ABSTRACT
The Chinese ideogram for crisis combines two characters: danger and opportunity. This indicates the duality of crisis and suggests several important issues for current and future analyses of crisis, crisis construals, and crisis lessons. First, the ideogram signifies that crises have both objective and subjective aspects corresponding to danger and opportunity respectively. Building on Régis Debray, we can say that, objectively, crises occur when a set of social relations (including their ties to the natural world) cannot be reproduced (cannot “go on”) in the old way. Subjectively, crises tend to disrupt (even “shock”) accepted views of the world and create uncertainty on how to “go on” within it. For they threaten established views, practices, institutions, and social relations, calling into question theoretical and policy paradigms as well as everyday personal and organizational routines. Second, in this sense, crises do not have predetermined outcomes: how they are resolved, if at all, depends on the actions taken in response to them. They are potentially path-shaping moments with performative effects that are mediated through the shifting balance of forces competing to influence crisis construal, crisis management, crisis outcomes, and possible lessons to be drawn from crisis. Third, without the objective moment, we have, at worst, deliberately exaggerated or even manufactured “crises,” at best, unwarranted panic based on mis-perception or mis-recognition of real world events and processes. 1 Sometimes, crises may be manufactured or, at least exaggerated, for strategic or tactical purposes not directly related to immediate events or processes. Agents may, for “political” motives, broadly interpreted, conjure crises from nowhere or exaggerate the breadth, depth, and threat of an actual crisis (Mirowksi, 2013). After all, “you never want to let a serious crisis go to waste” (cf. Rahm Emanuel’s comment, made on the Bloomberg television channel in November 2008 in his capacity as transition manager for President-elect Barack Obama). 2 A rigorous analysis of crises, crisis construals, and crisis management must be able to distinguish these alternatives or it could fall into a simplistic form of constructivism. Fourth, without the subjective moment, while disinterested observers may perceive a crisis developing either in real time or after the “event,” the crisis 50will have insufficient resonance for relevant participants to spur them into efforts to take decisive action. Yet the notion of critical moment and turning point is a key feature of crises as conventionally understood. Fifth, from this perspective, then, crises are complex, objectively overdetermined moments of subjective indeterminacy, where decisive action can make a major difference to the future (Debray, 1973, p. 113; see also pp. 99–100, 104–105).
