Bricolage as Enacted Sensemaking in Emergent Response Groups: Organizing in Conditions of Extreme Equivocality
研究了新冠疫情期间八个自组织应急响应群体如何通过拼凑（利用手头资源）减少行动、目标和资源的不确定性，实现快速协调与规模化，对理解危机中的非层级化组织有重要启示。
When crises strike, new forms of emergent organizing often arise to address urgent societal needs that formal institutions struggle to meet. Among these, emergent response groups (ERGs)—self-organized communities that form to respond to unexpected and extreme events—offer a particularly salient example of decentralized and nonhierarchical organizing. This multicase study investigates eight ERGs that formed during the COVID-19 pandemic to design and distribute critical medical supplies. Drawing on sensemaking theory, we show how bricolage—making do with at-hand resources—supports coordination and community structuring by reducing equivocality caused by distributed actors. Our findings describe how these ERGs grew rapidly by using bricolage to reduce action, goal, and resource equivocality, enabling coordinated and scalable crisis response efforts. We contribute to research on emergent organizing in crisis contexts by revealing how bricolage fosters coherence and rapid scaling in the absence of formal hierarchies. Our study also challenges the dominant assumption that bricolage is inherently limiting to organizational growth, showing that—in the context of self-organizing collectives—it offers a novel solution to the problem of coordinating action among distributed agents.