Quel apport des technologies de l’information et de la communication (tic) a l’improvisation organisationnelle durant la réponse à la crise ?

We explore Information and Communication Technology (ICT) support to organizational improvisation during crisis response by completing three studies. The first study confirms diversity in research on improvisation and suggests that author’s perspectives on improvisation diverge with respect to four tasks within the research process. The second study identifies five constituents of organizational improvisation. In addition, it reports six ICT properties 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.