Insights from local government managers: navigating crises through organizational capacities and perceptions

Barbera, C, Dom, BK ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0889-2571, du Boys, C, Korać, S, Saliterer, I and Steccolini, I, 2025. Insights from local government managers: navigating crises through organizational capacities and perceptions. Public Administration Review. ISSN 0033-3352

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Abstract

Recent years have shown that strategic responses to crises by local governments (LGs) depend on the type of crisis, the institutional environment, but also internal capacities and sensemaking processes. However, such relationships have not been tested widely yet. Based on a survey of managers (n=590) from cities with more than 15,000 inhabitants in France, Germany, Italy and the UK, this study explores the role played by specific organizational capacities (critical thinking, bricolage, financial capacities) and crisis perceptions (valence – i.e., threat vs opportunity; and controllability) in shaping adaptive or regressive response strategies. Results show that these capacities are associated with how LGs’ managers perceive crises and the type of responses adopted. Higher financial capacity, bricolage and critical thinking are associated with stronger sense of organizational controllability, but they have different relationships with threat and opportunity perceptions. The study confirms the importance of distinguishing valence (threat, opportunity) from controllability perceptions.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Public Administration Review
Creators:	Barbera, C., Dom, B.K., du Boys, C., Korać, S., Saliterer, I. and Steccolini, I.
Publisher:	Wiley
Date:	27 April 2025
ISSN:	0033-3352
Identifiers:	Number Type 1916511 Other 10.1111/puar.13859 DOI
Rights:	© 2024 The Author(s). Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Business School
Record created by:	Melissa Cornwell
Date Added:	02 Aug 2024 14:08
Last Modified:	26 Feb 2026 16:54
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/51887

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