Frame Restructuration: The Making of an Alternative Business Incubator amid Detroit’s Crisis

Abstract

Adaptive responses to crisis rely on effective cognitive frames: understanding what is going on amid unfolding crisis and what should be done to address it. Research has shown that failing to drop a routine cognitive frame exacerbates crises, while nimbly adopting a novel frame enhances resilience. This suggests that actors in crisis have an urgent dual mission: to simultaneously destroy and construct frames. Existing research offers little guidance on how actors can accomplish this in the midst of their struggles to survive threatening and disruptive circumstances. I address this shortcoming by drawing from a 22-month ethnography of a Detroit business incubator, analyzing how it gradually developed a novel diagnostic and prognostic frame of the city’s unfolding crisis. I propose and show that actors amid crisis construct a novel frame—while dismantling an old one—through a process of frame restructuration: the novel frame emerges from and co-evolves with unconventional actions that pragmatically address the exigencies of the crisis. Mutual constitution between pragmatic actions and the emergent frame can be critically propelled by the use of metaphor, which helps actors instantly reframe the context.