Organisations often operate under multiple mandatory and voluntary regulations, standards, practices, and expectations intended to improve fire safety management. Yet recurring fire-related incidents in organisational contexts indicate an inconsistency between the existing compliance framework and fire safety management in practice. This suggests that the challenge lies not in whether regulations exist, but in how they are understood, interpreted, and enacted in practice through various roles in organisations (organisational actors).
To address this challenge, this study adopts an institutional complexity perspective to examine organisations’ experiences (and implications of) managing multiple priorities, demands and expectations. While prior research conceptualises institutional complexity arising from incompatible, conflicting demands from multiple institutional expectations or logics (referred to as “between-logic interactions”), this research proposes that complexity additionally arises within a single logic (referred to as “variations within a logic”) when there are multiple carriers (such as rules, routines, and artefacts), and various organisational actors interpreting and acting upon them. The study, therefore, develops a practice-oriented account of how institutional complexity is experienced through between-logic interactions, the contribution of variations within a logic to that complexity, and how these interactions and variations combine (and have implications) in practice.
This study will be conducted through approximately 80 semi-structured interviews with actors in fire safety in organisations and external actors involved in designing, installing, and maintaining fire safety requirements across Australia. With ongoing data collection, preliminary analysis of seven interviews suggests four potential yet provisional configurations through which complexity is experienced in practice across organisations. They are: accommodative adaptation, where required practices are retained while succumbing to other pressures; threshold compliance, where practices are enacted according to minimum requirements; actor-dependent preparedness, where effective preparedness depends on the continued availability and readiness of key organisational actors; and system-practice misalignment, where technical systems and procedures seem effective yet create confusion when it comes to practice. These provisional configurations suggest that complexity is not experienced uniformly; within a single logic, such as fire safety, it can cause practical challenges when there are multiple overlapping carriers and the ways organisational actors interpret them. Making these differences visible is crucial to understanding where complexity emerges and to provide more targeted governance and implementation responses. This study aims to extend institutional complexity theory while contributing to broader discussions of governance, systems thinking, and organisational change in complex environments.