key: cord-0052892-odybm27e
authors: Rouleau, Linda; Hällgren, Markus; de Rond, Mark
title: Covid‐19 and Our Understanding of Risk, Emergencies, and Crises
date: 2020-10-25
journal: nan
DOI: 10.1111/joms.12649
sha: 7fb536f6033cb4f09f8147cd36378038ef370d40
doc_id: 52892
cord_uid: odybm27e

nan

population and killed 50 million. Each of these prompted conversations around the possibility of another pandemic occurring. Given the availability of knowledge gleaned from other health crises, it is fair to ask why Covid-19 left us less well prepared than we could, and perhaps should, have been.

Covid-19 has also foregrounded those who really do matter: scientists working on a vaccine, to be sure, but also those collecting our garbage, grocery store shelf stockers, nurses, police, care home staff, parcel delivery services, and the organizations that manage them. We have come to refer to these as 'essential workers'. And Covid-19 has exposed those who matter little. There could scarcely be a more poignant reminder of the triviality of organizational scholarship in a context where one might expect it to have more to say. When has anything we have ever published in our academic journals made any positive difference to anyone else but ourselves? Aren't we missing a trick if unable to engage effectively with those whose decisions materially affect the future shape of organizations and, by implications, those inside them? What better time is there for academia to open up new spaces for dialogue and to promote collaborative work between researchers and practitioners? Some of this is understandable. Thus, in the specific context of research into risk, emergencies, and crises, prior work has often concerned itself with 'localized' eventsthe fire at Mann Gulch, the Bhopal leak, tragedy on Mount Everest, the Challenger disaster, a fatal case of mistaken identity in the Stockwell shooting, and various studies of high-reliability and 'blue light' organizations. Whilst unquestionably insightful, it has been difficult to generalize from them (for a review of these case studies and more, see Hällgren et al., 2018) . Indeed, the pandemic is a stark reminder that crises can have global reach. Since the start of the millennium, we have witnessed several of those -9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, the migrant crises in Asia and Europe, and climate changethe consequences of which continue to be felt today. As Gephart et al. (2009) wrote, we are living in a risk society. Thus, in response to recent crises, organization scholars have rightly begun to call attention to, and develop frameworks for, advancing managerial and organizational knowledge about global extreme events, including by providing frameworks to study grand challenges (George et al., 2016) , economic, technological, social, and environmental 'riskification' (Hardy and Maguire, 2016) ; and systemic planetary risks (Whiteman and Williams, 2019) .

We might be able to do even better. As per Churchill's 'never let a good crisis go to waste', the pandemic affords various opportunities for extreme context research (ECR). First, ours is an experiment in which we are simultaneously observers and participants, and Covid-19 affords a rare chance to study a crisis as it unfolds. For those extreme context researchers who rely principally on secondary sources, there is no shortage of media coverage of the economic and societal impact of the pandemic, and the organizations most affected by it (e.g., hospitals, schools and universities, and those for who the pandemic has been a boon: Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook, manufacturers of PPE, anti-bacterial soaps and sex toys). There are equal riches to be had in how organizations have responded to the pandemic. What we do not yet know is what the longer-term impact on societal cohesion will be as heart-warming stories of solidarity and community exist alongside those highlighting generational and ideological differences in responses to lockdown. Outside of the public domain (and provided access can be secured), the current context provides a near-perfect in-vivo laboratory in which to study recurring themes in risk, emergency, and crisis research: What are the sources of organizational flexibility and inertia when responding to a pandemic? How do adaptative routines in a context of global coordination emerge and evolve in response to crises? How do long-term crises (without a clear end in sight) impact on psychological safety? What makes for more and less effective team leadership in managing financial, human, and material resources during crises? How do local specificities and networks impact on global Just-In-Time supply chains? How social medias and digital technologies frame messages and shape sensemaking? What gets normalized when and how during extended crises? How it is that similar organizations respond differently to what appear to be similar constraints and opportunities?

Second, the pandemic has emphasized the importance of jobs that are rarely ever marketed as exotic -think of police officers, delivery drivers, cleaners, postal workers, and the legions of healthcare workers -physicians, nurses, epidemiologists, hospital professionals, technical support staff and managers (or those who do not run from but towards risk) -as they provide care for Covid-19 infected patients while often ill-equipped and poorly prepared. Critical as these jobs are today, we have an opportunity to study them 'up close' to better understand what makes for meaningful work. How do people experience work that may traditionally have been stigmatized and yet is now discursively and materially constituted as heroic? How do heroic discourses affect how such workers feel about their work? To what extent do these help them cope with fear and anxiety, or perhaps exacerbate them? Is there a dark side to such discourses, and if so what is it? How do they contribute to conveying and reproducing gender and racial identities and inequities?

Third, the pandemic serves as a reminder of the fragility of life (as we know it) and the importance of training our ECR eye on societal grand challenges such as child sexual abuse, populism, religious extremism, migration, environmental destruction, global warming, war, inequality, homelessness, obesity, gun violence, cyber-crime, electionmeddling, and corporate fraud that we can contribute to resolving in whole or in part. The pandemic provides us with the impetus to take these even more seriously. Among others, Covid-19 invites risk, crisis, and emergency researchers to question the effectiveness of our governance systems. How have austerity and neo-liberal policies contributed to enhancing instead of alleviating the social and economic consequences of the pandemic? How has the pandemic revealed the fragility of the for-profit orientation adopted by many health care organizations today? How is expert knowledge about the pandemic constituted as a regime of truth in different cultures? How is the relationship between science and power institutionally deployed in different countries in response to the crisis?

Fourth, the pandemic invites us to develop new ways of studying risk, crises and emergencies. Our forced reliance on such communication platforms as Zoom might have at least one unexpected benefit: given that Zoom meetings can be recorded, they potentially afford us a rare opportunity to study meetings at multiple managerial and institutional levels and to do so in great detail (being able to press pause or stop and rewind). Incidentally, the normalization of Zoom as a practice might also make it easier for extreme context researchers to collaborate across geographies and disciplines. For example, might we be able to organize digital sessions of 'open theorizing' around similar data sets involving those from very different disciplinary backgrounds? As a 'staged' experiment inside a 'natural' one, what have we to lose? Fifth, our exposure to something as universally impactful (and unprecedented in recent times) as a pandemic might encourage ECR afficionados to look to alternative methods such as fiction to appreciate not only what could happen, but what life might be like should it happen. For example, whilst 9/11 was largely unforeseen, it was presaged by an intelligence officer using Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor as inspiration. Fiction, as Margaret Atwood said, gives us a chance to test-drive the future -to experiment what isn't but could be. The idea of using fiction for research purposes is thus to challenge reality, rather than as a counterpoint to empirical observations (Hällgren and Buchanan, 2020) . Future research could focus on how to avoid failures of imagination and prepare organizations for future scenarios. How can our societies handle a doomsday scenario? How might individuals, groups and organizations react to an extended existential threat? What makes for more and less effective leadership in such contexts?

Finally, we might enhance our ability to speak to practice by means of closer-up studies of people engaged in practices, as Weick did in his seminal works. Such a practicesensitive approach to theorizing assumes that meaning, knowledge, agency and sociality are aspects and effects of the nexus of interconnect human practices (Schatzki, 2001 , as cited in Nicolini, 2011 . While Weick relied on secondary sources, the pandemic might afford us front-row seats through field observations, enactive ethnography, autoethnography, or digital ethnography, or any method that allows for real-time observation of real people engaging in real practices under really challenging circumstances. And while attempting to focus on 'what's life-giving for them', we may save ourselves in the process.

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