Organizations that operate in extreme contexts have to develop resilience to ensure the reliability of their operations. While the organizational literature underlines the crucial role of slack when facing unanticipated events, a structural approach to slack says little about the concrete ways in which organizational actors produce and use this slack. Adopting a practice-based perspective during a 14-month ethnographic study in a French critical care unit, we study the slack practices, which consist in gathering, arranging and rearranging resources from both inside and outside the medical unit. This permanent process is captured in a dynamic model connecting situations, their evolutions and slack practices. Our research highlights the importance of situational slack production practices to ensure resilience. We also argue that these micro-practices are constitutive of the context in which actors are evolving. Finally, we discuss why these slack practices, although essential for ensuring resilience, can be endangered by the New Public Management context.

在极端情况下运作的组织必须发展弹性以确保其运作的可靠性。尽管组织文献强调了松弛在面对意外事件时的关键作用，但是一种结构化的松弛方法几乎没有说明组织参与者产生和使用松弛的具体方式。我们在法国重症监护室进行的为期14个月的人种志研究期间，采用基于实践的观点，研究松弛的实践，包括从医疗部门内部和外部收集，安排和重新安排资源。这个永久过程是在动态模型中捕获的，这些模型将情况，其演变和松弛实践联系在一起。我们的研究强调了情景松弛生产实践对确保弹性的重要性。我们还认为，这些微观实践是参与者不断发展的背景的构成。最后，我们讨论了为什么这些松懈的做法尽管对于确保弹性具有至关重要的作用，但为什么会受到新公共管理环境的威胁。