Researching Tomorrow's Crisis: Methodological Innovations and Wider Implications

• Published date: 01 April 2013
• Author: David Denyer,David A. Buchanan
• Date: 01 April 2013
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12002

Researching Tomorrow’s Crisis:

Methodological Innovations and

Wider Implications

David A. Buchanan* and David Denyer

School of Management, Cranfield University, Cranfield, Bedfordshire MK43 0AL, UK

*Corresponding author email: david.buchanan@cranfield.ac.uk

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 un-

conventional methodological perspectives and practices. A review of these develop-

ments 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, organ-

izational learning and implementation of ‘lessons learned’. While not a traditional

review, this approach serves to overcome problems associated with phenomena resist-

ant to precise definition, and maps the structure of a field characterized by fragmen-

tation, 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 generalizabletheory. The wider adoption of these approaches in

‘mainstream’ organizationand management studies may prompt innovation and fresh

insights in other areas, particularly wherethe temporal structure of events, the role of

slow-moving causes, and conjunctural reasoning, play significant roles.

Tomorrow’s crisis

The perception that the incidence and impact of

crises are increasing has heightened the importance

of crisis research. Leveson (2004) argues that several

trends are influencing the causes and consequences

of accidents and crises, including: technological

change; digital systems producing new hazards and

failure modes; increasing complexity of human–

machine relationships; changing regulatory views of

safety; and decreased public tolerance for accident

losses. During the initial drafting of this paper in

March 2011, one of the strongest earthquakes ever

recorded occurred off the north-east coast of Japan.

The earthquake triggered an event sequence that

included a tsunami followed by containment failures

at a nuclear power plant, leading to considerable loss

of life, damage to property, disruption to business,

damage to the Japanese economy, and censure for

government ministers and power company managers

for regulatory failures contributing to the power plant

problems (Kingston 2012). The previous year, in

April 2010, a blow-out and fire at the Macondo oil

well in the Gulf of Mexico destroyed the Deepwater

Horizon exploration rig, killing 11 and injuring 17

others. Spilling around five million barrels over the

next three months, and damaging the environment

and businesses on the Louisiana coast, this was the

worst oil spill in US history.The subsequent inquir y

attributed this disaster to a series of organization

and management failures (National Commission on

the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore

Drilling 2011a,b). While such events also occur

beyond the public gaze, ‘high-profile’ incidents have

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International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 15, 205–224 (2013)

DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12002

© 2012 The Authors

International Journal of Management Reviews © 2012 British Academy of Management and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA

02148, USA

coloured the contemporary social, political and eco-

nomic landscape by ensuring that the responses of

governments, regulators, other agencies and manage-

ment implicated in these events are scrutinized in

detail by the media.

A comparatively new field, crisis research has

grown steadily since the 1980s, creating a significant

published research base. Crisis research appears to

have at least three properties that create methodologi-

cal challenges for the field. First, crisis researchers

have been unable to agree definitions or typologies

concerning the events that interest them. Attempts to

define categories of incident must sit with the obser-

vation that many events belong in that category due

to interpretative social processes. Second, crisis

research is fragmented by ‘a myriad of disciplinary

approaches’; it appears in a cross section of general

and ‘niche’ journals, and ‘this fragmentation has kept

crisis research on the periphery of “mainstream” man-

agement theory’(James et al. 2011, p. 457). The result

of this fragmentation is the lack of integrating frame-

works, core concepts, agreed typologies or coherent

models to bind different perspectives together. Third,

researchers have been required to adopt designs and

methods considered unconventional in other areas,

and to use data from sources normally considered

unreliable and biased. This is a field where a

qualitative–processual paradigm is dominant, and

theory-building is often based on idiosyncratic cases

and small-n studies.

While those three challenges can be regarded as

weaknesses of this field, crisis research has made

significant contributions to management and organ-

ization studies. Weick’s (1988) seminal workon crisis

sense-making stimulated further work in that area

(e.g. Dunbar and Garud 2009; Stein 2004) and in other

domains. The study of crises has been the subject of

several special journal issues in organization and

management studies, such as the issue edited by Paul

Shrivastavafocusing on industrial crises in Journal of

Management in 1988. Recent issues have focused on

‘learning from rare events’ (Organization Science;

Lampel et al. 2009) and ‘leadership in extreme con-

texts’ (Leadership Quarterly; Hannah et al. 2009).

Organization and management studies have also con-

tributed to crisis research. For example, Perrow’s

(1999) pioneering study of the Three Mile Island

nuclear power plant failure (first published 1984)

brought an organizational perspective to what was

previouslyseen as an engineering problem (Ford et al.

2005). While the contribution of crisis research to

management and organization studies is laudable,

reviewingthe work of Starbuck and Farjoun (2005) on

lessons from NASA’s Columbia disaster, Neville

(2008, p. 1486) also argues the case for ‘mainstream-

ing workplace safety into organizational studies, a

field in which it presently receives relatively minimal

attention’. James et al. (2011, p. 484) argue that ‘the

study of crisis has not been as prevalent and impactful

in mainstream management journals as we would

hope or expect’, and argue for ‘bridging’ strategies.

One such bridging strategy would involve organ-

ization and management studies adopting the event

sequence and temporal bracketing structure that

underpins this review, and which draws a coherent

map of a fragmented multidisciplinary field, illustrat-

ing the scope of different research perspectives and

their combined contributions to theory and practice.

The event sequence structure can be used as a posi-

tioning tool, illustrating relationships between

research traditions, and indicating the potential for

dialogue between disparate perspectives (Astley and

Vande Ven 1983;Tsoukas 2009a). A second bridging

strategy would be for organization and management

studies to adopt the innovative methodological per-

spectives and practices that have developed in crisis

research. The field appears to have overcome the

problems associated with retrospective designs, sen-

sitive data, ethical concerns, multi-level explana-

tions, and using single case studies to develop theory.

The wider adoption of these approaches in ‘main-

stream’ organization and management studies may

prompt innovation and fresh insights in other areas,

and in particular where the temporal structure of

events, the role of slow-moving causes, and conjunc-

tural reasoning, are significant.

This review has six stages. First, we describe our

methods. Second, wefocus on ter minology. Third, we

use the event sequence to map crisis research and its

methodological properties. Fourth, we discuss data

collection and analysis, and the task of developing

multi-level, processually inspired, temporally sensi-

tive explanations. Fifth, we explore the current chal-

lenges facing crisis research. Finally, we offer five

methodological suggestions for researching the next

– tomorrow’s – crisis.

Review approach

This journal’s editors have encouraged the submis-

sion of non-traditional literature reviews, ‘grounded

in, and developed from, a synthesis of previous

research in the area, or based on integrative reviews

206 D.A. Buchanan and D. Denyer

© 2012 The Authors

International Journal of Management Reviews © 2012 British Academy of Management and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.