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The incident command system (ICS) is a particular approach to assembly and control of the highly reliable temporary organizations employed by many public safety professionals to manage diverse resources at emergency scenes. Our inductive study of a fire department's use of the ICS identified three main factors enabling this distinctively bureaucratic system to produce remarkably flexible and reliable organizations for complex, volatile task environments. This research suggests the possibility of new organizational forms able to capitalize on the control and efficiency benefits of bureaucracy while avoiding or overcoming its tendencies toward inertia.
Recent organization science research indicates that an expanding number of organizations are facing increasingly unforgiving social-political-- economic contexts (D'Aveni, 1994). Operational failures resulting in inappropriate, incomplete, laggardly, or otherwise mindless organizational responses to unexpected and demanding environmental contingencies (such as major and unforeseen competitive threats, product malfunctions and recalls, supplier collapses, technology breakdowns, and so forth) are ever more likely to be immediately and critically disabling (Hanssen-- Bauer & Snow, 1996; Lagadec, 1993; Pearson & Clair, 1998). Consequently, reliability-that is, the capacity to continuously and effectively manage working conditions, even those that fluctuate widely and are extremely hazardous and unpredictable (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 1999)-is becoming a vital organizational quality or competency.
Traditional bureaucratic (Weber, 1947) or mechanistic systems (Burns & Stalker, 1961) ostensibly become more unreliable as situational volatility escalates. In fact, Adler, Goldonftas, and Levine (1999) suggested that one of the most enduring ideas in organization theory is that bureaucracies, which are characterized by structural features such as standardization, specialization, formalization, and hierarchy, enable the steady, efficient functioning organizations require to compete successfully under stable operating conditions, but they also severely limit the organizational flexibility needed to cope effectively with complex, ambiguous, and unstable task environments. Not surprisingly, a growing number of managers are experimenting with new organizational forms that purportedly achieve flexibility, and thus a degree of reliability under turbulent conditions, by way of more organic and temporary work arrangements (Ilinitch, D'Aveni, & Lewin, 1996). "Hybrid," "network," and "virtual" are several of the terms that have been used to identify these emerging organizing principles.
However, our inductive study of a fire department's use of an approach to emergency or disaster management called the incident command system (ICS) points to...