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Improvisation from Performative Arts to Policy Making
Abstract
Hall et al. (2020) brought the well-known distinction between reflexive system and automatic system to the forefront when they wondered which of the two cognitive systems dominated in the response processes to the COVID-19 emergency. However, it is probably impossible to answer this question, although it highlights the actual need to explore what works in emergency response processes, apart from the structural and organisational factors that were explained in the previous chapter. The scientific community is divided on the matter. On the one hand, the literature on emergency management is still dominated by the hyper-rational planning approach, which presumes a clear prevalence of the reflexive system in emergency response processes. On the other hand, several policy analysts believe that response processes to crises and disasters are able to proceed in part thanks to mental and behavioural mechanisms pertaining to the automatic system, (Boin and ‘t Hart 2007; Arendt and Alesh 2015; Ansell and Boin 2019; Ravazzi 2023). Among these scholars, some have gone as far as to claim that improvisation plays a key role in emergency response processes (Turner 1994b; Mendonça et al. 2001; Mendonça and Wallace 2004; Webb 2004; Kendra and Wachtendorf 2006; Webb and Chevreau 2006; Kapucu 2008; Ansell et al. 2010; Eriksson and McConnell 2011; McConnell 2011; Schulman and Roe 2011; McEntire et al. 2013; Boin and van Eeten 2016; Sylves 2020; Roud 2021). According to Webb and Chevreau (2006, p. 67), ‘successful responses to crises occur not in spite of but because of various unscripted activities, improvised behaviour, and emergent organisational structures’. When describing the intergovernmental relationships of the US emergency management system, Sylves (2020, p. 251) considered improvisation as ‘part of the ethos of the system’. The empirical literature on emergency responses offers evidence that supports this hypothesis. According to Boin and Van Eeten (2016), the already mentioned CAISO team, which is responsible for the management of the California electric grid, managed to avoid the collapse of the system during the 2001 crisis by combining ‘a rapid decentralisation of actions and improvisation’ (131). Likewise, the coordinated actions that the healthcare delivery system of Ontario (Canada) put in place in 2003 to respond to the SARS epidemic seem to have benefitted from a good deal of improvisation (Varley 2009a). Soujaa et al. (2021), who analysed the rapid emergency responses in Texas against the 2015 Ebola infection, discovered that the emergency managers often deviated from the emergency plans and improvised. Again, according to Oscarsson and Danielsson (2018) and Oscarsson (2022, 732), the personnel who managed the 2015 refugee emergency in Sweden put ‘a lot of improvisation and prioritisation’ into action.
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Relevance to practice is an open issue for scholars in public policy and public administration. One major problem is the need to produce knowledge that can guide practitioners designing and implementing public interventions in specific contexts. This article claims that investigating the causal mechanisms of policy programs—i.e., modeling why and how they produce outcomes—can contribute to such knowledge. In this regard, mechanisms offer essential information to guide practitioners when replicating, adjusting, and designing interventions. Unfortunately, not all models of mechanisms can inform practice. The article proposes a strategy for design research and practice inspired by reverse engineering: selecting successful programs, causal modeling, assessing the target context, and designing. Scholars should model mechanisms by identifying the program and non-program elements that contribute to the outcome of interest and abstracting their causal powers. Practitioners can use these models, diagnose their target context, and adjust designs to deal with context-specific problems. The proposed research agenda may enhance orientation to practice and offer a middle ground between the search for abstract, general relationships, and single-case analyses.
Emergency policies are among the most challenging policies that policy makers have to deal with, because of their extreme seriousness, the lack of time, and the high uncertainties that are involved. Policy analyses have demonstrated that good structural and organizational strategies are important, but not sufficient, to systematically guarantee a high level of resiliency in response processes. Some scholars have therefore suggested the need to verify whether individual cognitive and relational mechanisms can contribute to explaining the different levels of resiliency that emerge in emergency response processes. From such a perspective, this article presents the findings of a research that was aimed at testing whether emotional mechanisms matter. The affect infusion model was used to provide the analytical framework that was considered to identify the evidence necessary for the empirical research, and the ‘most similar system design’ was applied to select and compare two couples of emergency response processes with similar contextual, structural and organizational features, but different levels of resiliency. The empirical research was conducted from April 2020 to February 2021, through periods of job shadowing and semi-structured interviews with personnel from the public and private organizations involved in the response processes. The research has substantially corroborated the hypothesis and has highlighted that, despite very similar contextual, structural and organizational conditions, a negative emotional mechanism, triggered by fear and anxiety, was pervasive among managers involved in the two lower-resiliency emergency response processes, while a positive emotional mechanism, triggered by pride, was dominant among managers involved in the two lower-resiliency processes.
Persistent efforts to meet the demand for cross‐organizational collaboration and trust‐based management have been halted by a mixture of bureaucratic inertia and entrenched New Public Management thinking. This article explores whether the COVID‐crisis has broken the reform deadlock. Based on a handful of recent surveys and interviews conducted by Danish public sector organizations, we look at the crisis‐induced transformations in local public administration. The main finding is that the pandemic has forced administrative agencies to collaborate with each other to solve new and pressing problems in a turbulent environment. Similarly, it has urged public managers to trust the skills and motivation of their employees, who must solve administrative tasks in innovative ways and with limited managerial support, supervision and monitoring. While changes may amount to little more than a temporary departure from normalcy, lesson‐drawing, learning retention and proactive leadership may help to produce a sustainable transformation.
This introduction to the symposium on “Robust politics and governance in turbulent times”; examines how different governance paradigms have conceptualized the relationship between order and disorder and stability and change. We selectively focus on two prominent and well‐established paradigms—public bureaucracy and network governance—and then contrast them with a third emerging paradigm, robust governance that aims to provide stable conditions for the development of robust responses to heightened turbulence through a combination of flexible adaptation and proactive innovation. We account for the three governance paradigms one by one with a view to how they deal with turbulence. We then define robust governance, discuss its distinctiveness compared to crisis management, resilience and agile management, and investigate the conditions and strategies for pursuing it. Finally, we endeavor to incorporate the findings of the symposium articles into the new and emerging perspective on how to advance robust governance in times of turbulence.
This article explores how a social services unit in Sweden coped with the large influx of unaccompanied children during the 2015 refugee situation. Crisis management is approached using social practice theory to examine how everyday work practices and their constituent resources informed personnel's management of the chaotic situation. The research data consist of practice-based interviews with managerial personnel from social services and operational staff at homes for unaccompanied children, as well as manuals and printed routines. The analysis demonstrates that the staff coped with the challenges posed by the refugee situation by adopting competences, mobilizing meanings, and adapting material resources belonging to different practices of everyday work. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of studying crisis management from a practice-based perspective as a complement to framing crisis management as a static asset of organizations—governed by institutionalized practices—which has implications for defining what constitutes crisis management and who can become crisis managers.
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Uncertainties run deep during a crisis. Yet, leaders will have to make critical decisions in the absence of information they would like to have. How do political leaders cope with this challenge? One way to deal with crisis-induced uncertainty is to base all decisions on a core principle or value. This is what we call a principled approach. The pragmatist approach offers an alternative: an experimental, trial-and-error strategy based on quick feedback. In this paper, we consider both approaches in light of the COVID-19 experience in four European countries. We conclude that the pragmatic approach may be superior, in theory, but is hard to effectuate in practice. We discuss implications for the practice of strategic crisis management.
The global reach of COVID-19 presents opportunities to compare policy responses to the pandemic and the role of knowledge across political contexts. This article examines the case of Vietnam’s COVID-19 response. Recognized for its early effectiveness, Vietnam exhibits the standard characteristics of unitary states but has also engaged communities, strengthening the legitimacy of and buy-in to response efforts. This article identifies six factors that shaped Vietnam’s response to the pandemic: (i) command-and-control governance, (ii) extensive preparation, (iii) fostering cooperative sentiment and solidarity, (iv) political readiness and communication, (v) policy coordination, and (vi) adaptation. The article contributes to practical discussions about country-specific responses to the pandemic, and to scholarship on policy effectiveness and success within the policy sciences and public management.
Emergencies are characterized by ambiguity and high stress. An emergency response typically involves a blend of public, private, and volunteer organizations. Responding to emergencies requires the capability to face unforeseen incidents and adequately adapt to them. The need for improvisation can be imperative for the success of an operation. Moreover, the interconnected nature of emergencies mandates collaboration, and collective improvisation can be a tool for handling challenges under the extreme complexity of an emergency. In this study, joint training is linked to the capability of collective improvisation in emergency response at an interorganizational level. The aim of this semi-conceptual study is to explore how joint training can improve collective improvisation capability in emergency response. To meet this aim, a literature review and pilot study are conducted. The context of this study is the management of emergency response in the Norwegian Arctic Sea region. The Arctic Sea region has a harsh climate with limited resources where involved organizations include both civil and military organizations, which makes the improvisation even more critical. This study shows that organizational memory, interorganizational trust, interorganizational communication, and information sharing are prerequisites and mediating variables that positively influence collective improvisation. Organizational structure and complex context also influence collective improvisation in emergency response.
The growing relevance of improvisation for successful organizing calls for a better understanding of how individuals develop improvisation skills. While research has investigated the role of training and simulations, little is known about how individuals develop improvisation skills when formal training is not an option, and how individual-level factors shape development trajectories. We explore these issues in a longitudinal qualitative analysis of live-action role-playing. Our findings surface a three-stage process of improvisation development shaped by the presence of task and social structures, which act as both constraints and resources. Moreover, our findings illuminate how collaborative and competitive orientations shape whether improvisers perceive these structures as a resource that they need to nurture and renew (i.e., collaborative), or to seize and exploit (i.e., competitive). We also show that individual orientations are not always enduring but can change over time, engendering four types of improvisation development trajectories. Our work provides a longitudinal account of how individual orientations shape the process of improvisation development. In so doing, we also explain why individuals who are skilled improvisers do not necessarily improvise effectively as a collective, and we reconcile different conceptualizations of improvisation.
Despite the emphasis placed on agility in uncertain situations such as extreme events, no comparative data exist to look into the determinants that drive agility. For crisis response managers, the failure to develop agility threatens organizations’ survival amid uncertainties. This paper investigates the development of agility and explains the emergence of agility against the fight of influenza A/H1N1 pandemics in Singapore and Taiwan in 2009. This paper further provides empirically grounded evidence to identify prerequisites for agility development in response to public health crises in East Asia.
Modern societies are increasingly faced with “unknown unknowns,” Black Swans, and mega-crises. Both public and corporate leaders find it deeply challenging to respond to these crisis events. Existing approaches and tools to cope with crisis-induced uncertainty are of little help in these dynamic environments. This article explores how the principles of Pragmatism may provide the building blocks for a theory of effective strategic crisis management. We argue that these principles, formulated by a group of American philosophers in a time of deep uncertainty, provide a way of thinking that will help practitioners prepare for, and deal with, emerging risks, crises, and disasters.
Musical collaboration emerges from the complex interaction of environmental and informational constraints, including those of the instruments and the performance context. Music improvisation in particular is more like everyday interaction in that dynamics emerge spontaneously without a rehearsed score or script. We examined how the structure of the musical context affords and shapes interactions between improvising musicians. Six pairs of professional piano players improvised with two different backing tracks while we recorded both the music produced and the movements of their heads, left arms, and right arms. The backing tracks varied in rhythmic and harmonic information, from a chord progression to a continuous drone. Differences in movement coordination and playing behavior were evaluated using the mathematical tools of complex dynamical systems, with the aim of uncovering the multiscale dynamics that characterize musical collaboration. Collectively, the findings indicated that each backing track afforded the emergence of different patterns of coordination with respect to how the musicians played together, how they moved together, as well as their experience collaborating with each other. Additionally, listeners’ experiences of the music when rating audio recordings of the improvised performances were related to the way the musicians coordinated both their playing behavior and their bodily movements. Accordingly, the study revealed how complex dynamical systems methods (namely recurrence analysis) can capture the turn-taking dynamics that characterized both the social exchange of the music improvisation and the sounds of collaboration more generally. The study also demonstrated how musical improvisation provides a way of understanding how social interaction emerges from the structure of the behavioral task context.
Significance
Claims about how reported emotional experiences are geometrically organized within a semantic space have shaped the study of emotion. Using statistical methods to analyze reports of emotional states elicited by 2,185 emotionally evocative short videos with richly varying situational content, we uncovered 27 varieties of reported emotional experience. Reported experience is better captured by categories such as “amusement” than by ratings of widely measured affective dimensions such as valence and arousal. Although categories are found to organize dimensional appraisals in a coherent and powerful fashion, many categories are linked by smooth gradients, contrary to discrete theories. Our results comprise an approximation of a geometric structure of reported emotional experience.
In the social sciences, there is an emerging interest in process tracing as a method for improving rigour and transparency in within-case inferences. Recently, the method has been proposed as a possible enhancement of theory-based approaches to evaluation, but applications of the method remain rare. In an attempt to fill this gap, process tracing was used to evaluate the Universal Exposition held in Milano in 2015 (EXPO2015). Mega-events of this kind are perfect candidates for ‘testing’ the method; although their effects have been widely discussed in the relevant literature, claims about the causal contribution of mega-events are not straightforward, and a number of ambiguities complicate any clear assessment of their consequences. Two in-depth case studies of projects related to EXPO2015 – the East External Highway and Refettorio Ambrosiano – demonstrate the advantages and feasibility of process tracing and of the application of Bayesian logic to evidence search, collection and assessment. In particular, case study results show that Bayesian scrutiny may reveal unexpected weakness in apparently obvious inferences and increase reliability in assessing less straightforward causal attributions.
Since 2000, the Gulf Coast states – Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida – have experienced a series of hurricanes, multiple floods and severe storms, and one oil spill. These disasters have not only been numerous but also devastating. Response to and recovery from these unprecedented disasters has been fraught with missteps in management. In efforts to avoid similar failures in the future, government agencies and policy practitioners have looked to recast emergency management, and community resilience has emerged as a way for to better prevent, manage, and recover from these disasters. How is disaster resilience perceived by local government officials and translated into their disaster response and recovery efforts?
Ashley D. Ross systematically explores and measures disaster resilience across the Gulf Coast to gain a better understanding of how resilience in concept is translated into disaster management practices, particularly on the local government level. In doing so, she presents disaster resilience theory to the Gulf Coast using existing data to create county-level baseline indicators of Gulf Coast disaster resilience and an original survey of county emergency managers and elected municipal officials in 60 counties and 120 municipalities across the Gulf States. The findings of the original survey measure the disaster resilience perceptions held by local government officials, which are examined to identify commonalities and differences across the set of cases. Additional analyses compare these perceptions to objective baseline indicators of disaster resilience to assess how perceptions align with resilience realities.
Local Disaster Resilience not only fills a critical gap in the literature by applying existing theories and models to a region that has experienced the worst disasters the United States has faced in the past decade, but it can also be used as a tool to advance our knowledge of disasters in an interdisciplinary manner.
A revolution in the science of emotion has emerged in recent decades, with the potential to create a paradigm shift in decision theories. The research reveals that emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial drivers of decision making. Across different domains, important regularities appear in the mechanisms through which emotions influence judgments and choices. We organize and analyze what has been learned from the past 35 years of work on emotion and decision making. In so doing, we propose the emotion-imbued choice model, which accounts for inputs from traditional rational choice theory and from newer emotion research, synthesizing scientific models. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology Volume 66 is November 30, 2014. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/catalog/pubdates.aspx for revised estimates.
It is argued that emotions are lawful phenomena and thus can be described in terms of a set of laws of emotion. These laws result from the operation of emotion mechanisms that are accessible to intentional control to only a limited extent. The law of situational meaning, the law of concern, the law of reality, the laws of change, habituation and comparative feeling, and the law of hedonic asymmetry are proposed to describe emotion elicitation; the law of conservation of emotional momentum formulates emotion persistence; the law of closure expresses the modularity of emotion; and the laws of care for consequence, of lightest load, and of greatest gain pertain to emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
By nature, research is a trek into the unknown by routes that may include a research pilgrimage like attending academic conferences, conducting interviews and experiments, and reading related research often via the digital environment that characterizes higher education in the 21st Century. They may find all sorts of information to include pointers to new techniques or techniques that could be adapted to address a burning issue in society or science. However, how their process of discovery actually happened is rarely reported and chance not admitted to as being a factor. Yet, in reality, researchers are very happy when finding something vital to their research, which they did not know beforehand that they would find, referred to as serendipity. Little is known about how researchers can harness serendipity and stimulate their creativity in making it work for them. This work investigates the methods by which discoveries are serendipitously made in research that can stimulate researchers’ creativity toward making unexpected discoveries. (article link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2713374521000145?via%3Dihub)
This article draws on the institutional collective action (ICA) framework and data from a survey of senior public health and emergency management professionals in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex following the Ebola outbreak to investigate coordination effectiveness during public health emergencies. Based on the study findings, the article recommends that having an identifiable lead agency, official statements from local authorities, a conducive environment for informal conversations, and communication activities that inform, connect, and involve professionals is essential for an effective coordination. Practical implications of the study extend to how to mitigate collective action dilemmas with regard to coordinating COVID-19 pandemic responses.
The COVID-19 pandemic reveals that the public sector is not only facing simple and complex problem, but also turbulent problems characterized by the surprising emergence of inconsistent, unpredictable, and uncertain events. Turbulent problems call for robust governance solutions that are sufficiently adaptable, agile and pragmatic to upheld a particular goal or function in the face of continuous disruptions. The article defines the concepts of turbulence and robustness and provides examples of robust governance strategies that are illustrated by the current COVID-19 response. Finally, it draws the consequences of the new focus on robust governance for public administration and leadership.
Responding to crises requires the ability to meet the unforeseen and adapt to new conditions. The transboundary nature of crises with e.g. increased interconnectedness among critical infrastructures, involving more actors in response, will call for collective coordination. Collective improvisation can be a tool for handling challenges under these circumstances, however the research is limited and dispersed over disciplines. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore the capability to improvise collectively in crisis management, and how it affects performance. To achieve this, we conducted a structured scoping study of improvisation in scientific literature and found that existing research is not sufficiently explained or detailed to fulfill our purpose. Our findings show that individual improvisation seems to be aggregated to a collective level without modifications, and existing methods lack in precision and transparency. Further, there is a need for a more nuanced discussion on improvisation and performance. Implications are that studies on collective improvisation risk measuring individual rather than collective improvisation, if based on existing literature. Moreover, the concept of improvisation is connected to mostly positive outcomes and assumed to have the same meaning for everyone. As a result, one should be careful when using the concept in practice, e.g. when using it as a causal explanation for successful performance, or when suggesting measures aimed at improving the capability to improvise collectively. To move forward, we suggest adopting collective problem solving as a broader analytical frame. Finally, we highlight some theories serving as a starting point for this investigation.
The aim of this study was to examine the practices of crisis management adopted by operative staff when facing a crisis situation in their workplace. This research is based on interviews with personnel from social services and staff from homes for unaccompanied youth. The interviewees asked respondents about their actions in caring for young refugees during the refugee situation. The results are structured around three themes: everyday practices, crisis work, and the process of normalization. Three practices for handling the situation-improvisation, prioritization, and creating alternatives-served as crisis management-as-practice. The staff members' everyday practice for solving problems became the basic method employed during the crisis to normalize everyday work.
Improvisation teachers have long known that the human mind could be trained to be effortlessly spontaneous and intuitive. Drinko explores what these improvisation teachers knew about improvisation’s effects on consciousness and cognition and compares these theories to current findings in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy.
Introduction - Part 1 WHO? Major Practitioners of Improvisation - Improvisation in Traditional Drama - Improvisation in Alternative Drama - Beyond Drama 'Paratheatre' - Part 2 WHAT? The Practice of Improvisation - Improvisation Exercises Preparation - Working Together - Moving Towards Performance - Applied Improvisation Work - Part 3 WHY? The Meanings of Improvisation - Towards the Poetics - Enriching the Communication of Meaning - Meaning and Performance - Notes - Bibliography - Index
Commissioners of impact evaluation often place great emphasis on assessing the contribution made by a particular intervention in achieving one or more outcomes, commonly referred to as a ‘contribution claim’. Current theory-based approaches fail to provide evaluators with guidance on how to collect data and assess how strongly or weakly such data support contribution claims. This article presents a rigorous quali-quantitative approach to establish the validity of contribution claims in impact evaluation, with explicit criteria to guide evaluators in data collection and in measuring confidence in their findings. Coined as ‘Contribution Tracing’, the approach is inspired by the principles of Process Tracing and Bayesian Updating, and attempts to make these accessible, relevant and applicable by evaluators. The Contribution Tracing approach, aided by a symbolic ‘contribution trial’, adds value to impact evaluation theory-based approaches by: reducing confirmation bias; improving the conceptual clarity and precision of theories of change; providing more transparency and predictability to data-collection efforts; and ultimately increasing the internal validity and credibility of evaluation findings, namely of qualitative statements. The approach is demonstrated in the impact evaluation of the Universal Health Care campaign, an advocacy campaign aimed at influencing health policy in Ghana.
Listen to Richard Sylves on his interview from “Homeland Security Inside & Out” Click Here to ListenRichard Sylves Interview Interview from ‘Homeland Security Inside and Out’ which airs on KAMU. Interview air date: May 20, 2008. In this groundbreaking book, long-time expert and scholar in the field of disaster management, Richard Sylves, comprehensively surveys the field of emergency management while building on his original research and sharing his insider knowledge. Providing much needed synthesis of the field's major findings, scholarship, and current developments, Sylves structures the book with an analytical framework that focuses on the challenge of effective intergovernmental relations—both across levels of government and across types of disasters—to guide readers through instructive and important political history as well as recent crises. Whether for an undergraduate studying the topic for the first time or a practitioner looking for professional development, Disaster Policy and Politics will prove to be a highly readable, informative text and handbook aimed at laying a foundation of knowledge and know-how. Ten chapters offer, among other topics: a contextual history of disaster policy and politics; a discussion of global issues and influences; an exploration of the politics of planning and funding for the next disaster; a look to the future, to where emergency management goes from here, including its maturation into a profession. A valuable learning resource available with the book is a website sponsored by the Public Entity Risk Institute that tracks presidential disaster declarations issued for every state and county from 1953 through 2006. © 2008 by CQ Press, an Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc. CQ Press is a registered trademark of Congressional Quarterly Inc.
Musical improvisation is, to many in the Western world, an activity shrouded in mystery. Most listeners are familiar with some genres of music in which improvisation is a commonplace, such as rock and other popular styles, jazz, or perhaps 'ethnic' musics - that is to say, composed or improvised 'traditional' musics falling outside the typical Western canons. Therefore listeners are aware that many musicians can, and routinely do, produce novel musical utterances in real time. The question for most them is 'How is improvisation carried out?' With this formulation of the question, musical improvisation becomes a suitable topic for psychological investigation, focusing on cognitive, physical, and interpersonal processes, and on the musical structures on which these processes operate. This article seeks to bring together the literature on musical improvisation that will be of interest and benefit to those wishing to know more about it from a cognitive perspective.
The ability to improvise represents one of the highest levels of musical achievement. An improviser must master a musical language to such a degree as to be able spontaneously to invent stylistically idiomatic compositions in the moment. This feat is one of the pinnacles of human creativity, and yet its cognitive basis is poorly understood. What musical knowledge is required for improvisation? How does a musician learn to improvise? What are the neural correlates of improvised performance? This book explores these questions through an interdisciplinary approach that draws on the study of pedagogical treatises on improvisation, interviews with improvisers, musical analysis of improvised performances, and cognitive neuroscience. Findings from the treatises, interviews, and analyses are discussed from the perspective of cognitive psychological theories of learning, memory, and expertise, as well as data from functional brain imaging studies of improvisation. Pedagogy, learning, and performance in improvisation are explored in a cross-cultural context, demonstrating universal features across a wide variety of musical traditions. Though disparate, these sources provide a convergent picture of the improvising mind, suggesting that musical improvisation draws on some of the very same cognitive processes and neural resources as the more mundane but equally infinitely creative faculties of language and movement. Improvisation therefore provides a new focus for comparisons of music and language cognition: while past research comparing music and language cognition has focused almost exclusively on perception of the two sound systems, the cognitive processes underlying the acquisition and production of music and language have not been systematically explored. Here, learning to improvise is compared with language acquisition, and improvised performance is compared with spontaneous speech from both theoretical and neurobiological perspectives.
Barry Kernfeld provides an introduction to jazz, discussing its musical concepts, procedures and styles, providing the background to this musical art. The book is organized around 21 historical jazz recordings - from the New Orleans Rhythm Kings' "Tin Roof Blues" (1923) to Ornette Coleman's "Honeymooners" (1987) - that are analyzed in the text and included in a free compact disc that accompanies the book. The author draws from these musical works to illustrate jazz rhythm, forms, arrangement, composition, improvization, style, and sound (recording fidelity, tuning systems, instrumentation, and timbre). Included in the book are 85 notated music examples keyed to the compact disc and a biographical dictionary of musicians who figure prominently on the disc. By laying out musical ideas that unify the genre, rather than by splintering it along stylistic lines, this book offers a method for enhancing enjoyment and understanding of jazz. This should be a useful resource for students and general listeners who wish to know more about this musical form.
We define organizational improvisation as the degree to which the composition and execution of an action converge in time, and we examine the theoretical potential of this definition. We then propose that both organizational procedural memory (skill knowledge) and declarative memory (fact knowledge) moderate improvisation's impact on organizational outcomes in distinct ways. We also suggest that improvisation influences organizational memory by (1) generating experiments and (2) permitting the development of higher-level competency in improvisation, Contemporary technological changes related to the nature of organizational memory intensify the salience of these issues.
The following article introduces the concept of "spontaneous planning" and examines its applicability in response to the September 9th, 2010, gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, California. Our case study offers a detailed picture of the unique nexus between planning and improvisation, and argues that spontaneous planning may facilitate more effective post-disaster operations. The article is divided into six main sections. First, we present a brief overview of pertinent planning and improvisation literature. Second, the contextual details of the San Bruno gas explosion event are reviewed. Thirdly, the research methodology for data collection and theory development is discussed. Fourth, we present research findings as they relate to spontaneous planning activities. Fifth, we discuss the impact of spontaneous planning in the San Bruno incident. Finally, we conclude with an exploration into the implications for future research and our recommendations for practitioners.
Organizational improvisation is increasingly recognized as a relevant area of management research. However, the cumulativeness of research on improvisation in organizations remains low. This paper organizes existing contributions on organizational improvisation within a new consolidating framework combining degrees (minor, bounded and structural) and levels (individual, interpersonal and organizational) of improvisation. The proposed degree/level framework allows for reviewing the existing literature on organizational improvisation in the management disciplines of strategy, organizational behaviour, organizational theory, innovation and marketing in a systematic manner. It also exposes potential areas for future research across management disciplines, research areas, organizational settings and industries, and beyond existing metaphors, most notably of jazz and improvisational theatre.
For decades social science research on disasters has documented the importance of organisational emergence and individual role improvising to effective emergency responses. Yet those responsible for planning for crises continue to embrace approaches that emphasise centralised command and control and that discourage creativity. In this paper we describe the nature of improvisation, identify characteristics of organisations that impede flexibility in responding to crises, and discuss the implications of social science research on disasters for crisis planning and emergency management. We conclude that crisis planners should encourage – not constrain – creativity in their planning efforts.
Parallels between jazz performance and organization are given. In organizations, people need to understand what's happening in order to help their organization perform flexibly. The more they know about what the organization does—what it's up to, what's going on in the world, what the customer wants, what other people do, what shape the organization is in financially, what the possibilities are—the more they can take action freely without fear of causing problems for someone else. Developing this knowledge takes time, like practicing a musical instrument.
Behind every successful performance, such as was the jazz symposium at the 1995 Academy of Management Conference, are people who have worked long and hard to try to ensure that the event will come to fruition; who have solved tricky problems and improvised ...
It has often been proposed, or assumed, that improvisation is a useful metaphor to provide insight into managing a nd organizing. However, improvisation is more than a metaphor. It is an orientation and a technique to enhance the strategic renewal of an organization. The bridge between theory and practice is made through exercises used to develop the capacity to improvise, borrowed from theatre improvisation. This paper describes a typical improvisation workshop in developing six key areas that link improvisation exercises to the practice of management: interpreting the environment; crafting strategy; cultivating leadership; fostering teamwork; developing individual skills; and assessing organizational culture.