Crowd Sensegiving and the Pearl Jam Concert Accident

Crowd Sensegiving and the Pearl Jam Concert Accident

Morten Thanning Vendelø* Copenhagen Business School Department of Organization Kilen 4.70, Kilevej 14A, 4th floor DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark Tel.: (+45) 38 15 29 90 e-mail: [email protected]

Claus Rerup University of Western Ontario Richard Ivey School of Business 1151 Richmond Street N London, Ontario N6A 3K7, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract Sensegiving has been studied within the boundaries of a single organization with managers as sensegivers, and employees as sensereceivers. Speed as it relates to sensegiving has not been explored. Here, we focus on how Roskilde rock music Festival gives fast sense to festival crowds during concerts. This focus allows us to not only explore the role of speed in sensegiving but also how it occurs across the boundary of an organization. We use semistructured interviews, archival data, direct observations, and field notes to study the development of the sensegiving capacity of the festival’s safety organization after the Pearl Jam concert accident in 2000, where nine people died. Our analysis reveals how sensegiving as a boundary-crossing process that commence long before the festival starts enables fast sensegiving to crowds during concerts. These findings have important implications for organization theory as they reframe the link between sensegiving and sensemaking processes in organizations.

Key words: Crowd safety, fast sensegiving, materiality, sensemaking, sustained attention

1

INTRODUCTION In the minutes immediately after a concert with the rock band Pearl Jam had been stopped at Orange Stage at Roskilde Festival in 2000, the Orange Stage Organization (OSO) found it difficult to make significant portions of the crowd understand that an accident had happened. In particular, OSO did not clearly communicate that the music would not start again, and that the crowd needed to quickly step back and give space for the crowd safety guards so they could help the people who were injured in front of Orange Stage. As a result of the confusion it took between 5 and 10 minutes before the crowd safety guards could get to the victims, and this delay most likely reduced the possibility of saving some of the victims. Rather than acting upon messages given from the stage by the master of ceremonies, Pearl Jam’s tour manager and several police officers, some people in the crowd started singing Pearl Jam songs, such as “Alive”, to bring the band back on the stage. Others threatened to beat up crowd safety guards if the music did not start gain (Zealand Public Prosecutor, 2002). In essence, the OSO was unable to influence the meaning construction of the crowd in a timely and effective manner. In the aftermath of the accident this inability to influence the meaning construction of the crowd caused the OSO to reconsider how it could communicate better with the crowd. In particular, the OSO wanted to be able to more effectively influence fast meaning construction in the crowd by being faster at spotting and interpreting problems. Here, we analyze how the OSO was reorganized to enable fast sensegiving to the crowd in emergency situations, and achieve crowd safety during concerts. Sensegiving is particular demanding in crowd emergency situations because there is a need for preventing people from attempting to resume the interrupted activity (Weick et al., 2005). Also, we discuss how specific organizational materialities, such as a mojo barrier-system and TV-screens, contribute to crowd sensegiving by enabling multiple forms of interaction between the OSO and the crowd. The paper is organized as follows. First, we review the sensegiving literature and find that it focuses on manager to employee sensegiving inside organizations. Second, we present our research methodology. Third, we present our findings and show how fast sensegiving and crowd safety at Roskilde Festival has been accomplished after the Pearl Jam concert accident in 2000. Finally, we conclude on the analysis and clarify the distinctive differences between crowd sensegiving and sensegiving occurring within the boundaries of a single organization.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 2

Gioia and Chittipeddi define sensegiving as “…the process of attempting to influence the sensemaking and meaning construction of others toward a preferred redefinition of organizational reality” (1991: 442). Hence, they conceptualized the process of sensegiving as a contradistinction to the process of sensemaking (Corvellec & Risberg, 2007). Later Weick et al. (2005: 416) defined sensegiving as “a sensemaking variant undertaken to create meanings for a target audience”. In recent years sensegiving has attracted attention from scholars in management and organizations (Maitlis & Lawrence, 2007). So far, sensegiving has predominantly been studied within the boundaries of a single organization by focusing on top-down sensegiving where the management is the sensegiver, and the broader membership of the organization is the ‘sensereceivers’ (Bartunek et al., 1999; Pratt, 2000; Fiss & Zajac, 2006; Maitlis & Lawrence, 2007; Smith et al., 2010; Snell, 2002). Recently, Clark et al., (2010) studied how sensegiving unfolds between two organizations during a merger. Despite broadening the focus of the process to suggest that it also occur outside the boundary of the organization they maintained a top-down focus: “Sensegiving refers to processes that top managers use to influence others’ constructions of meaning in attempting to create some preferred (re)definition of organizational reality” (ibid: 401. Italics added). Understanding how sensegiving occurs more broadly is important because only a few scholars have looked at how sensegiving can take place “at the organizational interface” (Rouleau, 2005: 1413), where middle managers act as daily interpreters and sellers of strategic change to people outside the boundary of the organization. Sensegiving is commonly dealt with in relation to strategic planning (Whetten, 1984), strategic change (Bartunek et al., 1999; Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991; Gioia & Thomas, 1996; Rouleau, 2005; Rouleau & Balogun, 2011), organizational change (Bean & Hamilton, 2006; Snell, 2002; Smith, 2009), organizational merger (Clark et al., 2010), and innovation and entrepreneurship (Hill & Levenhagen, 1995). Such processes of organizational transformation breed ambiguity, and therefore, they call for both sensemaking and sensegiving Also, it is plausible that their success depends on the ability of top managers to initiate and manage cognitive shifts among the broader membership of the organization, and thereby, reorient their current modes of thinking and acting. Recently, Hope (2010) analyzed how middle manager sensegiving materialize through political tactics, with “the objective of influencing decision makers’ meaning construction” (ibid: 212). Further, Jordan (2010: 399) showed how sensegiving is important in teaching novices to engage in heedful team interrelating. 3

Across these literatures, sensegiving occurs in situations with a well-defined sender and receiver. For example, Clark et al.s’ (2010) study of sensegiving during a merger the topmanagement team of each organization is targeting specific stakeholders. Consequently, sensegiving is typically seen as “an intentional effort to persuade others, suggesting that the sender has an intended meaning for a target audience” (Smerek, 2011: 82). Sensemaking has, on an almost equal base, been explored in relation to both crisis and change (Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010). In contrast, and as shown above, studies of sensegiving mainly focus on sensegiving during change, see for example Maitlis & Lawrence (2007), as apart from Weick (1993) sensegiving in crisis has not been addressed. Hence, there is reason to take a closer look at how sensegiving unfolds under these circumstances, and thereby, investigate if and how sensegiving in crisis differ from the sensegiving as it is defined by Gioia & Chittipeddi (1991) and Weick et al. (2005). For example, the speed of sensegiving is likely to be of important in crisis situation. Also, in case of the Pearl jam concert accident, the common description of sensegiving as a top-down process with fairly well-specified receivers of sensegiving is not appropriate as the receiver is a crowd. As such the receiver is a rather diffuse entity, that might also be the case in other studies of studies of sensegiving, but it is an aspect of sensegiving that has yet to be addressed. In case of the Pearl jam concert accident it seems more appropriate to talk about crowd sensegiving, in order to capture the diffuse nature of the sense receiver. When combining the importance of the speed of sensegiving with the diffuse character of the sense receiver it seems obvious that sensegiving in crisis needs to be examined in more detail.. Crowd sensegiving is a variation of sensegiving outside the boundaries of an organization, and it appears in three forms. One relates to safety, and the example of rock concerts is presented in this paper, but other contexts could be large sport events, such as football matches. In this form of crowd sensegiving, the objective of the sense given to a crowd is to influence it to behave in such a way that it maximizes the safety of the crowd. A second form is crowd sensegiving in religious movements (Bainbridge, 1997). Here the purpose of the sensegiving is to influence the believing of the crowd, and an example is when the pope conducts his messes for the masses at Saint Peter’s Square in Rome. Finally, a third form is crowd sensegiving in social movements where the focus is mobilization of collective action, in order to achieve some kind of societal change (McAdam & Scott, 2005). Examples are the gay liberation movement in San Francisco, in the late 1960s/early 1970s (Armstrong, 2005), or the more recent Tea Party movement. Whether crowd sensegiving relates to safety, 4

believing or mobilization of collective action, knowledge about crowd sensegiving for safety will contribute valuable insights about the two other forms of crowd sensegiving. When aiming at an analysis of how the OSO reorganized to enable fast sensegiving to a crowd in emergency situations, we direct the attention to prospective sensegiving. It finds its parallel in prospective sensemaking (Gioia, 1986), which refers to individuals and groups struggle to cope with ambiguous situations by engaging in forward-looking thinking, in order to “structure the future by imagining some desirable state” (Gioia & Mehra, 1996: 1229). Prospective sensemaking has been studied in the context of strategic change (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991), entrepreneurship (Hill & Levenhagen, 1995) and innovation (Ravasi & Turati, 2005), in all case with the focus on the construction of new interpretations of organizational environments and how to relate to them. Refinement of such interpretations results from slow-paced cycles of sensemaking and sensegiving, with group members attempting to influence other actors’ understanding of the environment and how to address it. Hence, in the context of prospective sensegiving to crowds, the challenge becomes to understand how fast-paced sensegiving to diffuse receivers can be achieved. The role of materiality and physical environments in relation to sensegiving and sensemaking is a final concern. As Stigliani & Ravasi (2011) note, there is an increasing interest in the social sciences for the material mediation of conversational practices. Organizational research has demonstrated how people in different contexts draw on different artifacts “to exchange, combine and construct new understandings (ibid: 3). Yet, “a comprehensive theoretical account of how material artifacts - and the practices through which they are produced and attached to-influence collective sensemaking (as well as sensegiving) is still missing” (ibid: 4). Studies of physical environments and the use of artifacts in organizations, for example, Bechky (2003) and Elsbach & Pratt (2007), predominantly take on an inside-the-organization view. Jensen & Kjærgaard (2010) analyse the use of visual artifacts, in the form of cognitive maps, in sensemaking and sensegiving during information systems implementation, and Stigliani & Ravasi (2011) describe how artifacts are used to mediate processes of elaboration, articulation and noticing. By focusing on the role of materiality inside organizations these studies do not differentiate themselves from the general picture provided in more recent reviews of the relationship between materiality and organizations. For example, Leonardi & Barley (2010) provide a summary of the perspectives on the social construction of technology implementation (ibid: 8-9), foremost in the form of adoption and use of information technology in organizations, and Orlikowski & Scott (2008) show that of the small percentage of articles in four leading management journals, which 5

directly addressed the role and influence of technology in organizations, the internal view dominates. Also, they conclude that technologies remain largely understudied in organizational research, although there is substantial evidence of technology’s central role in organizational affairs (ibid: 466). Rather than being interested in the role of materiality inside organizations, we aim at understanding how materiality that transcends organizational boundaries, establish proximity between, or physical co-location of, organization and crowd, and thereby, intervene in their sensegiving and sensemaking. In that way we seek to expand the line of research initiated by Whiteman & Cooper (2011). Okhuysen & Bechky (2009) argue that proximity leads to familiarity, which in turn has cognitive, emotional and behavioral consequences for how individuals perceive one another. When relating materiality to sensegiving and sensemaking it is important to understand that physical environments serve aesthetic, instrumental and symbolic functions (Elsbach & Pratt, 2007: 181).

METHODOLOGY Given the lack of research on sensegiving outside the boundary of the organization, we used an exploratory, inductive method to build new theory (Pratt, 2009). We conducted a longitudinal single case-study of the Orange Stage crowd safety organization at Roskilde Festival (Yin, 2009). Our data collection stretched over 10 years and focused on what happened before, during and after the Pearl Jam concert accident.

Research context During rock concerts the crowd faces the band, which plays from an elevated scene. The stage is separated from the audience by a fence behind which crowd safety guards stand facing the crowd. Crowd safety guards perform various tasks such as helping people in the audience over the fence if they are being crushed in the mosh-pit – the area at the front of the stage where people dance and express themselves in various ways –, and guiding the audience back into the area behind the fence. The guards are positioned along the fence and each guard attends to a particular section of the fence. The fence area is characterized by constant activity, which makes it difficult for a guard to; a) look deep into the crowd and observe what is going on, and b) keep track of what is going on in other sections of the crowd. The intensity of the task as well as the noise from the music makes coordination across guards challenging. Roskilde Festival. The first Roskilde Festival (1971) was organized by two local high school students. The following year Roskilde city council asked the local Roskilde Charity 6

Foundation, an organization engaged in kindergartens, youth clubs, and city fairs since the 1930s, to arrange an annual rock festival at the cattle showground in the city of Roskilde which is located 25 miles west of Copenhagen, Denmark. In 1971 the festival had 10,000 visitors on both days of the festival. The following year, the festival was expanded to three days, and in 1990 to four days. The festival attracts roughly 80,000 guests, 5000 media people, and 3000 artists of which 50,000 attend concerts with popular artists and bands such as Bruce Springsteen, Coldplay, Metallica, Neil Young, Oasis, Pearl Jam, Pet Shop Boys, Prince, Radiohead and Robbie Williams. In 2000, twelve full-time employees were in charge of managing and planning the Festival, and approximately 175 volunteers worked within 17 functional areas such as Parking and Stage Construction. To realize the entire festival in 2000, more than 15,000 people volunteered to work in food stalls, build stages, and guard the camp grounds where the crowd stays during the festival. In 2000, 180 bands performed on four stages each of which had its own organization that was enacted for the duration of the festival. Pearl Jam was playing on Orange Stage, which is the largest and most prestigious stage.

Data collection The first author collected all data. We formally obtained access to Roskilde Festival as a research site in May 2008 based on a proposal that focused on understanding crowd behaviors and resilient organizing. Prior to gaining access, we collected archival data about the accident including publicly available recordings of statements, interviews and other realtime data. Our data collection started in August 2000 and ended in November 2011. Our data collection was focused on the history of the festival from 1971 to 2010. Prolonged engagement with the data (Miles and Huberman, 1994) and the use of four data collection mechanisms (semi-structured interviews, archival data, direct observations, and fieldnotes) helped us to capture how; a) slow realization across the crowd about the unfolding of the accident caused a delay in giving space for the crowd safety personnel to rescue victims, and b) the OSO reworked the crowd safety set-up in order to achieve crowd sensegiving during concerts. Semi-structured interviews. We conducted a total of eleven semi-structured interviews with eleven informants. Eight of the informants worked on Orange Stage on the night of the accident, including one senior manager working back-stage, one manager working onstage, one stage coordinator, and five crowd safety guard. We also interviewed the current senior manager in charge of festival safety and a senior stage coordinator. The 7

interviews lasted from 90 to 120 minutes. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and returned to the informants for validation. The first author conducted all interviews in person in order to build trusting relationships with the informants and harvest meaningful tales from the field, which was important due to the sensitive nature of the research (Dundon and Ryan, 2010). In the initial interview protocol, we asked questions to identify (1) the schema that guided operations around Orange Stage and how it developed over time and (2) patterns of action, attention and sensemaking within the OSO before, during and after the Pearl Jam concert. This data helped us to validate and clarify themes identified in other data-sources, and to identify previously unidentified critical events and work practices in OSO that were un-reported in other data sources. Conducting real-time semi-structured interviews with key informants about the accident was difficult, as it was not until February 2010 that the last family of the victims dropped the Supreme Court case against the organizers of the Festival. Thus, nine interviews were conducted after February 2010 when informants were able to speak more freely. Archival data. We collected a total of 12,846 documents representing 9,458 pages of data. We organized the documents into six specific categories and three time periods not only to file, retrieve and analyze the data to understand what happened before, during and after the Pearl Jam concert but also to better triangulate the data and generate stronger theory: (1) accident investigations, (2) festival newspapers, (3) newspaper articles, (4) books, (5) photographs, and (6) electronic documentaries. (1) Accident investigations. Based on interviews with 977 individuals, Roskilde Police issued its written investigation (23 pages) on December 15, 2000. The Police concluded that crowd behaviors were the main cause of the accident, and that Pearl Jam and the festival management had no culpability. The investigation was criticized because the Police unit investigating the accident had also issued the permits to conduct the festival and approved the safety. In order to address these concerns, the Danish Ministry of Justice ordered the Zealand Public Prosecutor to conduct an independent investigation which was published on June 11, 2002 (173 pages + 111 pages of appendices). It provided a much more elaborate account of the accident. Both reports helped us to build a nuanced account of how members of OSO attended to and made sense of cues before the music was stopped. Whenever possible, independent confirmation of statements in the reports was sought through alternative data sources such as books, newspaper articles and interviews. (2) Festival newspapers. We collected 126 issues of the festival newspaper. These data helped us to generate an understanding of the evolution of the festival. For example, in the 8

early 1990s reports appear about how safety guards start to pull people over the fence at Orange Stage due to an increase in the crowd behaviors (e.g., crowd-surfing and moshing). These data helped us to establish a detailed understanding of how intensified crowd behaviors infront of Orange Stage gradually solidified into a taken-for-granted schema among crowd safety guards for attending to, making sense of, and responding to cues in the crowd. (3) Newspaper articles. The media covered Roskilde Festival and the Pearl Jam concert accident extensively. We collected articles published in the seven most widely circulated daily Danish newspapers. These newspapers are electronically indexed and archived in the database Infomedia, which allowed for the collection of all articles containing the search string “Roskilde Festival.” For the month after the accident we identified 441 articles. 66% of the articles were published in the week immediately after the accident. We used the accounts in these articles provided by safety guards on duty during the concert to (1) verify the information summarized in the two accident investigations and (2) understand how the Orange Stage interpretive schema influenced the processes of attending to, making sense of, and responding to cues. (4) Books. Roskilde Festival is a cultural event that has been documented by both academics and lay-people. We read broadly to develop an understanding of the history of rock music and the development of the Orange Stage interpretive schema, including the literatures on the history of popular music (Hamm, 1995; Negus, 1996), rock music and youth culture (Frith, 1978; Laughey, 2006) and crowd management (Smith and Dickie, 1993; Hargreaves and North, 1997; Perkins, 2004; Kemp and Hill, 2004; Kemp et al., 2007). (5) Photographs. Rockphoto (official service partner of Roskilde Festival) provided access to their database which contained a total of 6230 pictures taken at the festival (19972010). From this sample, we carefully studied 279 pictures that captured crowd behaviors and overviews of the Orange Stage area, including changes made to the area after 2000. We also carefully studied 294 pictures from the festival in 2000 including pictures of crowd behaviors during an Iron Maiden concert the night before the accident. Other photos established a general sense of festival behaviors over the years. Further, we compared photos of particular concerts which our informants described as “intense” with written statements about the same concert published by a third party in other data sources to capture intense crowd behaviors (Ray & Smith, 2011).

9

(6) Electronic documentaries. Roskilde Festival has been captured in a number of documentaries. We obtained nine electronic documentaries to develop accounts of the cognition and action of the crowd and the safety guards. In a 45 minute “real-time” radio montage based on an un-official recording of the Pearl Jam concert three crowd safety guards, who were on duty during the concert, and seven members of the audience, some of which barely escaped alive, re-enact the concert until it was stopped. The montage creates a feeling in the listener of ‘being there’, a feeling of the pressure and excitement of the 50,000 bodies in the crowd, and the beat and pull of the stage and the push to come closer to the stars. All nine documentaries contained a large number of sequences revealing an array of taken-forgranted assumptions and behaviors on both sides of the fence. We compared these sequences with accounts obtained from other data sources to better understand command structures, coordination practices and expectations around Orange Stage before, during and after the accident. Direct observations. Following Sutton’s (1991) study of bill collector, and Elliot and Smith’s (2006) observations of safety management practice at soccer events, the first author volunteered to work as a crowd safety guard at Orange Stage during the Festivals in 2008 and 2009. He took part in all activities required to become a certified crowd safety guard. In 2008 and 2010 he attended a two-day (four + two hours) mandatory course for volunteers joining the safety crew. Lectures, exercises and written material covered such topics as stress management, decision making under pressure, and crowd psychology. These data generated a rich understanding of crowd behaviors and the Roskilde Festival safety organization. The author worked for five days and a total 43 hours as a crowd safety guard during fifteen concerts at Orange Stage. He was assigned to a team consisting of 14 crowd safety guards, including the team leader. His direct experience helped us to understand how safety guards interact with the crowd before and during concerts, and how the crowd receives safety instructions from the crowd safety personnel. This knowledge was important in strengthening our ability to make reliable interpretations of the archival data. Direct observations generated trusting relationships with a broad sample of ‘insiders’ which helped the author to engage in informal conversations to validate accounts about what happened on the night of the accident. Fieldnotes. During the fieldwork the first author also took comprehensive field notes (Emerson et al., 1995) as time and context permitted by using a digital recorder to quickly capture observations and impressions. He made a total of 42 recordings which lasted 16 hours 10

and 20 minutes. All field notes and recordings where transcribed verbatim and organized into four categories: (1) briefings and de-briefings by team leaders and supervisors before and after concerts, (2) recordings of conversations between guards during concerts, (3) presentations by speakers at safety seminars, and (4) real-time reflections by the second author. These recordings helped us to validate and cross-check the archival data because it gave us not only a ‘hands-on’ understanding of the intensity of this type of work but also a possibility to revisit the author’s experience in the field. Recordings from the Slipknot concert in 2009 were especially important because it was classified by the safety organization as the wildest concert on Orange Stage after the accident. It was used as a reference point by managers in the safety organization to describe high intensity safety work to crowd safety guards which helped us to capture in vivid details what it means to work and remain calm as a guard “in an inferno of jumping bodies, extreme noise, alcohol and wild dancing” (Field notes). These recording also helped us to understand how an “inferno” of cues influences individual and collective processes of sensemaking. The live recordings of briefings were also important because here guards received instructions about “cues to keep an eye on and expectations about guard behaviors and the difficulty of the safety work in relation to the specific concert” (Field notes).

Data Analysis and Coding We adopted the analytical approach used by Gioia and co-authors (Corley and Gioia, 2004; Gioia at al., 2010), and used constant comparative techniques (Strauss and Corbin, 2008; Suddaby, 2006) where qualitative data are gathered and analyzed in a systematic and iterative manner to investigate our two main research questions. In particular, we used a two part “insider-outsider” interpretive research approach to analyze the data (Bartunek et al., 1996; Gioia et al., 2010). First, the ‘inside’ perspective of how the safety guards experienced the Pearl Jam concert (Van Maanen, 2011) was established. Second, we established the ‘outside’ perspective of the researchers by engaging in a higher-level theoretical analysis where we linked the inside perspective with the existing literature (Corley and Gioia, 2004). In performing this analysis, the second author - who is trained and works in North America became a “devil’s advocate” (Nemeth et al., 2001) who asked critical questions and introduced alternative explanations of the data to improve the quality of the theorizing (Golden-Biddle and Locke, 2007). As an “outsider” to the research site, he identified patterns in the data that the first author (e.g., the insider) either supported or refuted by drawing on his 11

rich understanding of the data. Through an iterative analysis “delay” and “sensegiving” emerged as “transparently observable” (Eisenhardt, 1989: 537) phenomena in the data, which we used to craft an emergent theory of crowd sensegiving around (Pratt, 2009). More specifically, the analytical process approach (Langley, 1999) consisted of four phases. First, development of a timeline to chronicle “who did what, and when” (Maguire and Hardy, 2009: 153) in the OSO after the concert had been stopped. Based on the time-line developed by the police and the public prosecutor, and which they established by using videofootage and various recording of the concert to determine the exact start and finish of each of the messages given from the stage after the Pearl Jam concert stopped (see table 1). Knowing when a particular message was delivered or a particular event took place was important because it helped us to compare statements from various data-sources. For example, if a safety guard experienced a particular crowd behavior before the police officers’ arrived, but the same crowd behavior was observed by another safety guard after the police officers’ arrived, then we could pin-point with great accuracy on the time-line when particular individuals located across the chain noticed particular crowd behaviors and initiated particular actions.

INSERT TABLE 1 AND FIGURE 1 AROUND HERE

Second, we developed a data-structure (see Figure 2 below) by first identifying components of raw data across data sources, which ranged from a single line to entire paragraphs that captured ideas and themes such as “message ambiguity” and “lack of understanding” in the language of the people in the crowd. We organized these first order codes into data-tables that supported a single theme or topic across data sources – a technique termed in-vivo coding (Strauss and Corbin, 2008). We identified these first order codes by using the search function in Word as well as manually coding the data. In particular, we wrote keywords such as “confusing messages” and “aggressive behavior” were written in the margin of interview transcripts and correlated these keywords with similar keywords identified in other documents. We used four basic questions to sort through the raw-data and develop first-order categories: (1) Did concerts in the past shape the way people in the crowd was thinking and acting after the Pearl Jam Concert stopped? (2) How did members of OSO coordinate their sensegiving to the crowd? (3) Why did it take time to make the crowd step back? (4) After the accident, how did the festival safety organization change? 12

INSERT FIGURE 2 AROUND HERE

Third, we analyzed the data by looking for patterns and overlap among first-order codes to assemble these into higher-order themes – a technique termed axial coding (Strauss and Corbin, 2008). This analysis is conducted to identify themes at a higher level of abstraction that potentially can be used as anchor points for developing a grounded theory (Gephart, 2004; Gioia et al., 2010). In order to isolate such themes, we merged, abandoned and revised the first-order categories until we arrived at six second-order themes. Fourth, in an attempt to further condense the data into meaningful patterns and relationships (Pratt, 2009), we amassed the six second-order categories into three aggregate dimensions that captured the overarching concepts relevant for understanding crowd sensegiving. The four stages in our analysis unfolded in an iterative process which we continued until further data collection failed to reveal new relationships or alternative explanations at which point we were convinced that we had developed a solid and plausible data-structure (Corley and Gioia, 2004). In line with Gioia et al (2010), we did not classify any of our data as a ‘finding’ until a category and its relationship to other categories had been substantiated across multiple data sources. The quotes we use in our findings narrative to convey the perspective of the ‘insiders’ who experienced the accident, as well as the reworking of the crowd safety set-up, therefore, represent only substantiated findings.

THE PEARL JAM CONCENT ACCIDENT CASE After the OSO had detected the accident and the concert with Pearl Jam had been stopped at 11:24 pm on Friday June 30. 2000, it was difficult to influence the meaning making of the crowd. A Front Area Guard explained “… that many in the crowd expressed that they wanted the concert to start again ... (and) that some in the crowd threatened to beat him up” (Zealand Public Prosecutor, 2002: 63). Many had used much energy to sustain a spot close to the front-arch fence and the band. They were reluctant to step back so the crowd safety guards could help the injured. For example, shortly after the concert had been stopped, the lead singer and the tour manager asked the crowd to take two or three steps back because some people close to the stage had been injured. However, it was not until this message had been repeated three times that the crowd began to move back, and gave space for the front area guards to help the injured (Roskilde Police, 2000). The lead singer said: 13

“Thanks a lot, I need to tell you something, it has nothing to do with music, it has something to do with personal safety, you guys are amazing, but there seems to be a problem up front here, and I’m gonna ask you to stop for five minutes, all right, so we will not have any music for five minutes, and I want you to pretend that I’m your best friend, and do me a favor OK? Because you have some other best friends up front here, that are hurting OK? So if you take three steps back, and I’ll ask you to count to three OK? … So let’s try it together OK? Give me an answer: Yes, if you want to help me. (The crowd shouts YES) All right, … I will count to three, and I want you to take two steps back OK? One, two, three” (Schwartz & Hinman, 2000: 44:41-45:48). Unfortunately, this message did not help the crowd to understand the seriousness of the situation. Many did not step back.

“It is conceivable that the crowds tardiness in stepping back, in spite of the lead singers tenacious attempts to make the crowd do so, occurred because the crowd did not immediately and to the full extent understand the seriousness of the situation, because the messages given to the crowd from the stage were communicated in an unprofessional way” (Zealand Public Prosecutor, 2002: 28).

The crowd reacted differently to the pause in the music announced by the lead singer. Some were aggressive. Some were not aware of what was happening. Some believed the pause was part of a happening. For example, when the first police officers arrived in the front arch at 11:34 pm they experienced that the crowd were dissatisfied, and were throwing plastic cups onto the stage. “[The police officers] considered searching the area in front of the stage for injured people, but because of the crowd’s aggressive behavior, they did not find it safe to do so” (Zealand Public Prosecutor, 2002: 133). Furthermore, many in the crowd believed that the concert would resume. To keep the party going some of them started to sing popular Pearl Jam songs. “In the throng close to the stage many from the crowd could not see and comprehend what was happening. Many experienced that the front area guards were unnecessary aggressive, because they shouted in order to get people out of their way, and thus, a grotesque scenery suddenly took place. A larger group in the crowd continuously sang the Pearl Jam tune ‘Alive’, in order to get the band to continue the concert. 24 years old Michael Sebastian Christensen: ‘Spontaneously, we, two or three times, started singing ‘I’m still alive’, and it was really cool, because people joined in. I know it sounds terrible in hindsight, but we had 14

no idea about what had happened, and that people had died. We simply did not understand why we should pull back. We just wanted to listen to Pearl Jam.” (Berlingske Tidende, 2000: 1). Other festival guests had observed the hole in the crowd, but thought that it was the result of some kind of sit-down happening. A police officer noted: “It seemed like they did not understand, that they were witnessing a big tragedy” (Zealand Public Prosecutor, 2002: 139). One of the police officers approached the Stage Manager and asked him several times to ask the crowd to step back. The Stage Manager did not think, however, that it was necessary to do so. He could see space behind the front rows of the crowd. Also, he did not want to cause unnecessary panic in the crowd. The Stage Manager also asked the Master of Ceremonies to not address the crowd until they knew what should happen next. The Master of Ceremonies did not comply, and “was subsequently criticized by the Stage Manager, because he had not cleared it with him” (Zealand Public Prosecutor, 2002: 59). When the Master of Ceremonies approached the crowd for the second time he said: “Unfortunately, the Pearl Jam concert is over. It really looks bad, and therefore, Pearl Jam has decided not to continue playing” (Ritzau, 2000). Around 00:17 the Commanding Police Officer demanded to talk with a representative of the festival management. He wanted the ‘pause music’ to be turned off. It was impossible to search the area in front of the stage before the crowd had left the area, and as long as the canned pause music was playing, the crowd would not leave. They believed it signaled that the concert would start again. Stopping the pause music was not possible immediately. It was only the Festival Manager who could order it to be stopped, and he was in a meeting. Yet, the music was eventually stopped around 00:25. Thereafter, 8-10 police officers searched the area for more victims. They did not find any, and communicated this to the Commanding Police Officer. Around 01:00 the Festival Manager went on stage and explained that approximately 20 persons had been injured because the pressure in the crowd had been too high, and that some were dead. He also asked for one minute of silence in respect of the dead, and concluded with the words “Sleep peacefully or take a silence moment. Be good to each other and take care” (Albrecht et al., 2000: 2).

ORGANIZING FOR CROWD SENSEGIVING After the accident, the festival began to rework its crowd safety set up. Less than a month after the accident, the Festival Manager established a list consisting of 100 suggestions 15

for improving crowd safety. In particular, the list focused on the fact that (a) the crowd did not understand what was happening, (b) parts of the crowd were aggressive, (c) the crowd safety personnel faced difficulties in communicating with the crowd, and (d) lack of clarity about division of responsibilities on the stage.

Priming of Festival Guests The crowd’s receptiveness to messages given from the stage had appeared as a central problem for OSO when it attempted to rescue victims after the concert had been stopped. Consequently, increasing the crowd’s receptiveness to communication about safety issues became an important criterion in the redesign of the festival. In order to cultivate crowd receptiveness to messages from the stage, safety priming of the festival guests now begins long before the festival opens, and the guests arrive at the festival site. The Roskilde Festival web-site features a set of sub-site about safety. These sites cover topics such as safety at the stages, good advice when attending a concert, and camping safety. The sites give a brief introduction to the safety organization and explain that the festival management has developed safety measures to ensure that the guests will have a good festival experience, and that without safety there can be no festival. The Roskilde Festival program, which festival guests either download before or receive when they arrive to the festival, also gives information about safety. In particular, it presents the festival safety approach and pre-primes the guests before they actually attend the concerts (see A, B and C in Table 2). The priming of festival guests continues at the festival. The rules for crowd behavior are continuously presented to the guests when they attend concerts. For example, the two big screens next to the Orange Stage presents ‘rolling’ messages such as “Attention! No crowd surfing please”, “Do not push – Do not run towards the stage”, “Attention! No crowd surfing please”, and “For questions or comfort: Contact the Crowd Safety Personnel” for at least an hour before every concert begins. Also, festival guest are encouraged to contact crowd safety personnel with their questions and concerns (see D and E in Table 2).

A New Relationship with the Crowd Immediately after the Pearl Jam concert had been stopped, front area guards and police officers experienced hostile and aggressive behaviors, and a non-collaborative attitude from parts of the crowd. It was as if parts of the crowd enacted a ‘them versus us relationship’, or a “they-relation” (Schütz, 1964; 1967) with the crowd safety personnel. Rather than listening to and collaborating with the crowd safety personnel, these parts of the 16

crowd wanted to beat up front area guards and/or threw items at both them and the police. As noted by the new Safety Coordinator, “After the accident last year we discovered that communication with the crowd was a problem” (Danholm, 2001: 5). In order to solve this problem, the festival began to define crowd safety as a collective issue that could only be achieved through collaborative between the crowd and the crowd safety personnel. As a result, the festival began to focus on nurturing a different type of relationship which can best be described as a ‘we-relation’. It centers on building an inter-subjective understanding between the two parties based on common experiences and respect (see F, G and H in Table 2). Engaging in dialogue with members of the crowd became a key component in the safety work. The dialogue can best be perceived as a way of changing the relationship from ‘they relations’, where the two parties are more or less anonymous to each other, and thus, present themselves to each other as ideal types, for example, crowd surfer or crowd safety guard, to what we describe as ‘we-relations’, in which the parties develop and share a set of common experiences, and thus, have a more advanced picture of one another. For crowd safety personnel the we-attitude is promoted during obligatory courses for volunteers working in the safety organization. During the course the crowd safety personnel is “encouraged to chat with the crowd before the concert begins” (Danholm, 2001:5).

A New Physical Set-Up In the hours after the accident leading members of the festival management and the OSO started to perceive the physical set-up in the area in front of Orange Stage, with the front arch and the wave-breakers, as much less safe than before. Some even began to search for an immediate solution to keep the festival going. In particular, they considered renting fences used along the roads during bicycle road races, but could not get a hold of the owners of these fences. After the festival the festival management asked several safety experts in the UK and Holland to solicit ideas for a new crowd safety organization. Leading members of the OSO quickly settled on a multi-barrier system because they wanted to lessen the pressure from the crowd on the first barrier closest to the stage. The chosen barrier system was designed in collaboration with the Dutch firm Mojo Barriers. It was used for the first time in 2001 (see photo 2). The new barrier system allows the crowd safety personnel to operate in physical proximity to the crowd (see I, J, K and L in Table 2). 17

“[Four fenced] corridors [divide] the area in front of Orange Stage [into four ‘cages’]. [The corridors] are manned with orange dressed people, who can … step up [on the fences] and survey the crowd. When viewed from the side the width of the four cages is approximately eight meters, and thus, there will never be more than four meters between the guards dressed in orange and any person in the crowd. … The guards dressed in red [pit-supervisors]… are in constant radio contact with the four [spotters] on the stage … [and the security manager].” (Roskilde Festival Avis 2001 #3, June 29. – Article on page 2, titled: “Båsene virker”. The central reason for choosing a multi-barrier system was that the OSO wanted control over, how close people could stand in the crowd. They also wanted to ensure easy access the crowd to make it easy to rescue people by having access into the crowd from several sides. The new physical set-up allows the crowd safety guards to access people in the crowd from passages inside the multi-barrier system, where the maximum distance is four meters from a passage and to the person farthest away. Video surveillance of the crowd was also implemented to supplement the eyes of the crowd safety personnel. Five computer controlled cameras forward live pictures to three screens in the Orange Stage Security Office, enabling the Security Manager to ask for closeup pictures of situations in specific parts of the crowd.

Reorganization of the Crowd Safety Teams After 2000 crowd safety guards were reorganized in three ways. First, the size of the safety teams was downscaled from 24 to 14 guards including the team leader. Second, the number of teams was increased from four to 20. More guards were needed in the new mojobarrier system (see contrast between photo 1 and 2). An important consequence of these changes was that the guards were working closer to large parts of the crowd, and thus, more people in the crowd experienced contact with the crowd safety guards before and during concerts. Third, each team works together with two crowd safety supervisors who carry a radio for communication when on duty. The physical proximity between crowd safety guards and the crowd, as well as the we-relations between guards and crowd enables the OSO to sustain attention of the crowd, which is a pre-condition for fast sensegiving, should that be needed during a concert. Also, it allows people in the crowd to approach guards and ask for clarification about messages given from the stage, and guards to provide guidance to people in the crowd who have not understood messages given from the stage. The radios 18

carried by the Crowd Safety Supervisors also provide a ‘tool’ for both fast sensegiving and fast sensemaking. The radios enable fast sensemaking as the supervisor can quickly report crowd problems to the security manager, who can ask; a) other supervisors to look at the situation, and b) the video operators in the security office to zoom in on the situation, and eventually feed these pictures to the security manager’s TV monitor (see M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, and U in Table 2).

CONCLUSION Fast sensegiving requires fast sensemaking because without meaning there can be no sensegiving. In the case of crowd sensegiving there is a need for fast sensegiving cycles, or high pulsing between sensegiving and sensemaking. Otherwise it will be difficult to avoid delays like the one that appeared after the Pearl Jam concert had been stopped, and which most likely reduced the possibility of saving some of the victims. Put differently, in some contexts slow sensegiving cycles can be risky, and contribute to the death of people. Fast sensegiving cycles consist of alternations between fast sensemaking - attempts to understand – and fast sensegiving – attempts to influence. The narrative shows that fast sensegiving cycles can be achieved when organizational materialities (Elsbach & Pratt, 2007; Leonardi & Barley, 2010; Whiteman & Cooper, 2011) such as mojo fences, video and TV screens are put in place so they provide for creating multiple types of sense-in-action, quick communication and scrutinizing of observed safety issues (sensemaking). Nevertheless, to achieve crowd sensegiving, fast sensegiving cycles must be accompanied by crowd receptiveness and sustained crowd attention. Just like sensegivers operating within the boundaries of a single organization (Chittipeddi & Gioia, 1991; Maitlis & Lawrence 2007), the sensegivers who attempt to give sense to a crowd cannot assume that they will have the attention of the people whom they try to influence. Neither can they assume that the crowd is receptive to the meaning they attempt to give to them. To succeed, crowd sensegivers must engage in priming and relation building aimed at making the crowd receptive and attentive to new meanings. In this paper, we have tried to show that this task is difficult when sensegiving is directed at a crowd where no ‘we-relations’ have been cultivated. Future research could investigate in further detail how the process of crowd sensegiving is likely to become lengthier and more time-consuming than sensegiving processes occurring within single organizations where people might have a stronger sense of belonging. We need to understand much more about how sensereceivers can be primed to understand their own role and identity as sensereceivers and co-creators of safety. 19

REFERENCES Albrecht, J., Egelund, R., Søndergaard, B., & Jensen, E. (2000) Øjenvidner til tragedien (Eyewitnesses to the tragedy). Politiken, July 2., 1. Section: 2. Ambrose, J. 2001. The violent world of moshpit culture. Omnibus Press, London. Armstrong, E. 2005. From struggle to settlement: The crystallization of a field of lesbian/gay organizations in San Francisco. In: G. F. Davis, D. McAdam, W. R. Scott & M. N. Zald, M. N. (eds.) Social Movements and Organization Theory. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press: 161-187. Bainbridge, W. S. 1997. The sociology of religious movements. New York, NY: Routledge. Bartunek, J. M., Foster-Fishman, P., & Keys, C. 1996. Using collaborative advocacy to foster intergroup collaboration – a joint insider/outsider investigation. Human Relations, 79: 701-732. Bartunek, J. M., Krim, R.., Necochea, R., & Humphries, M. 1999. Sensemaking sensegiving, and leadership in strategic organizational development. In: J. Wagner (ed.) Advances in Qualitative Organizational Research, vol. 2. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press: 37-71. Bean, C. J., & Hamilton, F. E. 2006. Leader framing and follower sensemaking: Response to downsizing in the brave new workplace. Human Relations, 59: 321-349. Bechky, B. A. 2003. Object lessons: Workplace artifacts as representations of occupational jurisdiction. American Journal of Sociology, 109: 720-752. Berlingske Tidende. 2000. Sort Scene (Black Stage). Berlingske Tidende, July 9, 2. Section: 1. Catasús, B., Mårtensson, M., & Skoog, M. 2009. The communication of human accounts: Examining models of sensegiving. Journal of Human Resource Costing & Accounting, 13: 163-179. Clark, S. M., Gioia, D. A., Ketchen, Jr., D. J., & Thomas, J. B. 2010. Transitional identity as a facilitator of organizational change during a merger. Administrative Science Quarterly, 55: 397-438. Corley, K. G., & Gioia, D. A. 2004. Identity ambiguity and change in the wake of a corporate spin-off. Administrative Science Quarterly, 49: 173-208. Corvellec, H., & Risberg, A. 2007 Sensegiving as mise-en-sens – The case of wind power development. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 23: 306-326. Danholm, K. 2001. Massiv ændring af sikkerheden (Massive safety changes). Gaffa Roskilde Daily, 2: 5. 20

Dundon, T., & Ryan, P. 2010. Interviewing reluctant respondents: Strikes, henchman, and Gaelic games. Organizational Research Methods, 13: 562-581. Eisenhardt, K. M. 1989. Building theory from case study research. Academy of Management Review, 14: 532-550. Elliot, D., & Smith, D. 2006. Cultural adjustment after crisis: Regulation and learning from crisis within the UK soccer industry. Journal of Management Studies, 43: 289-317. Elsbach, K. D., & Pratt, M. G. 2007. The physical environment in organizations. Academy of Management Annals, 1: 181-224. Emerson, R. M, Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. 1995. Writing ethnographic fieldnotes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fiss, P. C., & Zajac, E. J. 2006. The symbolic management of strategic change: Sensegiving via framing and decoupling. Academy of Management Journal, 49: 1173-1193. Frith, S. 1978. The sociology of rock. London: Constable. Gephart, R. P. 2004. Qualitative research and the Academy of Management Journal. Academy of Management Journal, 40: 454-462. Gioia, D. A. 1986. Symbols, scripts, and sensemaking: Creating meaning in the organizational experience. In: H. P. Sims & D. A. Gioia (eds.) The Thinking Organization. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Gioia, D. A., & Chittipeddi, K. 1991. Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change initiation. Strategic Management Journal, 12: 433-448. Gioia, D. A., & Mehra, A. 1996. Sensemaking in organizations – Weick, K. E. Academy of Management Review, 21: 1226-1230. Gioia, D. A., Price, K. N., Hamilton, A. L., & Thomas, J. B. 2010. Forging an identity: An insider-outsider study of processes involved in the formation of organizational identity. Administrative Science Quarterly, 55: 1-46. Gioia, D. A., & Thomas, J. B. 1996. Institutional identity, image, and issue interpretation: Sensemaking during strategic change in academia. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41: 370-403. Golden-Biddle, K., & Locke, K. 2007. Composing qualitative research. 2nd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Hamm, C. 1995. Putting popular music in its place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hansen, T. S. 2000. Forbedret sikkerhed på Roskilde Festival (Improved security at Roskilde Festival. Berlingske Tidende, 1. Section: 2. 21

Hargreaves, D. J., & North, A. C. 1997. The social psychology of music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, R. C., & Levenhagen, M. 1995. Metaphors and mental models: Sensemaking and sensegiving in innovative and entrepreneurial activities. Journal of Management, 21: 1057-1074. Hope, O. (2010) The politics of middle management sensemaking and sensegiving. Journal of Change Management, 10: 195-215. Jensen, T. B., & Kjærgaard, A. L. 2010. Cognitive maps as visual artifacts for sensemaking and sensegiving in information systems implementation. Paper presented at the Academy of Management Meeting, Montreal, On. Jordan, S. 2010. Learning to be surprised: How to foster reflective practice in a highreliability context. Management Learning, 41: 391-413. Kemp, C., & Hill, I. 2004. Health and safety aspects in the live music industry. Cambridge, UK: Entertainment Technology Press. Kemp, C., Hill, I., & Upton, M. 2004. A comparative study of crowd behaviour at two major music events. Cambridge, UK: Entertainment Technology Press. Kemp, C., Hill, I., Upton, M., & Hamilton, M. 2007. Case studies in crowd management. Cambridge, UK: Entertainment Technology Press. Langley, A. 1999. Strategies for theorizing from process data. Academy of Management Review, 24: 691-710. Laughey, D. 2006. Music and youth culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Leonardi, P. M., & Barley, S. R. 2010. What’s under construction here? Social action, materiality, and power in constructivist studies of technologies and organizing. Academy of Management Annals, 4: 1-51. Maguire, S., & Hardy, C. 2009. Discourse and deinstitutionalization: The decline if DDT. Academy of Management Journal, 52: 148-178. Maitlis, S. (2005) The social processes of organizational sensemaking. Academy of Management Journal, 48: 21-49. Maitlis, S., & Lawrence, T. B. 2007. Triggers and enables of sensegiving in organizations. Academy of Management Journal, 50: 57-84. Maitlis, S., & Sonenshein, S. 2010. Sensemaking in crisis and change: Inspiration and insights from Weick (1988). Journal of Management Studies, 47: 551-580.

22

McAdam, D., & Scott, W. R. 2005. Organizations and movements. In: G. F. Davis, D. McAdam, W. R. Scott & M. N. Zald, M. N. (eds.) Social Movements and Organization Theory. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press: 4-40. Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. 1994. Qualitative data analysis. 2nd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Negus, K. 1996. Popular music in theory: An introduction. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Nemeth, C. K., Brown, K., & Rogers, J. 2001. Devil’s advocate versus authentic dissent: Stimulating quality and quantity. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31: 707-720. Okhuysen, G. A. 2001. Structuring change: Familiarityand formal interventions in problem solving groups. Academy of Management Journal, 44: 794-808 Okhuysen, G. A., & Bechky, B. A. 2009. Coordination in organizations: An integrative perspective. Academy of Management Annals, 3: 463-502. Orlikowski, W. J., & Scott, S. V. 2008. Sociomateriality: Challenging the seperation of technology work and organization. Academy of Management Annals, 2: 433-474. Perkins, L. B. 2004. Crowd safety and survival – practical event and public gathering safety tips. Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press. Pratt, M. G. 2009. For the lack of a boilerplate: Tips on wirting up (and reviewing) qualitative research. Academy of Management Journal, 52: 856-862. Ravasi, D., & Turati, C. 2005. Exploring entrepreneurial learning: A comparative study of technology development projects. Journal of Business Venturing, 20: 137-164. Ray, J. L., & Smith, A. D. 2011. Worth a thousand words: Photographs as a novel methodological tool in strategic management. Research Methodology in Strategy and Management, 6: 289-326 Ritzau. 2000. Festival i chok (Festival in shock). Ritzau Bureau, July 1. 2000: 4.13 pm. Rockett, T. L., & Okhuysen, G. A. 2002. Familiarity in groups: Exploring the relationship between inter-member familiarity and group behaviour. In: M. Neale, E. Mannix & H. Sondak (eds.) Research on Managing Groups and Teams. Bingley: Emerald Books: 173-201. Roskilde Festival. 2007. Omsorgs- og sikkerhedsvurdering (Care and security assessment). (short version, June 13. 2007). Roskilde Police. 2000. Report on the accident at Roskilde Festival on June 30. 2000. December 15. 2000: 1-24.

23

Rouleau, L. 2005 Micro-practices of strategic sensemaking and sensegiving: How middle managers interpret and sell change every day. Journal of Management Studies, 42: 14131441. Rouleau, L., & Balogun, J. 2011. Middle managers, strategic sensemaking, and discursive competence. Journal of Management Studies, 48. Schütz, A. (1964) The dimensions of the social world. In: A. Brodersen (ed.) A Collected Papers II – Studies in Social Theory. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff: 20-63. Schütz, A. 1967. The phenomenology of the social world. Evenston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schwartz, S., & Hinman, T. 2000. Vi skulle bare trykke den af (We were there to have a Blast). Danish Broadcasting Corporation, DR P1, November 1. 2000, 7.15 pm. Running time 44 minutes and 50 seconds. Smerek, R. 2011. Sensemaking and sensegiving: An exploratory study of the simultaneous “Being and learning” of new college and university presidents. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 18: 80-94. Smith, A. D., Plowman, D. A., & Duchon, A. 2010. Everyday sensegiving: A closer look at successful plant managers. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 46: 220-244. Smith, J. G. 2009. NFL head coaches as sensegiving change agents. Team Performance Management, 15: 202-214. Smith, R. A., & Dickie, J. P. 1993. Engineering crowd safety: Proceedings of the international conference. London, UK, March 17-18 1993. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. Snell, R. S. 2002. The learning organization, sensegiving and psychological contracts: A Hong Kong case. Organization Studies, vol. 23: 549-569. Stigliani, I., & Ravasi, D. 2011. Organizing thoughts and connecting brains: Material practices and collective sensemaking. Working Paper from Department of Management, Bocconi University. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. 2008. Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. 3rd edition. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Suddaby, R. 2006. What grounded theory is not. Academy of Management Journal, 49: 633-642. Sutton, R. I. 1991. Maintaining norms about expressed emotions: The case of bill collectors. Administrative Science Quarterly, 36: 245-268. Søndergaard, B., & Egelund, R. 1998. Tak til de som bar – Vagterne foran Orange Scene drukner i kaosjunkende crowdsurfere. Politiken Roskilde Live, 7: 3. 24

Van Maanen, J. 2011. Ethnography as work: Some rules of engagement. Journal of Management Studies, 48: 218-234. Weick, K. E. 1993. The collapse of sensemaking: the Mann Gluch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38: 628-652. Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K., & Obstfeld, D. 2005. Organizing and the process of sensemaking. Organization Science, 16: 409-421. Whetten, D. A. 1984. Effective administrators. Change, 16: 38-43. Whiteman, G., & Cooper, W. H. (2011) Ecological sensemaking. Academy of Management Journal, 54: 889-911. Yin, R. K. 2009. Case study design: Design and methods. 4th edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Zealand Public Prosecutor. 2002. Beretning om resultatet af efterforskning af ulykken den 30. Juni 2000 på Roskilde Festival (Report from Zealand Public Prosecutor about the accident on June 30. 2000 at Roskilde Festival). 1-173. Zilber, T. B. 2002. Institutionalization as an interplay between actions, meanings, and actors: The case of a rape crisis center in Israel. Academy of Management Journal, 45: 234254.

25

TABLE 1 Overview of events after the concert stopped (graphically illustrated in figure 1) 11:24:34-11:25:42: 11:25:05 11:26:35-11:26:43: 11:26:50-11:26:52: 11:27:00-11:27:15: After 11:27:15: 11:27:57-11:28:10: 11:28:40-11:29:14: 11:29:30-11:29:33: 11:29:37-11:29:40: 11:30:12-11:30:16: Ca. 11:32: Ca. 11:34:30:

11:37: 11:48:30-11:49:20:

11:54:49-11:55:05: 11:55.23-11:55:23: 00:17:

00:25: Ca. 01:00:

(1) Lead Singer talks to the audience: “No more music for the next 5 minutes” and “Please walk three steps back” (Concert stopped) Camera Assistant finalizes his phone call, learns that the music has stopped, and starts investigating why (2) Lead Singer talks to the audience: “Please look at your feet and see if somebody is laying down there.” Unknown person shouts “move back, and another unknown person answers/asks “what?” (3) Lead Singer talks to the audience: “Two steps back” Crowd begins to give space to Crowd Safety Guards to rescue people (4) Tour Manager talks to the audience: “Two steps back” (5) Lead Singer talks to the audience: “Fuck You – three steps back” (6a) Tour Manager talks to Light Manager in the light tower and asks for more light on the audience. (6b) Tour Manager talks once more to Light Manager in the light tower and ask for more light on the audience. (6c) Tour Manager talks to the audience “Hold your positions, we still have a problem up here in the front.” Victims begin to arrive to Medical Tent, and a Medical Doctor calls 911. Police officers arrive at Orange Stage, one of them asks the Stage Manager to address the crowd and get it to move back. The Stage Manager does not find it necessary to do so, as he can see space behind the first rows of peo-ple, and does not want to be the cause of panic in the crowd. Also, the Sta-ge Manager says to the police officer that he has no authority to do so. First ambulance arrives. (7) Master of Ceremonies talks to the audience: “We don’t know what has happened – but 10-15 people are really badly hurt. You have to be patient until we know what has happened – take good care of yourself.” (8) Master of Ceremonies talks to the audience: “I shall ask you to continue withdrawing.” (9) Master of Ceremonies talks to the audience: “I shall ask you to continue withdrawing.” Vice Police Commissioner wants the music at Orange Stage turned off, as the crowd will not leave the area in front of the stage, but it is impossible as only the Festival Manager can make this decision, and he is in a meeting. The music at Orange Stage is turned off. (10) Festival Manager addresses the crowd from Orange Stage.

Source: Modified from Zeeland Public Prosecutor (2002: 46-47)

26

Table 2: Representative Supporting Data for Each 2nd Order Theme in Figure 2 2nd order Themes Pre-Festival Priming

Representative (1st order) Data A) “Twelve Good tips from safe festival When you go to see concerts at Roskilde Festival it is very important that you take care of both yourself and others. Below we give 12 good tips from Safe Festival (Tryg Festival), which are good to know before you head towards the stages. - Drink plenty before the concert – That is water, not just alcohol! - Arrive in good time for the concert instead of pushing your way through the crowd to get to the front. - It can be an overwhelming experience to be close to the stage at a concert if you have never tried it before. People are cramped together and the crowd is pushing. Be careful. - Before the concert make sure to locate the escape routes so you know which way to go if the crowd is pushing too hard. - Do not be violent or aggressive – the other festival guests, just like you, just want to have fun at the festival. - Never take part in crowd waves, slam dance or run in chains – often people get hurt during these activities. - Do not crowd surf or encourage other to do it. It is not allowed and you risk to be expelled from the festival. - Do not follow requests from artists, stage hosts or other audience to behave in a way that can bring people around you in danger. - Beware of things thrown from the stage such as T-shirts, drum sticks, tambourines, microphones and CDs. - Notice information about cancellations and delays of the concert. - Do not block exits or paths that lead away from the concert area. - If the crowd is pushing too much – move to the back and to the side of the crowd.” (source: http://www.roskilde-festival.dk/uk/practical/safety/good_advice_when_attending_a_concert/). B) “Follow all safety instructions and take an active part in ensuring that you – and everyone around you – have a positive concert experience” (Christensen, 2008: 42).

On Festival Priming

C) “Three areas where you can help: Pay attention to the communication security. Pay attention to your friends and those closely by. If needed, seek help with staff members wearing vests (crowd safety personnel)” (Christensen, 2008: 42). D) “Please avoid: Crowd surfing (prohibited at all stages and results in immediate explusion from the festival). Human chains (you endanger the safety of others by creating unrest in the crowd). Rushing and moshing towards the stage (this can create waves among the audience and pose a risk for someone falling down). Sitting on shoulders (this ruins the concert for those behind you)” (Christensen, 2008: 43). E) Messages displayed on the two screens next to Orange Stage. 1: “Welcome to the show – Take care of each other”

27

We-relations

2: “Rules of safety – Watch: The person next to you – Observe: The security announcements – Contact: The Crowd Safety Personnel” 3: “Do not push – Do not run towards the stage” 4: “Attention! No sitting on shoulders please” 5: “Attention! No crowd surfing please” 6: “For questions or comfort: Contact the Crowd Safety Personnel” 7: “Thank you for making this a great festival!” (Source: Photos taken at Roskilde Festival, July 3. 2010). F) “Besides dealing with problems as they arise, security guards are also encouraged to chat with the crowd before the concert begins” (Danholm, 2001: 5). G) “Exchange stories with the crowd” and “Get in touch with the crowd” (Per Skovsgaard at Crowd Safety Course, part 1, June 28. 2008).

Physical Proximity

H) “The master of ceremonies at Roskilde Festival are not stand-up comedians, like at other music festivals, because Roskilde Festival wants to establish friendly/good/confidential relations between the crowd and the master of ceremonies, so that the master of ceremonies is taken serious by the crowd if a serious message has to be given to the crowd” (Steen Bechman at Crowd Safety Course, part 1, June 28. 2008). I) ”This year, security guards will be placed evenly throughout the crowd so that safety isn’t relegated to the other side of the ‘enemy lines’” (Danholm, 2001: 5). J) “The Wave breakers are replaced by a new fenced off audience area with four pits and a max distance of 4 meters from the fence to a person in the crowd “(Danholm, 2001: 5). K) “The area will be divided into four fenced sections within which the festival will position a number of observers, who before, during and after every concert will attend to the security of the crowd” (Hansen, 2000: 2).

Fast sensemaking

L) “The task of the crowd safety personnel is to help the audience have a good concert experience, and to spot eventual problems. The observations made by the crowd safety personnel are but one component of the systems warning capability. With their help early intervention can prevent unfortunate and dangerous situations. Their task is to be especially attentive to potentially dangerous behaviors in the crowd” (Roskilde Festival, 2007: 5). M) “During concerts the Security Manager is constantly in contact with: - The Supervisors, who work with the Crowd Safety Teams in the Pit Area, and who carrier a radio and wear yellow vests. - The Sensors, who can be send into the crowd in order to feel the mood in the crowd. - The Intervention teams, who can be send into the crowd in order to solve specific situations.

28

-

The Media Crew in the Security Office who performs online video surveillance of the crowd. The Sensors, who observe the crowd from the stage.” (Steen Bechman at Crowd Safety Course, part 1, June 28. 2008).

N) “The benefit of using video cameras … is that it is possible to monitor the crowd and detect problems very fast.” (Danholm, 2001: 5). O) “[T]oday, there are sensors in all the fences, which constantly register the pressure from the crowd, and a video-system has been installed to monitor the crowd from above. …‘All the new systems have made it possible for the crowd safety guards to concentrate on servicing the crowd, rather than on policing it’, says Henrik Bondo Nielsen.” (Roskilde Festival Avis 2010, July 1. – Article on page 6: Big Mother is Watching). P) “The security manager … can call the security office – they operate all the monitors – and say ‘can you please give me some live-feed from area so and so in the crowd because I think there is something going on there that needs our attention.” (Talk, Safety Coordinator, Crowd Safety Seminar, June 30. 2010). Q) “We have the capability to monitor the whole area from the Orange Stage, all the way down to the back stand, and all the way to the shopping area. We have the four two mega pixel video cameras with ten times optical zoom and three times digital zoom, so we can pretty much see everything. …The cameras are 100% digital so we can just tell them to stay on night vision, and they shouldn’t be confused by the stage light.” (Field notes, Security Office Employee 1, Security Office, June 30, 2010).

Fast sensegiving

R) “We have spotters on stage, who are assistants to the security manager, but also to the CCTV-monitoring [in the sense that they can direct the cameras to areas in the crowd]” (Talk, Safety Coordinator, Crowd Safety Seminar, June 30. 2010). S) “Crowd safety supervisors have radio contact with the security manager and can guide the stewards in the pit-areas toward the crowd where they are most needed. We also implemented mobile sensory teams, which can be deployed at any time in the pit areas to help people if it is needed” (Talk, Safety Coordinator, Crowd Safety Seminar, June 30. 2010). T) “Security Manager has a number of tools at his disposal for communication with the crowd: Screens, which can be shown to the crowd, for example telling why the music has stopped” (Steen Bechman at Crowd Safety Course, part 1, June 28. 2008). U) “… security manager, who has the mandate to stop the concert, to pause the concert, to tell the production manager, the tour manager of the band, say: ‘We need the band to go out and try to calm things down now’, and that one person is key in our safety work today also. He has a number of functions that he can draw upon, that he can use for the safety operation” (Talk, Safety Coordinator, Crowd Safety Seminar, June 30. 2010).

29

FIGURE 1 Timeline for the first 95 minutes after the Pearl Jam concert had been stopped

30

FIGURE 2: Data Structure

31

Photo 1: Orange Stage Crowd Area before the Pearl Jam concert accident

Photo 2: Orange Stage Crowd Area after the Pearl Jam concert accident

32