ABSTRACT

Crisis management scholarship arguably has struggled for decades to find a central place in management and organization theory. This state of affairs belies a surge of both practical interest by executives and the popular press to better understand the origins of risk and crises and ways to better manage them (Boin, Hart, Stern, & Sundelius, 2005), and theoretical interest by scholars wanting to reinvigorate and expand research on organizational adversity and resilience (van der Vegt, Essens, Wahlström, & George, 2015). The challenges that threaten organizations and institutions continue to grow, and the types of crises and the possible sources of their origins have grown as well (Boin, Comfort, & Demchak, 2010). Yet, research has largely focused on crises that are large and highly visible (e.g., high consequence, low probability events) and has focused mostly on crisis management after the fact. Scholars have neglected incubating processes and other dynamics that precede or may lead to crises (Roux-Dufort, 2007; Williams, Gruber, Sutcliffe, Shepherd, & Zhao, 2017). It is in this domain that I urge future researchers to focus their attention.