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The purpose of this paper is to explain how adaptive capacity is accomplished through communication processes and can contribute to enhancing disaster resilience. The authors adopt a structurational “four flows” explanation of communication processes.

The authors observed and analyzed discourse in meetings of a crisis communication network consisting of representatives of municipalities and public authorities involved in crisis communication management during the Västmanland wildfire in Sweden.

Adaptive capacity during the wildfire was principally accomplished through the structurational communication processes or “flows” of self-structuring, activity coordination, and institutional positioning. These flows intersected demonstrating how communication accomplishes the development of a responsive affiliation, organizes stabilizing structuring practices, and enables adaptive structuring practices.

The main contribution of this study is a communicative explanation for adaptive capacity, which draws from a structurational model of constitutive communication, and lends further understanding to improvisation during disasters.

The authors discuss the findings in relation to improvisation, suggesting how the findings can inform future coordinated crisis communication for the public and news media. The recommendations address how practitioners might build a responsive affiliation, use minimal structures (e.g. communication practices), and maintain flexibility by introducing group reflexivity behaviors.

The authors provide new theoretical and empirical knowledge of the communicative constitution of adaptive capacity during a disaster.

The purpose of this paper is to enhance the knowledge of how leadership concepts are embraced by leadership actors and perceived to influence relationships between leaders and co-workers. Specifically, the authors aim to investigate how leaders and co-workers discursively construct the concept of “communicative leadership” and its practices and perceive that communicative leadership influences relationships, work processes, and agency.

The authors analyzed interviews with leaders and co-workers in two Swedish business organizations about their understandings and experiences of leadership.

Communicative processes that enhance co-worker agency, defined as a capacity to act; include: facilitating autonomy, sharing responsibility, and mutual participation. Relational and discursive leadership processes such as responsiveness and dialogue were seen to enhance mutual participation in both organizations. Broader Swedish cultural macro discourses shaped the leader/co-worker relationship, making agency a relational accomplishment rather than an individual phenomenon.

This study relies on data from individual and focus group interviews, rather than direct observation of leadership processes.

Findings suggest that organizations would benefit from making explicit their goals and expectations for communicative leadership in their respective social and cultural contexts.

The authors provide new theoretical and empirical knowledge of leaders’ and co-workers’ discursive construction of a leadership concept; leadership communication research in the Swedish context; empirical research on communicative leadership as an empowering form of leadership communication; and how leadership communication discourse on a micro level is connected to organizational and macro-social cultural levels.