Rethinking the extreme: towards new management approaches?

The number and multidimensionality of the extreme situations we face today are striking: the COVID-19 pandemic; geopolitical tensions such as the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East; extreme weather events, food and humanitarian crises; environmental and ecological crises, and so on.

Many of these crises are both more persistent and often low-priority, echoing what Boin et al. (2020: 122) call a “creeping crisis”—that is, “a threat to widely shared societal values or life-sustaining systems that evolves over time and space, is foreshadowed by precursor events, receives varying degrees of political and/or societal attention, and is addressed impartially or inadequately by authorities.” These crises compound long-standing global problems such as neoliberal imbalances, social inequalities, polarization, and rising political and social tensions (Mendenhall, 2020). Thus, the notion of a crisis as a clearly defined event in time and space is increasingly being questioned (t’Hart and Boin, 2001). The characteristics traditionally associated with a crisis, such as immediacy, identifiability, brevity, and unpredictability, are gradually giving way to situations characterized by simultaneity, feedback loops, amplification, and an unlimited nature (an uninterrupted succession of crises) (Davies and Hobson, 2022). In other words, one crisis leads to another; and responses to one crisis can exacerbate a second crisis: this is one of the key characteristics of what Edgar Morin (1999) means by “polycrisis.” This corresponds to a dense interconnection of socio-economic, ecological, and cultural-institutional crises, with interconnected challenges on a global scale that defy reduction to a single cause (Tooze, 2022).

Managing extreme situations can be explored at societal, institutional, organizational, individual, and other levels. It can involve numerous actors and affect diverse contexts and domains. It can draw upon specific mechanisms, skills, and capacities. Therefore, we invite researchers to reflect on the implications of extreme situations for practices, routines, roles, organizational structures, management styles, strategies, capacities, meaning-making, and everything else that can drive (or hinder) the development of new organizational responses to extreme situations.

We welcome conceptual and empirical contributions drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives and methodologies to better understand what it means to manage extreme situations and in extreme circumstances. Keywords: extreme situation - crisis - uncertainty - adversity - management approaches.

Track chairs:

Fadia KORBI (CNAM) ( fadia.korbi@lecnam.net) 

Carine Olfa BEN SLIMANE (Université Paris 12)