Abstract
Over the past few years, we have observed an acceleration of crisis and disasters impacting the life of millions of people including COVID-19, extensive and catastrophic wildfires, widespread and devastating flood, terrorism, and so on. When we think about these extreme events, most of us feel totally useless as if all of a sudden everything we know becomes irrelevant. Yet, these extreme events translate into ”organizing crises.” Therefore, we should have many things to say as we are supposed to be experts in organizing! This paradox is certainly a good pretext for a deep reflection on the (in)significance of our academic role in (war)times.
Extreme (war)times, such as what Ukraine is currently going through, are challenging who we are as academics, what is relevant, and what we should value in our work as organization scholars and theorists. In the face of the multiple disruptive events our societies are experiencing, there is a need to think about the role of organizational researchers in extreme (war)times. In this essay, I am asking the following questions: what do these extreme (war)times teach us about who we have become over the years? What is (or should be) the role of organization researchers in turbulent times? At the same time, this essay wants to be a cry for hope because such outbreak situations open new possibilities to change the world with our theories!
Who are we as organization researchers?
Over many decades, our work and theories have been developed in concomitance with the shifts and transformations of conventional organizations as dictated by their external environments. We thus have become experts on organizational structure, culture, institutions, networks, discourses, processes, practices, and so on. Doing so, we have been responding to organizational needs in context of change, economic growth and globalization without sufficient questioning for whom we were producing organization knowledge. Most of us have limited ourselves to study order and conventional organizational settings without paying enough attention to what is happening at the margin of the world.
Yet, research on risk, crisis and emergencies is not new in organization studies. We can think about the famous study of the fire at Mann Gulch, the 9/11 World Trade Centre tragedy, the Challenger disaster, the Stockwell shooting, the extreme case of the Holocaust, to name a few. Most of the time, organization scholars have privileged the study of extreme events in the western world. Too preoccupied by developing our theories, we have been using knowledge produced from these extreme cases to reveal dynamics and processes that remain hidden in conventional settings instead of providing pragmatic and critical points of view to address the grand challenges of our times.
After all, research is also fashion-driven, and, currently we are witnessing an increased interest from organization scholars in creating engaged research communities that are taking extreme events, grand challenges, and socio-environmental issues more seriously (Creed, Gray, Höllerer, Karam, & Reay, 2022; Howard-Grenville, 2021). It is likely that such research will grow over the next decade, but it is less certain whether this growth will provide the kind of theories and knowledge needed to overcome the harmful consequences of these events and issues in our organizational world. One thing is for sure, in turbulent times we need to push the boundaries of our academic work by making our research more impactful for organizations and societies.
What are these (war)times teaching us?
Some wars get more attention than others. This is certainly the case regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This humanitarian tragedy forcing people to leave their homes while many others are being killed has attracted the global attention of the western world while others similar conflicts – for example, those in Afghanistan or Ethiopia – simply haven’t. This should make us realize that extreme events are always socially constructed by organizations, governments, civil society, and medias. (War)times have consequences that go beyond organizations. Too often, organization scholars forget that organizations and society are embedded in one another for the best and for the worst.
In parallel with the war in Ukraine, other extreme events such as COVID-19 and its post-consequences, the scale and frequency of wildfires, and the recent growing inflationist pressures on families are reinforcing the distress of millions of people. Is there any connection between these extreme events, you may ask me? In fact, they are all reflective of the socio-political and environmental degradation of the world. It is as if the multi-layers of violence and atrocities resulting from these extreme events are somehow all intertwined in one and the same infernal loop. Therefore, these extreme events are catapulting us into a dystopic area where a dark and difficult future is awaiting us all.
A literature review recently published in The Lancet on extreme events and genre-based violence showed that when a disaster strikes, whether it is a flood, drought or famine, or a major fire, women (and all minorities) are particularly vulnerable to situations of abuses and exploitation (van Daalen et al., 2022). Beyond these extreme events, we can see an authoritarian drift specifically impacting vulnerable populations and minorities (Adler et al., 2023). This is even more true in (war)times. For instance, sexual violence and harassment against women are used as a tactic by the aggressor in the Ukraine war as in any armed conflicts. We know that worldwide, people from minorities are the most affected by climate change as much as they are the first ones to suffer from these extreme events since they are less equipped for dealing with the setbacks linked to the degradation of their living environment.
Yet, it is as if we have not learned from the past. Once again, the war and associated extreme events invite us to reflect on our way of producing knowledge in academia while putting what we know at the service of societal issues. As many academics from various disciplines, we should pay more attention to disruptive situations and the social injustices they provoke and reinforce. As we can use the extraordinary to understand the ordinary, researching in (war)times can help us deepen our knowledge of many topics in organization studies including coordination, routines, activity, teamwork, interpretive frameworks, and so on. But we have to develop knowledge to empower those at the margins.
The challenge of studying extreme (war)times
How can we make all of what we know about organizations and organizing more relevant in a world where extreme events are becoming the new normal? These events are a unique opportunity to observe how individuals, groups and communities are recreating order while being more conscious of the impact of culture and politics on organizations and organizing. However, studying these contexts “outside the normal life” challenges our usual ways of doing and publishing research in academia, which in turn impacts the way we are defining ourselves as organizational scholars. Two of these challenges are of primary importance when researching in (war)times: putting ourselves at risk and producing impactful research.
Putting ourselves at risk
Extreme contexts provide a near-perfect in-vivo laboratory in which we can study the turmoil of the world. For example, the construction of anti-tank obstacles known as “hedgehogs” by Ukrainian workers and local artists in an old metal workshop in Lviv is a fascinating ”cosmology episode” to better understand the use of creativity but most importantly also leadership, oppression, and resistance in extreme (war)times. The war in Ukraine also invites us to look at how firms, managers, and workers in key sectors such as health care or humanitarian help are making sense of urban combats. To help them, we should know more about the way they use their practical knowledge to act in a resilient manner in spite of the turmoil they are facing.
Of course, researching in unsettling contexts implies that we put ourselves at risk. Collecting real-time data in the context of an extreme event raises some safety concerns, poses specific challenges in terms of fieldwork access, and requires that researchers be prepared to live complex emotions such as “feelings of helplessness, feelings of guilt and shame, and discomfort about one’s role” (Claus, de Rond, Howard-Grenville, & Lodge, 2019). Being there also implies helping these people and therefore making a difference, however small it can be. Of course, being there also brings up some ethical concerns and responsibility issues regarding the people who have seen their life turned upside down. In any case, we should not instrumentalize people’s grief and hardship to get a good story.
Producing impactful research
In the academic world, it is well known that practitioners are not reading what we are writing and publishing in our academic journals. These (war)times provide the intellectual puzzlement that can trigger us to find new ways of writing and disseminating research on organization and organizing aside from publishing our work in academic journals. First, it urges us to open-up new spaces for dialogue with practitioners. What we know can certainly be translated into multiple genres. Why don’t we write books for managers and workers, reports for policy makers, pamphlets for activists, blogs for humanitarian workers and other researchers, and so on?
Second, organization scholars should also be more present within the public sphere actively disseminating their knowledge. When an extreme event is happening, the public sphere is filled with experts of all kinds such as political scientists, international researchers, economists, historians, epidemiologists, and so on. However, we rarely hear organization researchers commenting on an extreme event or a catastrophic situation. Organization researchers remain silent while we should be out there in the first row! Indeed, we do have something to say about all these “organizing crises” even though we know that our knowledge is incomplete and imprecise. We can provide answers to politicians and policy makers, to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and humanitarian workers, to managers and professionals from private and associative sectors who are impacted by the Ukraine invasion. It is not entirely our fault, however, if our academic work is not more visible. We can only make our academic role more significant if those in power in the various educational institutions are more open to the translation of what we know on organizations and organizing for different audiences by valorizing all forms our work may take.
Does our work matter?
As a closing remark, I put forth in this essay a reflection I hope will generate a debate about the role of organizational researchers in (war)times. Despite all the constraints in which our academic work is embedded, I think that it is our task to make the world a better place to live. We can change the world with our theories! But we will first need to change our way of producing knowledge in academia in order to make it both more practical and more critical.