ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the organizational complexity and dynamics in cases of crisis and emergency operations with a particular view towards how strategies and leadership emerge in situations that are out of the ordinary. The book deals with a broad field of organizational process research, and in particular. It also deals with interactions, dynamics, unpredictability, self-organizing structuring of order, and sudden structural breakdown. The book explores dynamical phenomena of organization and leadership from a complexity theoretical understanding of organizations. Acts of leadership and/or organization can be performed among people through the influence of themes of communication. It proposes that organizations responding to crisis and emergencies consist of a number of conflicting organizational practices that are differentiated by the practitioners' understanding of communication, power, identity, and ethics.
