ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes and integrates findings across the five empirical chapters. It highlights how the emergency management establishment, in curating cultural accounts, helped legitimize the risk governance framework and other ideas as timely or timeliness according to Chinese sensitivities, thus contributing to building and governmentalizing the organizational field. How the field managed its consolidation went beyond discursive strategies. The outcome also drew upon the material role of institutional evangelists among the establishment. Without them occupying niche positions in the existing institutional environment that predated the 2003 SARS crisis, the field could not have been created so quickly and seeded with so many new organizations (e.g., the EMO-SC, university programs, national research and training centers). These new bodies “circulated” the evangelists and allowed curatorial, as well as boundary work (building and blurring) to advocate for and entrench the ideas in the field. I conclude with limitations in my theory building from this research project, highlighting suggestions for future research, including studying the creation of the new Ministry of Emergency Management in 2018 and its impact in the organizational field.
