Locally counteracting international crises: narratives of municipal agency

The notion of crisis and crises response plays an important role in both political and organizational communication. This paper takes a discourse approach to crisis, investigating how international crisis are made sense of by municipal political actors. The paper addresses the issue of crises at the intersection between the local and international as well as at the intersection between the political and the organizational. More specifically, the paper investigates how local politicians conceptualize and represent the local impact of international crises, including accounts of the ways in which the actors responded to and counteracted these crises. Understandings of local political agency vis-à-vis international crises are thus explored.
Empirically, the study is based on focus group interviews with politicians from a Danish municipality, who were asked to identify and elaborate on international crises with a local impact. In the interviews, agency was articulated not a least via the interactional co-telling of stories about local political actions taken to counteract the crises. The current paper will present a narrative analysis of some of these stories, i.e. viewing them as discursively ordering actions unfolding in time, distributing different roles to key actors and invoking political challenges and ideals. Moreover, the analysis will show how the stories unfold and are co-constructed interactionally as a common achievement by the participants. Last but not least, in an organizational perspective, the paper will discuss how the co-constructed narratives help constitute organizational identities of local political bodies.