Building on the existing literature on crisis management and boundaries, we develop a typology of boundaries that can help us understand crisis management response. Specifically, our typology seeks to address the critique of current crisis management models, such as these being too prescriptive and putting too much emphasis on assumptions that only the decisions made by the crisis management team (i.e., centralized decisions) will impact the crisis management response. We address this critique by elaborating four categories of boundaries that are relevant to manage crisis response, such as physical, mental, social, and temporal, which can be either intentional or unintentional. Our typology offers a lens to consider crisis management by taking into consideration the complexities and nuances that linear crisis management models have not yet adequately addressed. We argue that by identifying, defining, and understanding different configurations of boundaries one can better manage crises towards a desired outcome.
