How Emergent Response Groups Emerge: The Role of Bricolage in Crisis Responses

Our understanding of the formation and development of emergent response groups, informal communities assembled around a social goal, is still limited, despite their importance in times of environmental shocks. To address this gap, we conducted a qualitative study of 13 response groups created in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic. Our research reveals the centrality of bricolage as the key process in enabling collective work and provides valuable evidence on the nature of organizational bricolage. We generalize our findings to advance three major theoretical contributions: (1) a novel typology of manifestations of bricolage; (2) an articulation of the concept of "at hand" resources in the context of emergent organizations; and (3) a conceptualization of the dynamics enabling the emergence of response group, grounded in the interactions the proposed bricolage types.