Trust and Organization: Integrating Responses to Freshwater Contamination within the Everyday Work of a Care Organization

In order to cut the word count I rewrote the entire abstract. Please replace with: Crisis management literature regularly focuses on large-scale incidents, crisis management organizations, and a managerial top-down approach. In reality, many crisis situations are small scale and local, involve non-emergency organizations, and often affect the entire organization. This chapter addresses this lacuna by fleshing out the empirical case of the outbreak of a waterborne parasite in a small municipality in Northern Sweden. The analysis showed that the outbreak affected the whole organization and was managed by the active agency of operative personnel and central experts. Additionally, findings suggest that spheres of action and different time-spatial framings were decisive elements in managing the crisis. The study concludes that issues of trust and the organizational setting influenced the framing and handling of the outbreak. In particular, the level of vertically directed trust established before the outbreak, along with the relatively high independence of the different units at operational level, played a decisive role in the integration of the outbreak in the everyday work of the organization. The paper calls for the development of organization theory addressing non-emergency organizations, small-scale events, and the integration of adverse events in the formal and social structures of everyday work.