Researching Tomorrow's Crisis: Methodological Innovations and Wider Implications

Abstract

The incidence and impact of crises, disasters and other extreme events appears to be increasing, thus heightening the significance of crisis research. The nature of such events – sudden, inconceivable, damaging, sensitive, unique – has encouraged unconventional methodological perspectives and practices. A review of these developments is timely. This article presents a bounded, temporally bracketed overview of the literatures exploring extreme events, structured around an ‘ideal type’ event sequence with six phases: incubation period, incident, crisis management, investigation, organizational learning and implementation of ‘lessons learned’. While not a traditional review, this approach serves to overcome problems associated with phenomena resistant to precise definition, and maps the structure of a field characterized by fragmentation, insular traditions and epistemological pluralism, generating a template against which crises can be explored. Crisis research appears to have overcome the problems associated with relying on retrospective research designs, accessing sensitive data, addressing novel ethical concerns, developing multi‐level explanations and using single case studies to develop generalizable theory. The wider adoption of these approaches in ‘mainstream’ organization and management studies may prompt innovation and fresh insights in other areas, particularly where the temporal structure of events, the role of slow‐moving causes, and conjunctural reasoning, play significant roles.