Morten Thanning Vendelø is an Associate Professor at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), specializing in organizational responses to crises and innovations. His research spans crowd safety at events like Roskilde Festival, Arctic emergency management, and pandemic adaptation, co-founding the Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research (COPE) in 2012 to advance interdisciplinary disaster studies. His primary research areas include Crisis Management, Event Safety Management, Organizational Decision Making, and Sensemaking in Organizations. Vendelø investigates how organizations learn from unexpected events through field studies in high-stakes environments, emphasizing improvisation, collective mindfulness, and adaptive decision processes. His work bridges theoretical frameworks with practical safety protocols for festivals and emergency response systems. Recent publications reveal consistent focus on organizational adaptation during prolonged crises (e.g., Covid-19), crowd behavior analysis at mass gatherings, and intuitive decision-making under uncertainty. Key trends include ethnographic studies of safety practices, conceptualizations of 'cold disasters' in Arctic contexts, and the interplay between data-driven and intuitive judgment in crisis response. Vendelø has supervised over 100 master's theses and 8 PhD dissertations, including Katharina Christiane Nielsen Jeschke's 2022 study on dynamic safety practices in construction and Signe Bruskin's 2020 ethnography of bank organizational change. His research is supported by projects like the Nordic Centre of Excellence on Resilience and Societal Security and the Otto Mønsted Visiting Professorship. He actively contributes to the Centre for Organization and Time (COT) and co-founded COPE, developing practical tools like a learning game for Arctic Search and Rescue with Rasmus Dahlberg. His work integrates academic rigor with real-world safety applications through collaborations with emergency management institutions and event organizers.






