Wicked Crises and the (In)capacity to Act

Abstract

A crisis is a juncture that demands decision and action. We live in times of wicked crises, that is, crises that are non-linearly interlinked; transgress organizational, institutional, and cultural boundaries; and can be addressed only collectively. Our chances to rise to wicked crises depend on our capacity to decide and to act in concert, which is power, according to political philosopher Hannah Arendt. In this essay, in honor of Administrative Science Quarterly’s 70th volume, I highlight different features of wicked crises and discuss two interrelated forces that weaken and undermine such power: first, organizational fragmentation, which results in governance complexity and fault lines, and second, societal fragmentation, which manifests in growing distrust in core cultural institutions, polarization, the loss of a shared lifeworld, and the rise of authoritarianism. I conclude with a call to action for our discipline.

There has been no shortage of crises in the first two-and-a-half decades of this millennium: 9/11, the global financial crisis of 2008, refugee crises, the climate crisis, COVID-19, the Russo-Ukrainian war, and the wars in the Middle East, to name just a few. Although societies have always faced unsettled times and we may question whether all proclaimed crises actually deserve the label, observers have noted that we live in a “permacrisis” (the Collins Dictionary’s 2022 word of the year), a cascading “global polycrisis” (Lawrence et al., 2024, p. 1), and an “age of crises” (OECD, 2022).

In this essay, I argue that due to a combination of environmental, social, technological, and geopolitical factors, the most demanding crises of our time—such as climate change, forced displacement, and cyber insecurity—are “wicked” (Rittel & Webber, 1973, p. 155). Wicked crises go beyond individual institutions, organizations, states, and local orders; they unfold on multiple scales simultaneously, are non-linearly interlinked, and there is no central authority capable of comprehensively addressing them. Our current predominant crisis models, which conceptualize crises as spatially localized and temporally phased events, are insufficient to address wicked crises.

Moreover, wicked crises present a dangerous conundrum. The complexity, urgency, and high stakes of these crises may advantage tight cultures due to their coherence and ability to effectively sanction deviance (Gelfand et al., 2021). For the same reason, these crises seem to call for hierarchical and centralized decision making and thereby play into the hands of authoritarian leadership styles. Yet, given the multiple scales, relationality, and ungovernable nature of wicked crises, addressing them depends on the capacity of plural actors to decide and act in concert. This capacity is becoming ever more fragile as trust in plural society and its institutions is rapidly eroding, authoritarian leadership styles are on the rise both in politics and organizations (Adler et al., 2023; Battilana et al., 2025; Nord et al., 2025), and democracy and our shared lifeworld are in crisis. Wicked crises, thus, inhere a dynamic that undermines the capacity to address these crises.

Below, I define “crisis,” and from this definition and the characteristics of wicked crises I infer the need for collective decision making and action. I then outline organizational and societal fragmentation as two major forces that undermine our capacity to act in concert in the face of wicked crises. I conclude with a call to action for organization and management researchers.

From Bounded Crisis to Wicked Crises

Etymologically, “crisis” derives from the Greek word krínein, which means to distinguish, separate, decide, judge. The words “crisis,”“criterion,” and “critique” have the same etymological origin: a fork in the road that requires a decision on which way to turn. For French philosopher Paul Ricœur, a crisis marked a turning point that disrupts “the normally tight relationship between the horizon of expectations and the space of experience” (Ricœur, 1986, p. 57, my translation). In this sense, crisis marks a pathology of history’s flow.

By interrupting the link between experience and expectation, a crisis melts down institutions. Institutions can no longer provide scripts for actions to be taken. Moreover, in order to (derived from expectations and the envisaged future) and because of (derived from prior experiences) motives that actors draw on for designing their course of action (Schütz, 2016) lose their relevance (Kornberger et al., 2019). “To perceive a situation as crisis,”Ricœur (1986, p. 54, my translation) emphasized, “means not knowing any longer which stable hierarchy of values should guide my preferences; not being able any longer to clearly differentiate between my friends and my foes.” Socially and culturally, a crisis marks a situation in which, for a certain time window, the social world becomes fragile and is up for grabs. As Berger and Luckmann (1967, p. 121) reminded us, all social reality is precarious; social order is always a construction in the face of chaos and of “the constant possibility of anomic terror,” and in situations of crisis we are on the brink.

Yet, although the present is unsettled, as long as the crisis lasts the future is open. Dutch crisis researchers Arjen Boin and colleagues (2018) noted that, in contradistinction to catastrophe and disaster, speaking of a crisis is, in an odd way, deeply optimistic. Speaking of a crisis suggests that the threat may still be averted if people, communities, organizations, and governments rise to the challenge and take the right turn. The crisis marks a juncture that, despite all insecurities and risks, demands judgment, decision, and action. And these judgments, decisions, and actions will make the difference—they are literally decisive—for better or worse. Hence, the ability to rise to a crisis rests, first and foremost, on the capacity to decide and to act.

While there are many approaches to crisis across disciplines and literatures, most definitions encompass three core characteristics, which Charles Hermann (1963, p. 63) summarized in Administrative Science Quarterly more than six decades ago: significant threat, short decision time, and surprise. Building on this definition, Karl Weick (1988, p. 305; see also, for example, James et al., 2011) famously defined crisis as “low probability/high consequence events that threaten the most fundamental goals of an organization. Because of their low probability, these events defy interpretations and impose severe demands on sensemaking.” These three features and the characterization of crisis as an event have come to predominate in organization and management research and are, with some variations, repeated in most research in our field and in adjacent scholarly areas such as public administration and public policy.

These notions of crisis imply temporal and spatial dimensions. The temporal dimension is foregrounded in Ricœur’s view of crisis as pathology of history and is inherent to the common conceptualization of crisis as event. Consequently, the traditional way to study crisis follows this temporal flow: pre-crisis, during crisis, and post-crisis, which are marked by critical moments and stage models covering prevention, response, and recovery. The temporal dimension is also foregrounded in research that indicates various stakeholders’ different time sensitivities, for instance, how politicians, rescue teams, and affected community members all work with different temporal orientations and temporal structures that may or may not collide (e.g., Geiger et al., 2020; Kateb et al., 2025; Skade et al., 2025). The spatial dimension denotes where a crisis unfolds and locates a crisis geographically and as place-related (e.g., Kodeih et al., 2023; Wright et al., 2021). Crises are located also within a social-historical fabric, a specific societal sphere (as, for example, in financial crises or health crises), or levels of political authority and jurisdiction (e.g., intergovernmental, federal or regional), which indicate which institutions and organizations are threatened and/or called upon to decide and act. In terms of the conceptual lens of scale (Bansal et al., 2018; Beckman et al., 2023; Dittrich, 2022; Ostrom, 2012), analyzing and contextualizing a crisis go beyond geographical location and imply placing it in terms of its geographic, environmental, economic, socio-historical, political, and relational dimensions.

Our traditional ways of depicting crises as localized and phased events have been very impactful in research and practice. They illuminate crises that occur in a specific geographical or social space and have a beginning, turning point, and end; and, undoubtedly, there are still many bounded, local crises that organizations need to deal with. Arguably, these models work best when the term “crisis” can be used as a word in the singular. However, our established crisis models reach their limits for crises that are no longer bounded events but spill over territorial, disciplinary, sectoral boundaries, and policy fields, or crises that transgress the boundaries between culture and nature (Ansell et al., 2010; Boin et al., 2020).

According to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 global risks perception survey (WEF, 2025), more than one-third of respondents characterized the outlook for the world in the next two years as stormy (global catastrophic risks looming) or turbulent (upheavals and elevated risk of global catastrophes). For the outlook concerning the next ten years, this number rises to over 60 percent. The most serious threats are, not surprisingly, wars and forced displacement, climate change, misinformation and cyber insecurity, as well as societal polarization. While some of these threats have occurred repeatedly in human history, others, such as cyber insecurity, adverse outcomes of artificial intelligence (AI), and the current level of disinformation, are more novel. However, even the more familiar, recurring crises such as pandemics, economic crises, interstate armed conflicts, and forced displacement have amplified impact in a globalized world. What distinguishes the current threats and resulting crises is that they score on multiple scalar dimensions and also multiple times on these dimensions: They are global and local; they concern multiple levels of jurisdiction simultaneously; they span past, present, and future; they are humanitarian and environmental and economic, and so forth. The United Nations Global Crises Response Group on Food, Energy and Finance (UN GCRG, 2022, p. 2–4), for example, warned that the war in Ukraine is a multidimensional crisis affecting over 90 countries and has ripple effects on food, energy, and finance: “Each of these elements,” they wrote in their brief, “can have important effects on its own, but they can also feed into each other creating vicious cycles. . . . The vicious cycles this crisis creates shows that no one dimension of the crisis can be fixed in isolation.”

The most challenging current crises are wicked. They are ill defined and include evaluative and contested judgments; they are highly complex and dynamic; they have a relational dimension not only in drawing attention to the relationships among humans, organizations, and institutions within a crisis and its context but also regarding the entanglement of multiple crises with one another. Wicked crises unfold simultaneously but in an asynchronous way, one being a symptom and at the same time an outcome of another; they are not only complex themselves but interlinked in non-linear pathways. Most important, they are, by definition, intractable and uncontrollable, and it is essential to realize that no single or central actor can deal with wicked crises, and no effective single command post exists.

The importance of collaboration and collective action is well established in academia and practice, including in the work of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom (e.g., 2010), who stressed the importance of distributed yet concerted decision making and polycentric governance. In our field of research, Ferraro and colleagues (2015), for instance, provided a model for collective, robust action in order to tackle the major challenges of our time, George and colleagues (2016) stressed the need for coordinated and sustained multi-stakeholder efforts, and Gray and Purdy (2018) elaborated on how collaborations may overcome core challenges. The UN GCRG (2022, p. 4) concluded in their brief on the Russo-Ukrainian war that these crises are “a common responsibility. . . . It takes a world to fix a world, what is needed now is to start.”

What stops us from moving forward? What undermines the collective capacity to decide and act? Scholarly work has drawn attention to multiple obstacles, including ingrained social division and asymmetric access to resources, political convictions and moral foundations, the motivational fabric of the involved actors, and scaling issues (for overviews, see, for example, Gümüsay et al., 2022; Leixnering et al., 2025). In the remainder of this essay, I highlight two aspects that have a common root: fragmentation. First, organizational fragmentation and resulting fault lines in governance arrangements increase complexity in coordination and collective action, even in the absence of conflicts of interest, competition, or adversaries. Second, societal fragmentation driven by fractures in society’s social fabric goes hand in hand with the decline of trust in core institutions, polarization, the loss of a shared lifeworld, and the rise of authoritarian styles.

Organizational Fragmentation and Governance Fault Lines

Amitai Etzioni (1964, p. 1) famously observed 60 years ago that “[o]ur society is an organizational society.”Charles Perrow (1991, p. 726) noted that “[l]arge organizations have absorbed society,” in the sense that they are no longer a part of society but are a surrogate for it. More recently, while the relevance of organizations in modern society is undiminished, the organizational landscape has changed considerably. I highlight two interrelated developments that contribute to organizational fragmentation: the proliferation of formal organizations and the decomposition of large organizations into complex assemblages of interconnected entities.

The worldwide expansion of formal organization since World War II has been documented and elaborated by Tricia Bromley and John Meyer (2015) in their work on hyperorganization. This proliferation includes not only the significant increase in the numbers of organizations across all sectors but, as the authors argue, also the extent to which these organizations are construed as purposeful, autonomous, strategic actors that are expected to define their identities and boundaries.

The large integrated organizations that long dominated industries and fields have decomposed into business groups consisting of complex assemblages of interconnected entities with interwoven ownership structures, cash flows, and boards. These assemblages are often spread out internationally across different political and economic systems. In addition, new forms of organizing, such as platforms or open organizing, challenge the organization as the appropriate unit of analysis (e.g., Davis & DeWitt, 2022). Similar developments have occurred in the public sector, in which decades of reforms and “agency fever” (Pollitt et al., 2001, p. 271) have transformed formerly monolithic state bodies into nested organizational networks. Cities, for instance, are composed of an often small, classic bureaucratic administrative core surrounded by hundreds of interwoven organizations across multiple levels of ownership, legal regimes (public and private law), and a broad variety of organizational forms (from corporations to public law agencies) that are subjected to different governance regimes (Leixnering et al., 2021). The complex designs of these multi-organizational formations make it difficult to demarcate boundaries, understand power structures, and locate decision making. These complex designs also give rise to concerns about the opaqueness of structures, accountability, responsibility and transparency deficits, regulation gerrymandering, offshoring and tax avoidance, indirect political influence, and regulatory capture, among other issues.

Organizational fragmentation poses a challenge to coordination even in the absence of conflicts of interest, competition, ideological dissent, or political maneuvers and increases the complexity for dispersed, polycentric decision making. Globalization, just-in-time international supply chains, and interlinked international relations have tightened the interdependence among states, policy systems, economy, and civil society. At the same time, complex, interwoven organizational formations are increasing fragmentation by multiplying interorganizational interfaces; and the construction of every organization as a rational, strategic, and purposeful actor fortifies the boundaries between these organizational entities.

These developments impact the ability to respond to all crises, particularly wicked crises. Interfaces and complexity multiply the risks of spillovers and enhance the potential scope of crisis escalation. These ingredients increase the vulnerability of systems and institutions. They not only make fatal accidents “normal” (Perrow, 1984), but they are also a source of friction when it comes to dealing with the accidents. They are problematic even for smaller scale or routine crises where all actors involved share interpretations and a sense of necessity and urgency, and standard operating procedures are in place, simply because competency overlaps and/or governance gaps are inevitable.

Wicked crises are multi-scalar constellations and involve ecosystems of organizations with different governance modes and arrangements. Addressing these crises requires not only the alignment of different actors across sectors but the alignment of a multitude of formal and informal governance regimes. Arguably, all of these challenges could be interpreted as warranting centralized governance and decision making. But given that wicked crises are, by nature, ungovernable, the hope that a center can be restored, that a central decision maker can guide the way, is unfounded and ultimately counterproductive, quite apart from being undesirable from a democratic and pluralistic point of view. Similarly, Ostrom (2012) emphasized that although multi-scalar challenges seem to call for global solutions, relying on one scale and one model to address them is naïve and is part of the problem rather than a solution. Instead, what is needed is a better understanding of how decisions on multiple scales and across multiple autonomous yet overlapping and interlinked decision makers are interrelated and how they interact.

There is ample and growing research on multisector and multi-stakeholder collaborations, pluralistic governance arrangements, and collective action. This knowledge is spread across several scholarly fields, including ours. We need more disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge (for similar calls, see, for example, Leixnering et al., 2025; Reinecke et al., 2024) but also more specific insights from organization and management scholars on how organizational fragmentation impacts the capacity to decide and act in concert, as well as on the opportunities and challenges of polycentric decision making and collective action more broadly.

A promising way to know more about the implications of organizational fragmentation is to study interfaces in which governance fault lines materialize and impede collaboration (e.g., Dentoni et al., 2018; Leixnering et al., 2025; Mair et al., 2016). Couture and colleagues (2023), as an excellent example, showed how the consolidation of collective responses trapped partners into reproductive activities that ultimately decreased the partnership’s capacity to collectively respond to the challenge they set out to address.

Governance fault lines manifest within single scalar dimensions and across them. We need to develop systematic and empirically based knowledge on what types of governance fault lines emerge in relation to specific scalar constellations of wicked crises and how these fault lines impact the ability to address the crises. With regard to the jurisdictional dimension, for example, multi-level state structures create vertical (e.g., between federal and state level) and horizontal (between different states or partners in a partnership) interfaces, with consequences for coherence and speed of decision making. Fourie and colleagues (2023) provided insights into the implications of governance gaps at jurisdictional interfaces for the capacity to fight the Black Summer bushfires in Australia in 2020. On the spatial scale, governance fault lines occur whenever problems and solutions are dislocated, as is the case with refugee streams during armed conflicts or with the impacts of global warming. Most crises that affect a larger geographical scale also involve multiple jurisdictional systems and levels, leading to complex inter-scalar constellations. Frey-Heger and colleagues’ study (2022), for instance, showed how a transnational multi-actor partnership set up for refugee protection developed mutually reinforcing dissociative mechanisms, which, on the ground in Rwanda, not only hindered appropriate responses but actually intensified the problem they were supposed to address.

Governance fault lines on the temporal scalar dimensions, in combination with the spatial and jurisdictional dimensions, surface often as anticipatory governance issues (e.g., Guston, 2014). The famous Collingridge dilemma (Collingridge, 1980) describes the conundrum: During early stages, while regulation and introduction of governance rules may still be possible, not enough knowledge about potentially harmful implications exists. Once the problems have materialized, the capacity to intervene is radically diminished, not least due to jurisdictional and regulatory fragmentation; the power of the tech providers, which makes it almost impossible for any regulator to meet them at eye level; widespread use of the new technology; divergent ethical standpoints; and lack of consensus on whether and how to act collectively. Generative AI and cryptocurrencies are fabulous examples demonstrating the dilemmas of anticipatory governance in real time.

Finally, organizational research should study more comprehensibly how the multipolar world order and current geopolitical situation, together with rising nationalisms, impact not only organizational fragmentation and the capacity to address wicked crises but also the existence of such crises and their gravity. Collective action is not per se a warrant for plurality and democracy. This observation brings me to the next section.

Societal Fragmentation and the Erosion of Power

Our chances to rise to the challenges of wicked crises rest on our capacity to decide and to act in concert. The essential feature of our existence as humans is the ability to start anew, to act, said Hannah Arendt (1987). For her, the capacity to act together with others is power. “Power,” she emphasized, “arises from the human capacity not only to act or to do something, but from associating with others and agreeing to act in concert” (1985, p. 45, my translation). For Arendt, power is never possessed by individuals but arises among them when they agree to act collectively; it vanishes when this association is broken. The human capacity to act in concert opens public space and is the foundation of pluralistic communities. This power, she emphasized, can be preserved in institutions and organizations that reflect the underlying democratic and liberal values. When the people withdraw their consent to the collective endeavor, these institutions and organizations may nonetheless linger. However, if they are no longer endorsed by the people, they eventually become instruments of violence. “Even the greatest power,” Arendt made clear, “can be destroyed by violence; out of the barrels of rifles comes the most effective command that can count on instant and unchallenged obedience. What never comes out of them is power” (1985, p. 54, my translation). The core danger, therefore, is that pluralistic societies are losing this power.

Various international observers have reported worrisome trends in this regard: Democratic backsliding and autocratization (e.g., Freedom House, 2025; Nord et al. 2025; The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2025), together with polarization of society, are increasing, while people’s trust in core cultural and political institutions is eroding (e.g., Pew Research Center, Edelman Trust Barometer, Eurobarometer). According to the World Economic Forum (2025), societal polarization is regarded as the fourth most severe threat in the coming two years. Apart from economic anxieties and social divides, the main forces identified as driving polarization are the loss of trust and a battle for truth, “making it harder to collaboratively solve problems” (Edelman, 2023, p. 4). Although one may always question the empirical basis of such questionnaire-based studies and the extent to which the responses across countries and political regimes can actually be compared, what is nonetheless alarming is that democracies were found to be affected by these trends to a higher extent than were authoritarian regimes.

For Arendt (1953), given that power always comes from people deliberating and acting together, loss of power starts and grows with fragmentation and isolation. Isolation, therefore, is the aim of all tyrannical regimes; it is the soil for totalitarianism and also its result (Arendt, 1986). The culprit in modern times seems easily identified: digital communication technologies and social media. And, indeed, research has found that communication technologies and social media algorithmically produce echo chambers that insulate people from rather than exposing them to opposing perspectives (e.g., Etter et al., 2019; Sunstein, 2017), feed off of and into the emotionality of contestations (Jing et al., 2024; Toubiana & Zietsma, 2017), drive ideological and especially affective polarization (Iyengar et al., 2012), and jeopardize willingness to collaborate (Dimant, 2023). Quite contrary to the promised democratization of the media sector, social media is charged with the amplification of partisan fragmentation (Waller & Anderson, 2021) and the reinforcement of the power of old and new elites in the hands of for-profit corporations (Hindman, 2008). Through the workings of digital technology, and social media in particular, the “promise of networked society,”Entman and Usher (2018, p. 299) wrote, “takes a dark turn,” damaging social cohesion and fracturing democracy.

It may be an interesting paradox that growing technological hyperconnectivity simultaneously increases societal fragmentation, as well as people’s experiences of alienation and isolation (but see Arendt’s observations on the “iron band [of terror] that presses isolated men together,” 1953, p. 321). Yet, it may be too quick to put the blame on digital communication technologies and social media. Research has demonstrated that the relationship among social media, disinformation, and polarization is complex and multidirectional (e.g., Tucker, 2018), varies for different platforms (Kitchens et al., 2020), is asymmetric with regard to users’ political preferences (Mosleh et al., 2024; Waller & Anderson, 2021) and across countries (Nord et al., 2025), and is driven by a small partisan group (Guess, 2021). Moreover, the significant polarization of platforms over time is fueled disproportionately by new users rather than individual-level polarization (Waller & Anderson, 2021). Social media’s ability to fracture and polarize society is high because, in our times of crises, the foundations of pluralistic societies are fragile.

From Ricœur (1986) we learned that being in a crisis entails a disruption of established thought-styles or paradigms, which leads to disorientation regarding the production and evaluation of truth claims. Swidler (1986) reminded us that unsettled times are high-ideology periods in which new ideologies emerge because the existing cultural toolkit no longer provides sufficient orientation. Ideologies make all-encompassing, totalizing claims to explain and legitimate the whole social and subjective world, including interpretations of the present, past, and future (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). The growing followership of conspiracy theories (Rao & Greve, 2024; Sutton & Douglas, 2020) and evidence that social sorting encompasses more and more previously apolitical areas of life (DellaPosta, 2020) point in this direction.

Whether the current developments will lead to the emergence of new all-encompassing ideologies is currently too early to know and goes beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, Arendt sharply observed that the ideal subject for totalitarian regimes is not the convinced believer of their symbolic universes “but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist” (1953, p. 321). Credibility and truth gaps are characteristic of times when the ever-changing and increasingly incomprehensible world has brought people to be simultaneously credulous and cynical, “always ready to believe anything and nothing at all, convinced that absolutely everything was possible and nothing true” (Arendt, 1986, p. 600, my translation). She was analyzing the emergence of totalitarian regimes in the last century, but if we agree with our mainstream media, we have already arrived at this point again. We are no longer disputing opinions, prioritizations of values, the legitimacy of interests, or the applicability of logics, but we are disputing what happened, not in distant history but yesterday, last week. What is at stake is trust in the reality of everyday reality (Schütz & Luckmann, 2003).

At the anti-vaccination protests during the COVID-19 crisis, for example, observers were puzzled to see people waving rainbow flags rallying next to others displaying fascist symbols. What mobilized these groups across traditional divisions such as political convictions, class, religion, or educational background was not so much a shared vision of the future or an all-encompassing new belief system (the “we” component of social identity). It was, rather, mistrust, not toward parts of the state (e.g., police, justice system, politicians) or individual groups of experts (e.g., economists or the medical profession) but toward cultural institutions as a whole—government, administration, courts, media, universities, and so forth—and opposition to what is regarded as a misguided mainstream way of defining reality, that is, a shared opposition to “them.”

This observation is in line with research that sees affective rather than ideological polarization to be increasing and the association between them to be inconclusive (e.g., Iyengar et al., 2012). It is also consistent with research showing that people’s detachment from political identities will not reduce their negative approach toward outgroup members (West & Iyengar, 2022), which relates to observations that current social sorting goes beyond traditional political partisan ideologies to include broader areas of life (DellaPosta, 2020). These findings also relate to research showing that people simultaneously adopt multiple and diverse conspiracy theories in order to hedge against increasing uncertainty (Greve et al., 2022). Rather than moving toward one broad ideology, Greve and colleagues (2022, p. 922) concluded, “there is a collapse of ideologies in contemporary society and the only grand narrative, if any, is uncertainty, which produces a patchwork quilt of beliefs.” The danger, thus, seems less to be that one politically ideological group is sharing more misinformation or rumors than another is (e.g., DeVerna et al., 2024; Mosleh et al., 2024) but, rather, the loss of basic consensus on what may count as mis-/disinformation and on how facts are differentiated from mere opinions or fake news (Meyer & Jancsary, 2025). The “deregulation of the truth market” that German journalist Michael Seemann (2017) diagnosed with regard to the media has infested all domains of society.

Perceptions and sensemaking, as well as temporal orientations, values, interests, and preferences, differ among key constituencies in a crisis, and it would be very naïve to assume that deciding and acting in concert in a pluralistic society can be achieved without conflicts over interests and values regarding societal and political issues and how these conflicts should be addressed. Notwithstanding the need for deliberation, negotiation, and often compromise, in general our traditional models of crisis rely on the assumption that different interpretations and frames feed from a shared lifeworld and cultural stock of knowledge and that, hence, some basic agreements, credibility, and trust exist. The models take for granted that, for instance, firefighters or ambulances are not regarded as agents of dark powers. And while in crises everything is scarce—time, attention, resources—it is this loss of a shared foundation that is becoming increasingly perilous. It makes it difficult for mainstream cultural institutions to back one another in times of crises, and the all-too-common crisis politicking, crisis exploitation, and blame games to harvest small political gains backfire and further destabilize the entire system. Power is a matter of people agreeing to act in concert, Arendt said. It is lost when people withdraw their consent. What are the tipping points when our institutions and the organizations that support them fail? It seems that we are observing their unraveling in real time.

Much of the current research on societal fragmentation stems from adjacent academic disciplines, such as research in psychology that analyzes individual-level predispositions to polarization or conspiracy theories, and communication and public policy studies investigating the impact of social media, the erosion of democratic institutions, or the rise of autocratic regimes. Fragmentation, polarization, and democratic backsliding involve as much (dis-)organization as their opposites do, and organization and management scholars obviously also have much to offer in many ways. Below, I point to a few research areas that, from my point of view, stand out regarding the capacity to act in concert in the face of wicked crises.

Quite broadly, we need to devote more attention to how geopolitics and global developments shape and are shaped by organizing and organizations. Against the backdrop of the multipolar world order and rising nationalisms globally, the multiple scalar dimensions of wicked crises and organizational fragmentation take a political turn. What is required is in-depth understanding of how organizations involved in addressing wicked crises are able to navigate polarized or totalitarian contexts, as well as avert autocratic surges both inside (Battilana et al., 2025) and outside their boundaries (Adler et al., 2023; Meyer & Quattrone, 2021). A further way to investigate societal fragmentation from an organizational and management angle is to systematically gather insights into how specific organizations and (dis-)organizing processes and practices fuel or alleviate fragmentation. For instance, all five of the new digital “pump-valves” that Entman and Usher (2018, p. 299) blamed for the dark turn of digital communication and the fracturing of democracy—platforms, analytics, algorithms, ideological media, and rogue actors such as bots or trolls—have an organizational dimension and already are or will be on the research agenda of organization and management scholars. Also, adjacent fields’ emerging interest in the practices and mechanisms of division entrepreneurs (e.g., Scoville, 2025), that is, actors who purposely and strategically construct divisive issues that reinforce us/them boundaries, could be linked to insights from organization and management theory into institutional (Battilana et al., 2009) or cultural entrepreneurs (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001).

Some actors and organizations are themselves key geopolitical players, working for or against polarization and fragmentation, and we need to understand better their roles, workings, and impacts. Selznick (1952) referred to organizations that are hijacked by partisan interests as “organizational weapons,” and in our current geopolitical climate, such organizational weapons can be located in all sectors of society and all parts of the world. Scholars and commentators have started to highlight the role played by private sector organizations: Davis, for instance, emphasized the threats of “corporate authoritarianism,” especially in tech firms, for democracy (in Adler et al., 2023, p. 6). Other examples of organizations at risk of weaponization include state bureaucracy in service of autocratic leadership, critical infrastructure providers, organizations involved with critical raw materials, and, quite literally, private military and security companies (e.g., Bátora, 2021; Baum & McGahan, 2013) that dismantle our understanding of the institution of war.

However, organizations and organizing are not merely instruments that thwart the capacity to act in concert; they also play an important role in overcoming fragmentation. Of particular interest are organizations and practices located at intersections of the multiple scalar dimensions of wicked crises, for instance those that play broker roles in polarized debates; provide meeting grounds for dialogue between parties in conflict; serve as hubs, bridges, or connectors for collaborations; or have the capacity and opportunity for diplomacy when states or other powerful actors are too entangled in their nationalistic or particularistic interests. In order to counteract the erosion of the capacity to act in concert in the face of wicked crises, we need to systematically accumulate, advance, and combine with other disciplinary insights our knowledge of these types of organizations and practices and how they can be enabled and empowered in service of pluralism.

Conclusion

Crisis indicates a juncture and demands decision and action. Multiple scales, inherent relationality, and ungovernability render the most demanding crises of our time wicked. Our chances to address the wicked crises of our time rest on our capacity to decide and to act in concert. In this essay, I have highlighted two forces that undermine this capacity. The first force, proliferation of organizations and complexification of governance arrangements, is the outcome of developments in our organizational landscapes; the second is driven by broader societal developments: fragmentation due to polarization, mistrust in the cultural institutions of society, and the loss of a shared lifeworld. The two forces are interrelated and feed each other: While the existence of fault lines is characteristic of all complex governance arrangements, dealing with them is arguably more challenging in pluralistic societies, with their dispersed and pluricentric decision-making structures, than in autocratic or totalitarian systems. And in crisis situations, speed is of the essence. Loss of orientation in times of crises draws people to charismatic figures; fragmentation, isolation, and acceleration are the soil in which totalitarianism grows and flourishes (Arendt, 1986). The conundrum is that we must draw hope from our ability to decide and to act in concert when, at the same time, the foundations of this capacity are undermined by the same forces that make deciding and acting in concert ever more necessary.

The first force is obviously the core competence of organization and management research. However, our discipline also has much to contribute to the second: Both organizational and societal fragmentation involve a high degree of active organization and an equally high degree of active disorganization. Moreover, isolation, erosion of trust, polarization, and dissent are as manufactured as are their opposites. It is our task to offer insights into the antecedents, mechanisms, processes, and implications of the proliferation and complexification of governance arrangements for wicked crises and into how to work with them constructively and pluralistically without falling for centralized and autocratic decision-making structures, grand leadership visions, or totalizing belief systems. This brings me back to where I started: We need to adapt our notions and models of crisis to account for the multiple interlinked scales of wicked crises, as well as for organizational and societal fragmentation and the related processes of organizing and disorganizing. In a multipolar world order, this task includes rethinking the appropriate levels of analysis, our disciplinary boundaries, and our methodological toolbox.

There is much work ahead for organization and management scholars. To repeat the optimistic note I started with: As long as we live in times of crises, the future is open, and our decisions and actions will make the difference.