We live in societies that are increasingly vulnerable to different types of crises, be they natural or man-made disasters, organizational crises, acts of terrorism, financial crises, humanitarian crises or many other crises. As Mitroff and Anagnos (2000) once noted, crises are no longer an aberrant, rare, random or peripheral feature of today’s society, but rather built into the very fabric and fibre of modern societies. Crises have become an inevitable and permanent feature of modern society. Organizational crises of different types, be they industrial accidents, misconduct, harassment, discrimination, unethical conduct, faulty products, shoddy services or unethical behaviour, afflict organizations and their stakeholders. Some of these are solved behind the organization’s closed doors while others are thrust into the limelight, thereby upsetting an organization’s image, reputation and relationship with its stakeholders. The environment of organizations is today fraught with high levels of risks, which are also compounded by new communication technologies. The most obvious area of vulnerability is in social media, which enables disgruntled stakeholders to air their grievances against an organization. For example, when a United Airlines passenger was forcibly removed from an overbooked plane, videos taken by other passengers and shared on social media went viral. The crisis affected United’s reputation internationally and the stock dropped by as much as four percent in a few hours. In Norway, supermarket giant Rema 1000 had its reputation damaged when its customers took to social media to protest against its controversial best friend campaign. Due to negative publicity, Rema 1000’s reputation and market share fell. Many other examples bear testimony to the implications of fast-moving communications. In an era of instantaneous communications and social networking, crisis news travels faster than ever before, making breaking news in international media channels, and viral feeds on social media platforms. New communications technologies make the world smaller and closer, and this enhances the visibility of many crises.

A cursory look into the different crises that occurred between August and September 2017 shows an increased frequency of crisis events. Images of flooded homes and highways dominated media coverage as Hurricane Harvey hit the US Gulf Coast, devastating vast areas of Texas. Barely a few weeks later another destructive hurricane, Hurricane Irma, swept across the Caribbean Islands before hitting the US state of Florida, forcing many evacuations and leaving a trail of destruction to property. The economic livelihood of many organizations was grossly affected. At precisely the same time, parts of Asia experienced severe floods that took many lives and left many homeless. Around the same period, in mid-August a terrorist attack hit a popular tourist street in Barcelona, leaving citizens of 24 countries among those killed or injured. Images of victims covered with blood and others fleeing the scene in panic again filled the 24-hour international news coverage. In early September, Mexico’s strongest earthquake in a century took more than 60 lives. Elsewhere in the world, similar natural and human-made crises were also unfolding.

Memories of previous crises still linger on in the minds of many people: the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 that led to over 200,000 deaths and 300,000 injuries, and left over a million homeless; and the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa in 2014 that took more than 11,000 lives in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. In Norway, the July 2011 sequential attacks on a government administration building in Oslo and at the Labour Party’s youth camp at Utøya caused more than 70 deaths and left many injured. Images and stories of crises of different natures abound in the media. These crises remind us of the high probability of extreme weather events, terror attacks, health pandemics and other human-made crises, all of which have implications for organizations, be they emergency organizations, humanitarian or businesses. We are becoming more and more aware of risks and vulnerabilities in our societies.

Ulrich Beck’s classic text Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (1986) captures the increased risk in today’s society, a situation that organizations cannot avoid. The risk society describes how new risks created by science and social changes, such as nuclear accidents, climatic change and genetically modified organisms, have, since the Second World War, partly overshadowed the old natural disasters like pests, earthquakes and famine. In his later work, World at Risk (2009), Beck describes what he calls the globalization of risk, which has seen changes from a risk society to a global risk society. This new risk society is global and no longer tied to a particular place, for a specific time and to a specific group of people. In the new risk society, risks and crisis transcend geographical boundaries (nation states), social classes and disciplines.

Perrow (1999) argues in his book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies that as our technology increases, and wars increase, and when we invade nature more and more, we create systems—organizations and organization of organizations—that increase risks for operators, passengers and innocent bystanders. For Perrow , most high-risk systems (e.g. chemical factories, nuclear power stations, airlines and genetic technologies) have some special characteristics that make accidents unavoidable and even ‘normal’. They are normal because they are unavoidable, unpredictable and unstoppable. Perrow’s argument is that while most, what he calls, ‘risk organizations’ have catastrophic potential, the good news is that if we can understand their nature better, we can reduce or even remove these dangers. ‘Normal accidents’ contributed to the intellectual developments in the 1980s that revolutionized how we think about security and risk.

There is no doubt that we live in a society characterized by high risk and vulnerability. The list of crises is endless, thereby underlying a need to not only understand them but also work proactively to prevent them from happening in the first place and to be prepared for any eventualities. Increased understanding and awareness that crises can happen, that crises affect stakeholders—that is, those individuals or groups that are (or perceive themselves to be) directly or indirectly affected—and that crises can have big consequences for organizations and stakeholders alike puts crisis preparedness on the management agenda. Awareness is the beginning of the journey...