science fiction' is increasingly used as a source of inspiration and ideas. The contribution of our analysis concerns highlighting the role of leadership configurations in extreme contexts, an approach not previously addressed in this field, but one that has greater explanatory power than current perspectives. In Day of the Dead, we observe several different configurations - patterns of leadership styles and behaviours - emerging, shifting and overlapping across the phases of the narrative, each with radically different consequences for the group of survivors. These observations suggest a speculative theory of leadership configurations and their implications in extreme contexts, for exploring further, with other methods.

This teaching case focuses on challenges and opportunities of studying extreme contexts in general and the use of retrospective data in particular. The case takes its start in a retrospective case study of the fatal 1996 Mount Everest climbing incident. Based in the case description, the research design of the article, and the practical execution, a number of challenging areas and important lessons with respect to studying extreme contexts are outlined. By working with the method case, we expect students to further their ability to assess the main benefits and challenges when studying extreme contexts, discuss the appropriateness of possible methods when studying extreme contexts, analyze the use of method applied to a specific extreme context, and critically examine the use of method applied to this specific (extreme) case.

Organization scholarship has seen an escalation of interest in research into extremes. Comprising several interconnected domains, this growing body of research is decidedly fragmented. This fragmentation risks limiting its potential for advancing management and organization studies. Drawing on 138 articles published in top-tier journals between 1980 and 2015, the purpose of this review is to resolve some of this fragmentation by sharpening definitions and by developing a context-specific typology to help differentiate between contributions from research into risky contexts, emergency contexts, and disrupted contexts. Doing so allows us to let the various literatures speak to each other and to outline ways to enhance the cumulative potential of extreme context research.

The present study provides an autoethnographic account of the efforts to gain field access to a police organization, spanning more than 2 years. The aim is to describe a case of gaining access in relation to the professional norms of science put forward by Robert K. Merton. Aided by an organized record of notes, e-mails, and other written communications regarding access (144 memos of various types), the study describes and discusses the negotiations with Mertonian norms that followed from the dissonance between ideals of research and practical reality. Opening up for further scholarly discussion, this article concludes that Merton’s norms are incongruent with both prevailing guidelines of research ethics and with the practical, short-term problems of access negotiations and research bargains.

Emergency calls are high-stake situations characterized by volatile and time-critical conditions. The use of the telephone restricts sensory perception to a single modality hearing which makes both sense making and embodied sensemaking more difficult. Using observations, interviews, and organizational documents, we unveil how attention to the non-verbal cues of callers and their surroundings assists emergency operators to make sense of incoming calls for help. We find that operators use two practices to prioritize the calls: a frame-confirming practice and a frame-modifying practice. The practices are underpinned by configurations of verbal and non-verbal cues, wherein caller's emotional expressions and environmental sounds are both considered as distinct input. The non-verbal focus in this study extends our understanding of first-order sensemaking within the emergency domain but also in other sensory deprived settings in high-consequence industries. The contributions of this analysis to sense making research reside in the revelation that non-verbal cues contextualize and consequently frame the discursive elements of sensemaking. More specifically, this research offers the insight that embodies sensemaking benefits from attention being given to callers' non-verbal cues, rather than valuing only one's own bodily experiences and mere verbal descriptions about events.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to identify and explore alternative coping strategies that may compensate for the limitations of weak governance structure in a product development project. Design/methodology/approach - The findings are based on a single case study, including interviews and documents, of a product development project that consists of two interlinked projects in a large multinational company. Findings - Two distinct procedures are identified to cope and manage effectively when there are weak project governance structures. The first procedure is a horizontal process of operational consensus-seeking where conflicts between projects are negotiated and resolved through communication between independent actors such as two project managers who are at the same hierarchical level within the same organization. The second process is a vertical process of strategic escalation where issues that have failed to be resolved are shifted upwards to a new hierarchical level where a new round of operational consensus-seeking is attempted. Research limitations/implications - This paper complements the existing understanding of project governance with a project-as-practice perspective. Based on the findings the authors suggest that project governance needs to be nuanced in its understanding since a too-structured approach may in fact increase tensions in an organization. Practical implications - Practical insights include how organizations may work with its project governance structures in order to avoid tensions. The authors suggest that, in particular, politically sensitive situations may be avoided by weak rather than strong governance structures. Social implications - The authors find that weak governance structures may be efficient for the organization, but harmful to personnel, who become too focused on the task at hand. Originality/value - To the best of the authors' knowledge very little research has been attributed to project governance from a practice approach. Moreover, most attention has been given to strong structures, thereby not examining the positive implications of weak structures.

This article analyses how a working group in the Swedish police made sense of their task in the wake of reorganization. It aims to describe how inputs from top management prompted processes of sensemaking within the group, and their subsequent results in responding to latent paradoxes. The police group’s work was studied through participant observation, interviews and documents. The findings illustrate how the group made latent paradoxes salient and how they worked with these paradoxes to ultimately make them latent again by what we call “false syntheses”. Through this process, the group achieved its task, but the paradoxes were reproduced, made latent and pushed away to another part of the organization. Thus, sensemaking transforms paradoxes from latent to salient, from macro to micro levels of the organization.

The abundance and importance of temporary project teams in society introduces the need of understanding their nature. The purpose of this article thus is to highlight the existence of an only accidentally investigated type of team that we identify as Impromptu teams, and analyze their role in a temporary organization. Based on a detailed retrospective account of the infamous disaster on Mount Everest in 1996, we identify three examples of Impromptu teams. The three examples indicate that the teams are characterized by being triggered by an unexpected event, and formed through a bottom-up process, where joining the team is voluntary and the activities are based on a logic of appropriateness, rather than rule following. The identification and nature of Impromptu teams have implications far beyond Mount Everest, since most organizations at some point need to use teams similar to the identified examples.