Unrecognised Crisis Management – Normalizing Everyday Life

Crisis management is often understood as the role of emergency managers or security managers at governments. This picture is reinforced in institutional structures, crisis plans and also in media, were pictures from a crisis often show emergency responders in action. What other professionals do during or after the crisis is less recognised. The aim of this study is to investigate the role and work of professionals within elderly care and schools during a crisis. Interviews was conducted with rescue personnel, school and elderly care personnel involved in handling a crisis. The result show that the exciting picture of the crisis manager is reinforced by involved actors. Even though parallelism between emergency personnel and schools and elderly care personnel was the dominant pattern during the crisis, it was also the case that the direct crisis management of the emergency personnel took precedence over the indirect crisis management of school and elderly care personnel, e.g., when the school and elderly care personnel left the incident scene to the rescue workers, but the school and elderly care personnel dominated when re-establishing everyday life for their dependant  – this kind of crisis management is today unrecognised.