The moment of truth—Reconstructing entrepreneurship and social capital in the eye of the storm

There are many images of entrepreneurship which all pay attention to the importance of social capital. Nevertheless, these understandings of entrepreneurship do not tell us about the capabilities and social ingenuity that people hit by a natural or man-made catastrophe may evoke. We have studied how the effects of the hurricane Gudrun, which hit southern Sweden in January 2005, were dealt with by civic and formal, private as well as public, organizations. The lessons from our rich case accounts are reflected upon in the perspective of ephemeral organizing and used to craft our notion of ‘emergency entrepreneurship’. Its proposed features include coping with rupture in everyday life by the acknowledgement of local knowledge and leadership and the use of bridging as well as bonding social capital facilitating immediate (inter)action and swift trust. This appears as a spontaneous collective effort, ‘social bricolage’, which means combining and locally—in time as well as in space—integrating chunks of everyday routines according to the events and associated needs that the drama produces.