While evidence of the exceedingly important role of technology in organizational life is commonplace, academics have not fully captured the influence of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on crisis response. A substantive body of knowledge on technology and crisis response already exists and keeps developing. Extensive research is on track to highlight how technology helps to prepare to crisis response and develop service recovery plans. However, some aspects of crisis response remain unknown. Among all the facets of crisis response that have been under investigation for some years, improvisation still challenges academics as a core component of crisis response. In spite of numerous insights on improvisation as a cognitive process and an organizational phenomenon, the question of how improvisers do interact together while improvising remains partly unanswered. As a result, literature falls short of details on whether crisis responders can rely on technology to interact when they have to improvise collectively. This dissertation therefore brings into focus ICT support to organizational improvisation in crisis response in two steps: We first address this question from a general standpoint by reviewing literature. We then propose an in depth and contextualized analysis of the use of a restricted set of technologies – emails, faxes, the Internet, phones - during the organizational crisis provoked by the 2003 French heat wave. Our findings offer a nuanced view of ICT support to organizational improvisation in crisis response. Our theoretical investigation suggests that ICTs, in a large sense, allow crisis responders to improvise collectively. It reports ICT properties - graphical representation, modularity, calculation, many-to-many communication, data centralization and virtuality – that promote the settling of appropriate conditions for interaction during organizational improvisation in crisis response. In the empirical work, we provide a more integrative picture of ICT support to organizational improvisation in crisis response by retrospectively observing crisis responders’ interactions during the 2003 French heat wave. Our empirical findings suggest that improvisation enables crisis responders to cope with organizational emptiness that burdens crisis response. However, crisis responders’ participation in organizational improvisation depends on their communicative genres. During the 2003 French heat wave crisis, administrative actors who had developed what we call a “dispassionate” communicative genre in relation to their email use, barely participated in organizational improvisation. Conversely, improvisers mainly communicated in what we call a “fervent” communicative genre. Therefore, our findings reveal that the ICT support to organizational improvisation in crisis response is mediated by the communication practices and strategies that groups of crisis responders develop around ICT tools.

In Gerichtsshows wie „Richter Alexander Hold“, „Richterin Barbara Salesch“ und „Das Strafgericht“ agieren Laiendarsteller semi-spontan als Teilnehmer einer fiktiven Gerichtsverhandlung. Hier wird also eine kommunikative Gattung aus der öffentlichen Kommunikation – die Gerichtsverhandlung – als Folie für eine Unterhaltungssendung genutzt. In dieser Arbeit wird die Gerichtsshow mithilfe des Konzeptes der kommunikativen Gattung beschrieben. Die Darstellung findet auf den verschiedenen Ebenen der kommunikativen Gattung "Binnenebene", "situative Realisierungsebene" und "Außenstruktur" statt. Außerdem wird dem Modell der kommunikativen Gattung als weitere Ebene die "mediale Außenstruktur" hinzugefügt, um die Beschreibbarkeit des Mediengesprächs "Gerichtsshow" zu verbessern. Die Analyse der Gerichtsshow zeigt, dass hier durch die Beteiligten eine Kontextualisierung als Gerichtsverhandlung aufgebaut wird. Die Teilnehmer müssen jedoch zugleich Aufgaben bewältigen, die denen einer Unterhaltungssendung entsprechen. Eine zentrale Aufgabe der Beteiligten ist daher das ständige Aushandeln zwischen der Produktion der Kontextualisierung als Gerichtsverhandlung einerseits und der Erfüllung der Anforderungen einer Unterhaltungssendung andererseits. In diesem Aushandlungsprozess entsteht eine gerichtsshowspezifische Darstellung von Kommunikation vor Gericht, die in dieser Arbeit mithilfe von rechtssoziologischen Konzepten wie dem der "Verfahrensgerechtigkeit" in ihrer Bedeutung im Diskurs um Recht und Gerechtigkeit eingeordnet wird. Die Analyse findet anhand von transkribierten Ausschnitten aus den Sendungen „Richter Alexander Hold“, „Richterin Barbara Salesch“ und „Das Strafgericht“ statt. / In German court room shows like “Richter Alexander Hold”, “Richterin Barbara Salesch“ and “Das Strafgericht“, amateur actors perform semi-spontaneous as participants of a fictional trial. The present thesis analyzes court room shows as communicative genres, using the concept of “Kommunikative Gattungen” as introduced by Beger/Luckmann (1988) and Günthner (1995). The analysis shows that court room shows' participants use court-specific contextualization cues to contextualize their interaction as a trial. At the same time, they have to fulfil tasks which are typical of shows and especially talk shows. Participants thus have to negotiate between producing a court-contextualization on the one hand and managing talk show tasks on the other hand. This negotiation produces a representation of court room communication that is typical of court room shows.

I den här avhandlingen studeras Europeiska kommissionens kommunikativa praktiker i ljuset av de pressmeddelanden som dagligen distribueras till världens största presskår i Bryssel, men också via internet till andra journalister och allmänheten. Övergripande syften med avhandlingen är att beskriva textproduktionen i denna en av världens största textproducenter och att lyfta fram den, hittills förvånansvärt osynliga, språkliga dimensionen av kommissionens kommunikation. Avhandlingen tar avstamp i ett dialogiskt perspektiv på kommunikation, där kommunikation förstås som en dynamisk process i vilken människor (sam)agerar i ett givet sammanhang. Avgörande blir således att se pressmeddelandena som en del av den produktions- och distributionskontext de ingår i, både på lokal nivå och på en mer övergripande institutionell nivå. Empiriskt bygger avhandlingen på fältstudier vid Europeiska kommissionen och textanalyser av pressmeddelanden från kommissionen och från franska och svenska departement. Pressmeddelandena studeras både som process och produkt: formuleringsprocesser å ena sidan och textmönster och tempusbruk å den andra. Som ett exempel detaljstuderas produktionen av två pressmeddelanden mot bakgrund av skribenternas förklaringar och motiveringar till sina ändringar. Med sin unika inblick i hur ett pressmeddelande blir till steg för steg och av olika aktörer utgör denna del ett viktigt bidrag till forskningen om pressmeddelanden, som först på senare år blivit mer processinriktad. De olika delstudierna ger alla vid handen att kommissionen, enkelt uttryckt, måste arbeta mer för att underbygga sin argumentation och för att göra sina initiativ mer begripliga, legitima och motiverade. Detta kan i stor utsträckning tillskrivas den mer komplicerade kommunikationssituationen som gäller för kommissionen i förhållande till de nationella departement som är jämförelsematerial i studien. / The thesis investigates the European Commission’s communicative practices in the light of the press releases that are distributed daily to the world’s largest press corps in Brussels and on the Internet to other journalists and the general public. The overall aim of the thesis is to describe the text production of one of the largest text producers in the world and to highlight the linguistic dimensions of the Commission’s communicative practices, which until now have received little scholarly attention. The study adopts a dialogical perspective on communication, where communication is understood as a dynamic process in which people interact in a given context. This means that the press releases are seen as parts of the production and distribution context in which they are embedded, both on a local level and on a more general institutional level. The empirical data on which the study is based comprise field studies at the European Commission and text analyses of press releases issued by the Commission and French and Swedish ministries. The press releases are analysed on different linguistic levels, text pattern and the use of tense, on the one hand, and composition processes on the other. As an example, the production of two press releases is studied in detail, in view of the authors’ comments to and motivations for changes to the texts. With its unique insight into how a press release is drafted step by step and by the different parties involved this part of the thesis is an important contribution to research on press releases, which only recently has become more oriented towards the production process. The results of the analyses highlight the fact that the Commission, to a greater extent than the national ministries, must substantiate its argumentation and make its initiatives more comprehensible, legitimate, and motivated. This finding may be ascribed to the more complex communication situation of the Commission, compared to the national ministries, which served as material for comparison in the study.