"If we don't act now, someone will die" : temporal riskwork in action

In this ethnographic study, we develop the concept of temporal riskwork -- actions taken to alter the temporal dynamics of risk -- by examining how riskworkers navigated situations of multiple dynamically evolving risks under severe time constraints. In such contexts, decisions about how and when to act are critically interdependent and made with attention to assessing urgencies, priorities and volatility of risk. Our study revealed how risk can present both synchronic and diachronic competing temporal demands, requiring temporally complex riskwork. We studied a mental health crisis team where actors collectively responded to clients’ urgent, often accelerating risks in high-stakes, time-pressured environments. We contribute to the literature by developing a model of temporal riskwork that explains how actors can collectively manage a set of ongoing risks by engaging in two connected temporal processes: decelerating synchronic risk momenta and redirecting diachronic risk trajectories. More generally, our model explains how riskworkers can collectively manage the temporal complexity of multiple concurrent risks, integrating their assessments and actions in complex, dynamic contexts.