Managing resource transposition in the face of extreme events: Fieldwork at two public networks in Germany and the US
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Author | Olivier Berthod,Michael Grothe‐Hammer,Ryan Hagen,Jörg Sydow |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12660 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Managing resource transposition in the face of
extreme events: Fieldwork at two public networks
in Germany and the US
Olivier Berthod
1
| Michael Grothe-Hammer
2
| Ryan Hagen
3
|
Jörg Sydow
4
1
Department of Business and Economics,
Jacobs University Bremen, Bremen, Germany
2
Department of Sociology, Helmut Schmidt
University, Hamburg, Germany
3
Department of Sociology, Columbia
University in the City of New York,
New York, USA
4
Department of Management, Freie
Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Correspondence
Olivier Berthod, Department of Business and
Economics, Jacobs University Bremen,
Campus Ring 1, 28759 Bremen, Germany.
Email: o.berthod@jacobs-university.de
Funding information
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Grant/
Award Number: SY-32/6-2; U.S. National
Science Foundation, Grant/Award Number:
DDRIG 1519280
Abstract
As administrations increasingly rely on interorganizational
networks to organize public service provision, this article
inspects the role resourcing plays in the way managers
working in networks cope in the face of extreme events.
Using comparative analyses of fieldwork in the context of
two emergency service networks in two major cities in Ger-
many and the US, we introduce the concept of resource
transposition. This concept holds the potential to explain
why and how networks might perform well in situations
that drain its central participants' resources. We highlight
the relevance of four practices: resource (re)production;
resource administration through integration; resource
administration through centralization; resource support. We
derive a set of propositions underlining the usefulness of
the concept of resource transposition.
1|INTRODUCTION
A major crisis erupts and the response required exceeds the resources available to the public organizations
involved—how do public managers proceed? Understanding how public organizations respond to extreme events—
that is, crises that trigger important capacity overload for the organizations in charge and the resulting need to enact
network resources in new, unpredicted ways (Pearson and Clair 1998)—is a central research interest in the field of
public administration and management (Moynihan 2008; Zhang et al. 2018). Public management research often
Received: 23 August 2018 Revised: 10 September 2019 Accepted: 4 January 2020
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12660
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which
permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no
modifications or adaptations are made.
© 2020 The Authors. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Public Admin. 2021;99:171–188. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm 171
reports on the role of interorganizational networks as a means to alleviate resource interconnectivities in the face of
crises (e.g., Agranoff and McGuire 2001; Kapucu 2006; Moynihan 2008; Berthod et al. 2017b). That said, we know
little about how public managers make use of interorganizational relations in and outside of such networks to allevi-
ate sudden resource scarcity when their community is hit by an unexpected event of unusual magnitude.
If we turn to the literature on public networks in general, a central argument is that relations support resource
transfers from one point to another (O'Toole 1997; Mandell and Steelman 2003; Herranz 2008; Hicklin et al. 2008;
Rethemeyer and Hatmaker 2008). While crisis responses certainly take advantage of existing interorganizational
relations (Berthod et al. 2017b), public managers also recraft them and create new ones, moving towards rapidly
emerging and ephemeral systems (Kapucu 2006; Moynihan 2008). Research on network resources, however, tends
to join one of two streams. On the one hand, studies focusing on structural features of networks tend to concentrate
more on the financing of the networks' existence than on resourcing their daily operations (Provan and Milward
1995; Rethemeyer and Hatmaker 2008; Lange et al. 2013). On the other hand, research on management within pub-
lic networks proposes that organizational resources need to be adapted when shared across organizational bound-
aries, in the main without revealing what such a process of resource adaptation might look like (Agranoff and
McGuire 2001; Agranoff 2007; Herranz 2008; Saz-Carranza and Ospina 2011). Building on this second stream, our
goal in this article is to refine existing theory by naming and describing central elements of the process of resource
adaptation. We therefore ask: How do public managers turn organizational assets into resources for a collective pur-
pose to face extreme events?
Observing extremeevents in real time is particularly difficult. Such events typicallycatch organizations by surprise,
are rare, and are limitedin duration. In this article, we explore such a process of resourcingby comparing ethnographic
data collected during two extreme events at the central coordinator of emergency response networks. These two
cases report on a destructive2014 thunderstorm over the city of Düsseldorf, Germany, and a 2015 naturalgas explo-
sion and fire in New York City, US. Inspecting the work of the publicmanagers in charge in these two cases, our find-
ings point to a dynamic and processual view of resourcing in interorganizational settings. Specifically, we reveal the
practices on which publicmanagers relied to organize and manage resourcesin this context. These findings contribute
to refining our understanding of the role officers and managers of emergency response organizations play in making
organizationsresponsive in the face of questions of life and death at worst and the integrityof public space at best.
2|NETWORKS AND RESOURCES: TOWARDS A PRACTICE VIEW
The dilution of traditional bureaucratic models of governance towards more interorganizational ones has produced a
surge of research on networks in general and ‘goal-directed networks’in particular. Goal-directed networks consist
of relations between three or more organizations assembled towards a common goal (Provan and Kenis 2008; Isett
et al. 2011; Lecy et al. 2013; see Provan et al. 2007 for a review). Goal-directed networks shed light on the potential
of interorganizational collaboration and emerge typically in the face of problems that cannot be tackled by single
organizations alone (Provan and Milward 1995; O'Toole 1997; Klijn and Koppenjan 2000; Agranoff and McGuire
2001; Moynihan 2008).
Resources, defined here as the inputs a social system needs to perform towards its goals and maintain its opera-
tions, constitute a central element in research on interorganizational networks (Powell 1990; Provan and Milward
1995; Rhodes 1997; Gulati 2007). For example, resources are often a rationale for network managers to ‘activate’
partners in their network or include new ones and make resources flow (Gray 1989; Agranoff and McGuire 1999).
From this managerial perspective, network managers not only activate, but also frame, mobilize and synthesize net-
work relations (Agranoff and McGuire 2001; McGuire 2006). In more specific terms, public managers ‘mobilize’par-
ticipants by securing their commitment and contribution over a shared goal. They ‘frame’the operating rules of
interactions in the network (see Kickert et al. 1997), and ‘synthesize’these various participants and their inputs into
a coherent whole (O'Toole and Meier 2004).
172 BERTHOD ET AL.
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