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Emergency Services Management An expert guide to contemporary research in the field of emergency services management, this short-form book will help academics, scholars, and practitioners to appreciate the important role and contribution of these services. Contemporary emergency services have been rapidly changing in response to increasing demand, reducing resources, the impact of COVID-19 and the increasingly complex threats to public safety. Academics, practitioners, the emergency services and their key stakeholders all need to have a clear understanding of the changing role and contribution of these services as well as finding ways to improve their management and performance so that policy solutions to new and emerging threats may be efficiently developed and effectively implemented. The book looks at the application of public management theories to emergency services and the development of professionalism within the police, fire and rescue, and ambulance services. It examines the increasing need for better collaboration and identifies the nature and extent of the academic and practitioner divide and the research gap between the academic and professional communities in each of the services. This book will be invaluable to researchers, scholars, practitioners, and students in the fields of governance, leadership, and management, especially those focusing on emergency services and management during crises. Paresh Wankhade is Professor of Leadership and Management at Edge Hill University, Lancashire, UK. Peter Murphy is a Professor of Public Policy and Management at Nottingham Trent University, UK. State of the Art in Business Research Series Editor: Geoffrey Wood Recent advances in theory, methods and applied knowledge (alongside structural changes in the global economic ecosystem) have presented researchers with challenges in seeking to stay abreast of their fields and navigate new scholarly terrains. State of the Art in Business Research presents shortform books which provide an expert map to guide readers through new and rapidly evolving areas of research. Each title will provide an overview of the area, a guide to the key literature and theories and time-saving summaries of how theory interacts with practice. As a collection, these books provide a library of theoretical and conceptual insights, and exposure to novel research tools and applied knowledge, that aid and facilitate in defining the state of the art, as a foundation stone for a new generation of research. Comparative Corporate Governance A Research Overview Thomas Clarke Brands and Consumers A Research Overview Jaywant Singh and Benedetta Crisafulli Emergency Services Management A Research Overview Paresh Wankhade and Peter Murphy For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ State-of-the-Art-in-Business-Research/book-series/START Emergency Services Management A Research Overview Paresh Wankhade and Peter Murphy First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Paresh Wankhade and Peter Murphy The right of Paresh Wankhade and Peter Murphy to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-05543-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-05544-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-19801-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003198017 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Preface vi Acknowledgement viii 1 Emergency services management: a research overview 1 2 Working towards attaining professional status 19 3 Collaboration: issues, challenges, and opportunities 36 4 Leadership and culture(s): still command and control? 58 5 The research-practice gaps in emergency services 77 6 Conclusion: collaboration, not isolation, is the way forward 98 Index 105 Preface Emergency services operation is a global provision, but their management and organisational understanding is beginning to open a clear theory-practice divide in the current research landscape. This short volume endeavours to de- mystify some of the key issues in the emergency services organisations and to examine this theory-practice divide. Scholarly understanding of emergency services is hampered by complex legislative and political landscape, different management structures, numerous funding models, and commissioning frameworks with little to compare between them. This has also recently been accompanied by an unprecedented period of change brought about by a global climate of fiscal austerity, changing socio-economic conditions, growing numbers of natural disasters, and pandemics and new forms of security threats to mention a few. Notwithstanding these challenges, these organisations have made significant progress in upskilling the workforce, adopting new technology and the application of mainstream management tools to improve performance and service delivery. The study of emergency organisations can potentially offer great insights into organisational resilience, interoperability, collaboration, and leadership behaviours. One of the key aims of the book is to make sense of the quite heteroge- neous body of existing literature in order to extend the debate and consoli- date the knowledge base paying particular attention to authoritative sources published in leading scholarly outlets. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the emergency services has been profound both on organisational delivery and organisational resilience and on staff health and wellbeing. We have, however, had to be selective in choosing the themes for inves- tigation due to the format of this series and consciously didn’t dwell on the workforce issues having recently written extensively elsewhere. Our key objective has been to provide readers with a critical perspective on the state of business research within the neglected settings of emergency service organisations which is the commendable aim of the State of Art in Business series. We sincerely hope that we have done justice to our brief. Preface vii Emergency service organisations have much to offer to management and organisation studies scholars because of their global manifestation and their adoption of management tools and new hybrid forms of governance structures. Our analysis suggests that the ‘research-practice gap’ can only be addressed by a significant collaborative effort between academics, professionals, and practitioners with an active bridging role played by govern- ments, policy makers, staff associations, professional bodies, think tanks and other potential boundary spanners. January 2023 Paresh Wankhade Peter Murphy Acknowledgement This book would not have been completed without the help and encouragement of many people to whom we would like to express our sincere gratitude. We would like to thank the Routledge State of the Art in Business Research Series Editor Professor Geoffrey Wood, our publisher Routledge Books, and in particular Terry Clague, Senior Publisher for their continuous support, encouragement and patience in completing this project. We would have not completed this work without the support and understanding of our respective families (Kavita, Gaurav, and Divij; Stephanie and Robert) to write up this book. This book is an important contribution to the Series in exploring the state of research in emergency services which are relatively neglected by the management and organisational studies scholars. Important insights can be gained about the practice of leadership, organisational resilience, and interoperability in both emotionally challenging and dynamic environments and their more routine or everyday organisational settings. We sincerely hope that this volume will rekindle further research interest about the nature and working of emergency organisations and will help attract a new breed of academics, professionals, and practitioners in the quest for theory building and carrying out empirical research in difficult and extreme settings. Paresh Wankhade Peter Murphy 1 Emergency services management A research overview Introduction and background The purpose of this book is to present an overview of contemporary research in the field of emergency services management. It is about research into the business and management of the emergency services and in particular, the three services that are colloquially known as the ‘blue light’ services namely the police, ambulance, and fire and rescue services. All three of the ‘blue light’ emergency services have changed signifi- cantly since the turn of the century, reflecting both the increased range and the changing nature of the risks that contemporary society and local communities now face, and the response from emergency services (New- ton and Hodge, 2012; Wankhade et al., 2019; McCann and Granter, 2019; Wankhade and Patnaik, 2019; Murphy et al., 2020). This has led to changes to the organisations themselves and how they are governed and managed. For instance, Tony Blairs’ New Labour government in the U.K. from 1997, famously tried to ‘modernise’ and facilitate the continuous improvement of all locally delivered public services including the three blue light services (Finlayson, 2003; Stewart, 2003; Savage, 2007; Department of Health, 2000; Murphy and Greenhalgh, 2018). It was not, however, in any way unique and much of this ‘performance’ agenda was reflected in similar agendas in North America, across Europe and in Australasia. ‘Modernisation’ and the turn of the century provide the logical starting point for a review of ‘contemporary’ business and management research. It also provides two contrasting periods, that is, the years before and after the Great Recession of 2007–2009. The first period generally saw increasing investment in public services, including the emergency services, while the second period generally experienced continuous and significant reductions in financial support for emergency services up to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Marmot et al., 2010, 2020; National Audit Office (NAO), 2011, 2015a, 2015b; Murphy and Greenhalgh, 2018; HM Treasury, 2021). DOI: 10.4324/9781003198017-1