Social Scientists Confronting Global Crises

Jean M. Bartunek, Jean M. Bartunek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000519785
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Comportement organisationnel

Social scientists develop knowledge that is directly pertinent to global challenges and crises and need to be included in initiatives taken to address them. This book is a step towards such presentation and involvement.

Global crises are crucially intertwined with our relationships, groups, organizations, communities, institutions, how they collaborate with each other, how they compete with each other, and the dynamics intermingled with these. These dimensions are inadequately addressed by scientists and insufficiently recognized by other stakeholders. With contributions from a global array of respected social scientists, this shortformbookcontributes to deep understandings of social phenomena associated with global crises.Inilluminating interventionsvia those dealing with challenges and crises first-hand, the book alsoshows the ongoing personal development required to address global crises in productive ways.

This book will be of interest to social scientists, researchers, academics, organizational consultants and students in the fields of management, especially those focusing on global challenges and crises. It will also be a useful resource for practitioners and policy makers.

1 IntroductionThe importance of this book

Jean M. Bartunek

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109372-1

Executive Summary

This book recognizes social scientists’ knowledge and insight pertinent to global crises, and both challenges and enables social science academics and consultants to understand and develop responses to them. In this first chapter, I introduce the book and the impetuses for it. I also indicate some of the range of venues in which social scientists can contribute, including relationships across groups and organizations, political, national and cross-national systems, and development in our capacity for productive action.

Social scientists have knowledge and insights that are directly pertinent to global challenges and crises. We need to be included in initiatives taken to address them. So we need to speak to such issues, to make evident the kinds of contributions we can distinctly offer. This book provides one step towards accomplishing this purpose.

It is not just geologists who understand what is involved in climate change, its causes and its impacts, and not just virologists and epidemiologists who understand pandemics and how to deal with them. Social scientists understand how such crises are intertwined with us as individual human beings, in our relationships, our groups, our organizations, our communities, our institutions, how we collaborate with each other, how we compete with each other, and their ensuing dynamics. Many social scientists, including those featured in this book, have demonstrated great skill in working with these dynamics in practice settings.

Consider the limitations of two recently published influential books. Bill Gates’s (2021) How to avoid a climate disaster: The solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need, says very little about cooperation and collaboration among groups other than acknowledging various barriers. Yet successful interactions such as those the social scientists included in this book explain and help to create are necessary for people, groups, organizations and nations to carry out the steps Gates recommends for responding to very real climate concerns. Jacqueline Novogratz’s (2020) Manifesto for a moral revolution: Practices to build a better world, alludes to the value of trusted relationships, but does not focus on their complexities and what is required for them to be built up and sustained. Yet, developing and sustaining complex relationships are crucial as the contributors to this book show. Thus, this book does not focus so much on specific global crises, but more on the kinds of interactions, relationships and development that affect our ability to deal with them.

The impetus for this book

In April 2020, early in the “lock down” period of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, Ed Schein, Professor Emeritus at MIT, and a longtime friend, sent me a “call to action” for social scientists and asked me to post it online to stimulate discussion among a group of scholars and consultants concerned about global crises. Ed’s call to action forms the appendix of this book. It begins with the admonition that we as social scientists need to speak up. It asks the question:

Will we recognize that we need to use or invent methods of collaboration on a global level to deal with the global environment as a finite resource that we are currently depleting by encouraging or at least sanctioning rampant competition among countries, industries, and political parties?

At the time Ed wrote, I had been rereading my favorite book from my college days, Albert Camus’s (1948) novel The Plague. In this novel, Camus has Dr. Bernard Rieux, a physician, narrate the story of what happened in Oran, Algeria, when a plague appeared somewhat mysteriously, devastated the town over an extended time period, then ran its course and faded away in a manner also mysterious. Camus describes how several individual citizens of Oran responded to the plague, so the reader gets a chance to see very different personalities interpreting it. Contrary to any effort to separate the “good” people and the “bad” people in a situation like this, one of the things Dr. Rieux learned from the plague was “there is more to admire in men than to despise” (p. 278).

On the very last page of that book, Dr. Rieux described the reason he had decided to narrate the story of the plague. He said that he:

had resolved to compile this chronicle so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them (by the plague) might endure.

These two sources coming in tandem, Ed’s call to action and Camus’ book (see Bartunek, in press, for a fuller account), inspired my resolve to compile this chronicle. More, I wanted to dedicate the book to those who have passed away due, directly or indirectly, to COVID-19 as one small memorial.

This book is not a narrative about the progression and departure of COVID, which at the time of publication is still devastating many people’s lives. Rather, it is a way of enabling sophisticated social scientists who are involved in both academia and practice to show what social scientists can do to address and mitigate (if not prevent) global crises confronting us now and predictably (Bazerman & Watkins, 2004; Phan & Wood, 2020) in the future, and to have empathy for those who suffer from these crises.

The social scientists who have contributed to this book

The contributors to this book are primarily associated with management and organizations, some with a primary emphasis on academic scholarship, some with a primary emphasis on consulting practice, but all with considerable capability and interest in both realms. They all have extensive training in the core social science disciplines that underlie management and organizational studies, including such fields as psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics and political science.

When I invited the authors to contribute, I told them that the only requirement was that each chapter include “something explicit about academic social science scholarship and something that makes the scholarship doable in practice”. This book thus represents an academic–practitioner collaboration (Bartunek & McKenzie, 2018), in the sense that both academic and consultant authors are contributing insights on their own terms that together form a whole. Joining the contributions of rigorous scholarship with skilled practice can together lead to a new appreciation of both, contributions that neither could make on their own.

Everyone writing in this book i...