Hybridity, sociomateriality and compassion: What happens when a river floods and a city's organizations respond?

•Human and non-human phenomena, including events, interact as sociomateriality.•During critical events, human agency can intervene to reconfigure sociomateriality.•Reconfiguring sociomateriality is judged as more or less ethically compassionate.•Organizational compassion is one such reconfiguring that unfolds as serial choices.

SummaryIn this study we analyze the ethics of compassionate support provided by organizations to their employees during and after the Brisbane flood crisis of January 2011. The relationship between the social and the material is often taken for granted in discussions of compassion, which has largely been conceived as an emotion or an ethical virtue. By contrast, we see it as a variable state that is contingent on phenomenal events, social relations, organizational routines, technology and corporeality. These are entangled in temporal processes in which the ethics of organizing compassion are constituted. When traumatic events occur processes of sociomateriality can substantiate or negate organizational compassion.