Discourses of an Organizational Tragedy: Emotion, Sensemaking, and Learning After the Yarnell Hill Fire

Abstract

How an organization discursively responds to a tragedy can have lasting impacts on how it makes sense of its past and plans for future actions. This study explores the organizational discourses that emerged after the Yarnell Hill Fire. We argue examining the social discourses following this fatality fire can illuminate how a high reliability organization, its crews, and members experience and make sense of an organizational tragedy. Several themes are found to be at tension with one another within the overarching discourses of emotion, sensemaking, and learning. We examine how these are negotiated and offer implications of these discursive tensions.

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