ABSTRACT
3Crises have been studied in academia in many disciplines and from diverse perspectives for at least 150 years. However, recent decades have seen a marked increase in the crisis literature, primarily due to the pervasiveness of crises throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and onwards, and an associated inflation in crisis discourses. The 1970s witnessed a range of political and economic crises – the Nixon Shock, the 1973 oil crisis, stagflation, and intensified class struggles as well as the emergence of new social movements – which contributed to the electoral victories of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the US and the UK, respectively. The 1980s in turn witnessed high-profile commercial, industrial, and technological disasters (e.g., the Bhopal disaster, Chernobyl, the Challenger explosion, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill) that reignited interest in disasters as well as crises and how to prevent, manage, or resolve them. A further major boost came with the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. Indeed, this led to greatly increased funding and efforts to enhance coordinated research and planning. Thus, as Boin, McConnell and ‘t Hart point out, this has triggered efforts to unify “a disjointed, segmented set of niches within the social sciences” concerned with crises (2008, p. 6).
