The Pedagogy of Economic, Political and Social Crises

Dynamics, Construals and Lessons

Bob Jessop, Karim Knio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351665742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Crises have been studied in many disciplines and from diverse perspectives for at least 150 years. Yet recent decades have seen a marked increase in the crisis literature, reflecting growing awareness of crisis phenomena from the 1970s onwards.

Responding to this mainstream literature, this edited collection makes six key innovations. First, it distinguishes between crises as event and crises as process, as well as crises as accidental events or as the result of system-generated processes. Second, it distinguishes crises that can be managed through established crisis-management routines from crises of crisis management. Third, it focuses on the symptomatology of crisis, i.e., the challenge of moving crisis symptoms to understanding underlying causes as a basis for decisive action. Fourth, it goes beyond the cliché that crises are both threat and opportunity by distinguishing valid accounts of the origins and present nature of a crisis, from more speculative accounts of what potentially exists. Fifth, it explores how crises can disorient conventional wisdom, thus provoking efforts to interpret and learn about crises and draw lessons after a crisis has ended. Finally, the sixth element is the move away from the conventional focus on executive authorities and disaster management agencies, instead turning attention towards how other social forces construe crises and attempt to learn from them.

Offering important insights into the pedagogy of crisis throughout, this collection will offer excellent reading to both researchers and postgraduate students.

Part I

Introducing some key themes

1 Introduction

Organizational perspectives on crisiology and learning

Karim Knio and Bob Jessop¹

Crises have been studied in academia in many disciplines and from diverse perspectives for at least 150 years. However, recent decades have seen a marked increase in the crisis literature, primarily due to the pervasiveness of crises throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and onwards, and an associated inflation in crisis discourses. The 1970s witnessed a range of political and economic crises – the Nixon Shock, the 1973 oil crisis, stagflation, and intensified class struggles as well as the emergence of new social movements – which contributed to the electoral victories of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the US and the UK, respectively. The 1980s in turn witnessed high-profile commercial, industrial, and technological disasters (e.g., the Bhopal disaster, Chernobyl, the Challenger explosion, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill) that reignited interest in disasters as well as crises and how to prevent, manage, or resolve them. A further major boost came with the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. Indeed, this led to greatly increased funding and efforts to enhance coordinated research and planning. Thus, as Boin, McConnell and ‘t Hart point out, this has triggered efforts to unify “a disjointed, segmented set of niches within the social sciences” concerned with crises (2008, p. 6).

The newly rediscovered terror threat in the “homeland”, the eruption of the 2008 global financial crisis in the “heartland” of finance-dominated neoliberal accumulation, and the rise of new forms of instability and popular resistance accentuated by the economic and political turmoil consequent upon the 2008 financial crisis, have all contributed to a diversification of the study of crises. One current is preoccupied with the cause and nature of crises, another focuses on crisis management, and a third on learning and lesson-drawing processes post-crisis. These currents may overlap. As Shrivastava notes, the “expansion of crisis research and practice is undeniably impressive”; however, “there is no single paradigm guiding research” and there are “many different disciplinary voices, talking in different languages to different issues and audiences” (1993, p. 33). This is reflected in crisis research in the fields of organizational studies, economics, political science, public policy, and sociology, as well as international relations. A plurality of perspectives and approaches is appropriate to complex phenomena because each may reveal what others cannot see. However, without serious efforts at synthesis and at rendering commensurable different paradigms and perspectives, the result can be a mosaic with contrasting impulsions and problematiques, creating a ‘tower of Babel’ effect, leading to “difficulties in communication of research results within the research community” (ibid.). It can also lead to serious questioning about what gets lost or overlooked if crisis narratives and an inflationary use of the concept of crisis marginalize other ways of examining recent events and social processes that challenge established inherited routines and experiences (cf. Roitman, 2015; see also Chapter 3). In this sense, while crisis and critique have been closely coupled in the modern era (cf. Koselleck, 1988), it may be time to critique a one-sided concern with crisis at the expense of other ways of construing and explaining significant and/or disruptive events in the modern world.

To offer some guidance through this literature, we distinguish crisis from other forms of disruption, identify a key distinction between two broad kinds of crisis, highlight the challenge of symptomatology when it comes to interpreting the nature and significance of crises, and, as the special contribution of this collection, explore different aspects of what we call the pedagogy of crisis.

1. We distinguish disasters from crises in terms of the more accidental nature of disasters, which have the character of one-off events even if they occur regularly or frequently, and the more systemic and recurrent nature of crises, rooted in systemic processes of individual systems and/or the patterned interaction among a plurality of systems. This is reflected in two different, if overlapping, kinds of literature, concerned respectively with the prevention and management of disasters and the regulation of crisis tendencies and challenges of crisis management (see Chapter 3).
2. Following Claus Offe (1976), although in more nuanced ways, we also distinguish normal from exceptional crises – with the former being susceptible to routine crisis management and the latter requiring extraordinary measures to overcome a crisis of crisis management (on these distinctions, see Chapters 2 and 3).
3. This pair of distinctions raises the issue of symptomatology, i.e., how actors set about deciphering the opaque relationship between the symptoms of a disaster or crisis and their underlying causes, and, hence, address the challenge of intervening into these causes to manage or resolve the resulting crisis (on symptomatology, see Jessop, 2015; and Chapters 3 and 14). Indeed, this is also the site of struggles over how to construe the immediate symptoms of an extraordinary event or process and to politicize or depoliticize how they are construed, explained, and managed.
4. A fourth aspect concerns the pedagogy of crisis over different spatiotemporal horizons. Here we distinguish between the challenge to past lessons and current perceptions of how the world works that is induced by disasters and crises, the attempt to decipher their character when they first emerge on the basis of immediate empirical symptoms, efforts to identify and make sense of their underlying causes through trial-and-error experimentation based on efforts to respond to, manage, or resolve these phenomena, and, fourth, possibly, efforts to learn lessons from a disaster or crisis to improve capacities (elsewhere and/or in the future) to prevent, address, manage, or overcome similar events or processes (cf. Ji, 2006; Jessop, 2015). This last aspect is of special interest for the pedagogy of crisis. An important example is the role of commissions or other organized inquiries to draw lessons from recent crises for the future (the basis for societal and organizational learning and the refinement of expertise and resilience) or, alternatively, perhaps, to obfuscate causes, depoliticize crises, and avoid or divert blame (e.g., Boin, ‘t Hart, Stern and Sundelius, 2005).
5. Regarding the last of these possibilities – but linked to struggles over how to construe symptoms – is the use of past lessons to interpret current crises (as events and/or processes) to guide crisis management. This can be interpreted as the first-order use of the past to remake the present or as the reflexive use of history to make history (or historicity) (cf. Brändström, Bynander and ‘t Hart, 2004; and Chapter 14 below).
6. Combining these different topics and fields of inquiry invites us to investigate the difference that alternative modes of crisis response make to crisis management for different kinds of crises (see below).

The contributions to this book therefore propose different but complementary ways to analyse crises and, on this basis, indicate ways to develop a new cartography of crisis. They range across different fields in which crises occur, adopt different disciplinary and trans-disciplinary perspectives, and explore different levels of social relations from individual leadership, through organizations and inter-organizational relations and, further, institutions and institutional orders, up to social formations and their crises. Each of these levels is significant because it has distinctive forms of embeddedness and kinds of emergent properties that can serve as the basis for interpreting crisis symptoms based on direct experience or capacities for collective reflection, as the basis for crisis prevention and/or management through access to distinctive and complementary institutional capacities and resources and developing capacities for higher-order metagovernance, and as the basis for learning through and from crisis based on critical self-reflection of different kinds of actor in different settings.² Thus, in addition to the problems of interpersonal trust and networking, inter-organizational cooperation depends on finding ways to secure the internal cohesion and adaptability of individual organizations; and in making compatible through inter-organizational negotiation their respective operational unities and independence with their de facto material and social interdependence on other organizations and reliance on specific resources that each controls. This can be especially challenging where different organizations are primarily anchored in institutional orders (e.g., economic, juridical, political, scientific, religious) with different organizational logics; this is reinforced when crisis construal, crisis management, or crisis lessons require cooperation among self-organizing systems with their own codes, programmes, institutional logics, and interests in self-reproduction. Here it is important that organizations from different institutional orders or functional systems seek to reduce ‘noise’ in inter-systemic communication by enhancing mutual sensitivity to the autonomous logics or rationales of complex autonomous systems and thereby promote mutual understanding; and try to engage in negative coordination, i.e., take account of the possible adverse repercussions of their own actions on third parties or other systems and exercise self-restraint as appropriate. This may then provide the basis for specific inter-organizational partnerships oriented to the positive coordination of relevant activities around specific objectives.

These different sites and forms of social relation can be involved in tangled hierarchies in so far as lower levels are constrained by higher levels yet simultaneously help to shape the latter. For example, interpersonal trust may ease inter-organizational negotiation and/or help build less personalized, more ‘generalized trust’ as collective actors are seen to sacrifice short-term interests and reject opportunism (cf. Luhmann, 1979, pp. 20–22). In turn, inter-organizational dialogue eases inter-systemic communication and thereby permits ‘systemic trust’ (in the integrity of other systems’ codes and operations) by promoting mutual understanding and stabilizing expectations as the basis of self-binding actions in the future. These are important mechanisms for reaching shared understandings about the nature of crises, developing agreed responses, and acting on any lessons learnt.

Unsurprisingly, then, a common thread across all the studies is the important mediating role of social organizations and movements as key sites of social construal and crisis response even if organizations are not themselves the specific site at which crisis dynamics operate and crisis eruption. Thus, this introduction takes the opportunity to provide a critical commentary on the organizational literature on crises and organizational learning before other chapters widen the scope of crises analysis and learning by adding further features corresponding to their specific objects of inquiry. Our conclusions will then reconnect these various literatures by showing how the pedagogy of crises necessitates a deeper analytical treatment of symptomatology. Accordingly, the next section delves deeper into the multifaceted mosaic of literature, mostly concerned with organizations that deal with crises, the second section then identifies some of the innovations and contributions of this introduction, while the final section considers how each of the authors contribute to the overall aim of this book.

The mosaic of crisis literature

Crises as events or processes? trends in the literature

The crisis management literature is prone to conceive crises in binary fashion as events or as processes (Forgues and Roux-Dufort, 1998; Jaques, 2010). The event approach tends to treat crises as “incidents or accidents”, i.e., “contingent and/or peculiar events as opposed to routines, regularities and experience” (Forgues and Roux-Dufort, 1998, p. 4). Thus, event-based approaches typically focus on how a given event triggers a distinct crisis that “may be isolated in space and time” and “has often quite distinguishable origins” (ibid., p. 5). Conversely, the process-based approach explores the transformative phenomena that unfold over space-time and, through their interaction, caused the onset of crisis (ibid.). Whether these phenomena are sequential or systemic, they nonetheless combine a “series of different familiar or unfamiliar stakeholders, issues and resources resulting in a destructing effect on the organization and its stakeholders” (ibid.). The same distinction can be usefully applied to crises outside the field of organizational studies.

More generally, Tony Jaques has argued that the event-based approach tends to obscure some of the more enduring trends that provide the background to the triggering of a crisis (2010, p. 470). This argument is also relevant to the distinction that we introduced above between disasters and crises – for, in Jaques’ terms, disasters may result from more systemic underlying trends. Therefore, the process-based approach, although less widely used and less developed, has been more successful in focusing attention on the “continuum of activity” that underlies the occurrence of the crisis event (ibid.). The latter approach is illustrated by Denis Smith, who insists the “configuration of individual crisis events can be seen…as a function of the interactions between a number of smaller events which conspire to generate the main crisis event” (1990, p. 265).

Much mainstream work relies more on an event over a process-oriented approach, both theoretically and in practice (Roux-Dufort, 2005; Jaques, 2010, p. 470). This is largely rooted in the fact that crises were initially treated as unexpected/accidental phenomena, hence, in our language, more like disasters than crises. As Rosenthal comments, until the mid-1990s, “the crisis agenda was rather thin” and mainstream social science and public administration had “some reason to marginalize crisis research” (2003, p. 131). Generally speaking, the demise of the Soviet Union and economic prosperity in the Western hemisphere “created an optimistic atmosphere” (ibid.). Crises were therefore seen as “incidental disturbances that should not and did not disturb the dominant mood. Whenever a crisis occurred, the watchword was getting ‘back to normal’” (ibid.). As a result, mainstream crisis management theory inherently prioritized “quickly containing accidents or unexpected events and in deploying mechanisms to handle the urgency and the destabilization” (Roux-Dufort, 2005, p. 5). However, increasing economic instability, as well as the September 11 attacks, caused a fundamental paradigm shift, forcing scholars to recognize the “inability to anticipate, and the accumulation of weaknesses and ignorance that made these acts possible” (ibid.). This reoriented the mainstream study of crises and crisis management towards a more process-based approach. To understand the evolution of the understanding of crises, the two conceptualizations will be elaborated.

Crises as events

The crisis-as-event literature conceptualizes crises as irregularities or accidents that stand out in relation to the normal state of affairs. Consequently, this type of understanding had come to view crises as “low-probability, high-impact events” (ibid., p. 6, Pearson and Clair, 1998, p. 60). They are also unanticipated and very frequently contain an element of surprise (Forgues and Roux-Dufort, 1998, p. 6). The triggering event could be a “piece of information, a perturbation, a trouble, a tension that disrupts the fragile balance of the organization” and “has often quite distinguishable origins” (Forgues and Roux-Dufort, 1998, pp. 4–5). Thu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• PART I: Introducing some key themes
• PART II: Resilience in and through crises
• PART III: Non-learning, fantasy learning, and potential learning
• PART IV: Fetishistic or reflexive learning?
• PART V: Limits to learning and the scope for overcoming them
• PART VI: Conclusions
• Index