BUREAUCRATIC VALUES AND RESILIENCE: AN EXPLORATION OF CRISIS MANAGEMENT ADAPTATION
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12085 |
| Date | 01 September 2014 |
| Author | ALASTAIR STARK |
| Published date | 01 September 2014 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12085
BUREAUCRATIC VALUES AND RESILIENCE:
AN EXPLORATION OF CRISIS MANAGEMENT
ADAPTATION
ALASTAIR STARK
The concept of resilience has gained currency as a motif under which governments have sought
to improve their responses to crises. At the heart of this agenda is an understanding that crisis
management must be adaptable. Yet crises continue to expose the intransigent nature of central
bureaucracies. This article addresses this issue by exploring how bureaucratic values can affect the
ability of agents to adapt to the challenges of crises. Data are generated from a series of interviews
with crisis managers who operate in a policy chain that connects the European Union to the United
Kingdom. The data indicate that two well-entrenched bureaucratic value-sets, relating to efficiency
and procedural rationality, have profound consequences for the resilience agenda.
INTRODUCTION
The concept of resilience has become very fashionable in public policy discourse. However,
its academic provenance has a longer history than that suggested by its contemporary
currency. This lineage has been traced back to psychological studies of the resilient
individual conducted in the post-war period (de Bruijne et al. 2010, p. 14) but since then
the concept has become a feature of the work of ecologists (Holling 1973), engineers
(Hollnagel et al. 2006), organizational theorists (La Porte and Consolini 1991), public
administration scholars (Wildavsky 1988), and crisis management analysts (Comfort et al.
2010). The conceptual treatment that resilience has received as a consequence has tended
to obfuscate rather than illuminate, turning ‘what was once a straightforward concept ...
[into] a complex, multi-interpretable concept with contested definitions and relevance’
(Klein et al. 2003, p. 40).
This article, however, focuses on adaptation as a fundamental characteristic of resilience.
In this sense, an interdisciplinary consensus exists around a view that resilience can
be engendered through adaptation. Hence for the engineer, resilience can be observed
in those systems that are designed to adapt in a way that will quickly return them to
a stable equilibrium (Fiksel 2003, p. 5330). For the ecologist, resilient systems are not
necessarily those that ‘bounce-back’ efficiently but rather those that can continuously
adapt to unremitting environmental fluctuations (Gunderson 2003, p. 35). These two
views of resilience have profoundly shaped the concept’s use within the social sciences
(see de Bruijne et al. 2010).
This article focuses upon the resilience of bureaucratic crisis management agencies.
Institutionalized bureaucratic structures have a proven ability to absorb environmental
turbulence without succumbing to radical reform (Bell and Hindmoor 2009, p. 20). Within
the context of a crisis, however, institutionalized structures can often sit in tension with
a need for more extreme forms of adaptation (Ansell et al. 2010; Comfort et al. 2010). This
tension is particularly pronounced in the context of crises because of the urgency and
uncertainty of the environment. Uncertainty demands embossed rules, structures, and
Alastair Stark is in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, Brisbane,
Queensland, Australia.
Public Administration Vol. 92, No. 3, 2014 (692–706)
©2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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