Comes & Adrot Power as driver of interorganizational information sharing Short Paper – Intelligent Decision Support in the Networked Society Proceedings of the ISCRAM 2016 Conference – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 2016 Tapia, Antunes, Bañuls, Moore and Porto,eds. Power as driver of inter-organizational information sharing in crises Tina Comes Centre for Integrated Emergency Management, University of Agder tina.comes@uia.no Anouck Adrot Université Dauphine anouck.adrot@dauphine.fr ABSTRACT Research on decision-making and coordination in critical settings has provided important insights on resources and behaviors that improve emergency response. However, literature often assumes that decision-makers can access information when necessary, while empirical reality suggests that information is not always so easily accessed, but more or less shared between emergency actors. This research in progress aims to investigate how a specific organizational variable, power, influences information sharing behaviors’ and its impact on emergency management. This research relies on two field studies to highlight in an inductive fashion a set of hypotheses on power in emergency organizations. We propose axes of investigation that map out ways to further explore the issue of power in emergency settings. Keywords Information sharing, decision-making, power in organizations, emergency INTRODUCTION In the response to sudden onset crises, responders need to act and coordinate in very short time, and most often they need to react without having a complete and comprehensive understanding of the situation (Hardy & Comfort 2014; Van de Walle & Comes 2014). Particularly if critical or high-risk infrastructures are affected, and consequences are far-reaching, responders need to work with experts and stakeholders from industry, policy-makers, the media, the population in the affected areas, and communication and transportation providers – to name just a few. The level of complexity of a crisis, however, rises with the increasing number of experts and stakeholders that need to be involved to respond to a crisis (Rao et al. 1995). Emergency response thus relies on efficient and fast information collection and communication, and literature has also highlighted how information sharing and access to information and knowledge can shape the response to a crisis (Van de Walle & Comes 2015). Recognizing the pivotal role of information has resulted in a trend to involve an increasing number of stakeholders and volunteers as information providers and analysts, or to crowd source information and data in the response to sudden onset crises. While access to information is partly planned, some crucial decisions made during emergencies proved to nourish from emergent information sharing. For instance, in the aftermath of 2010 Haïti earthquake, emergency responders could benefit from frequently updated information provided from the Crisis Mappers Community through Open Street Map, or Ushahidi (Crowley & Chan 2010; Altay & Labonte 2014). Without any notice, Geoeye, a start-up, provided access to satellite images to Internet users who, from the world wide web, updated the OSM, which supported emergency rescue. Besides the often debated aspects of information reliability and trustworthiness (Mendoza et al. 2010), there is also the much less studied dimension of power relations. During crises, knowledge and authority are often separated, and thus create an organizational imbalance (Suparamaniam & Dekker 2003). Therefore, we propose in this paper some axis of investigation to investigate in this research in order to further understand the influence of power on inter-organizational information sharing. To propose these axes, we rely on an exploratory