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The logic of tact: How decisions happen in situations of crisis

The mass-migration of refugees in the fall 2015 posed an immense humanitarian and logistical challenge: exhausted from their week-long journeys, refugees arrived in Vienna in need of care, shelter, food, medical aid, and onward transport. The refugee crisis was managed by an emerging polycentric and inter-sectoral collective of organizations. In this paper, we investigate how, during such a situation, leaders of these organizations made decisions in concert with each other and hence sustained the collective's capacity to act collectively. We ask: what was the logic of decision-making that orchestrated collective action during the crisis? In answering this question, we make the following contribution: departing from March's logics of consequences and appropriateness as well as Weick's work on sensemaking during crisis, we introduce an alternative logic that informed decision-making: the logic of tact. With this concept we (a) offer a better understanding of how managers make decisions under the condition of bounded rationality and the simultaneous transgression of their institutional identity in situations of crisis; and we (b) show that in decision-making under duress cognition is neither ahead of action, nor is action ahead of cognition; rather, tact explicates the rapid switching between cognition and action, orchestrating decision-making through this interplay.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:6827
Date01 February 2019
CreatorsKornberger, Martin, Leixnering, Stephan, Meyer, Renate
PublisherSage
Source SetsWirtschaftsuniversität Wien
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle, PeerReviewed
Formatapplication/pdf
Relationhttps://doi.org/10.1177/0170840618814573, https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/home, http://epub.wu.ac.at/6827/

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