Call for Papers

Over the last 50 years, a disaster related to climate, weather, or water hazards occurred every day, causing on average 115 deaths and US$ 202 million in losses daily (World Meteorological Organization, 2021). The impacts of these disasters are expected to drastically increase over the upcoming decades and their latent effects such as food insecurity, refugee movements, and violent conflicts are already intensifying humanitarian crises worldwide (Schneider et al., 2021). Professionals, businesses, non-profits, startups, institutions, objects, and standards are increasingly deployed both internationally and locally in an evolving ecosystem to prevent, prepare for, respond to, or recover from so-called ‘natural’ disasters (Revet, 2020). While phenomena such as earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts, floods, wildfires, etc. are often referred to as ‘natural’ disasters to distinguish them from disasters that are ostensibly caused by human error, such as explosions, oil spills, and health crises, we use inverted commas to question and critique the label ‘natural’. Such extreme weather and seismological hazards become disastrous because of the nexus of practices within which they unfold (Schatzki, 2002) including practices associated with urban planning, land use, building codes, disaster risk assessment, contingency planning, and stockpiling (Wijkman & Timberlake, 2021).
 
The aim of this sub-theme is, therefore, to bring together scholars using a practice approach (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011; Nicolini, 2013; Schatzki et al., 2001) to explore this evolving disaster ecosystem; specifically, those mundane, everyday practices that instantiate patterns for creating, managing, and reconstructing hazard exposure in ways that have disastrous consequences. Recent papers indicate the power of the practice theory lens to illuminate how those societal patterns that we take for granted as the ‘natural’ order of things, are constructed within mundane practices that are often hidden even from those who enact them (Jarzabkowski et al., 2015; Sele et al., 2024). A practice lens is thus valuable in helping us to understand how the disaster ecosystem creates disasters as ‘natural’, attempts to manage them, and how it might be reconstructed to have more positive effects for society.
 
We invite contributions illuminating how practices oriented towards the disaster ecosystem emerge and change over time, the patterns of actions that they construct, and how these patterns shape the ongoing reconstruction of the disaster ecosystem. In particular, given the different time horizons of disasters, which are often long in-the-making but become urgent at the moment of their happening, we are interested in tensions between practices with short and long-term orientations (Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2022; Jarzabkowski et al., 2022), or the emergence of flexible and inter-temporal practices (Reinecke & Ansari, 2015). A practice perspective can further reveal how people navigate the profound, less visible, changes to norms, rules, and organizing mechanisms instigated by ‘natural’ disasters through their activities and routines (Jarzabkowski et al., 2015; Orlikowski & Scott, 2023; Sele et al., 2024). For instance, we are interested in unpacking the practices of evaluating, monitoring, forecasting (Seidemann et al., 2023) mitigating against, and financing responses to disasters (Jarzabkowski et al., 2023).
 
Furthermore, we welcome scholarship adopting a critical, yet generative, perspective to explore the practices involved in the construction, persistence, and (unintended) consequences of disasters (Couture et al., 2023; Frey-Heger et al., 2021; Howard-Grenville & Spengler, 2022). For instance, working within the context of ‘natural’ disasters means operating with taken-for-granted concepts, such as ‘vulnerabilities’ of communities and individuals, scales, such as levels of exposure and urgency, and tools, such as flood maps, to assess social impact or dictate response and recovery efforts. These concepts, scales, and tools are applied and legitimized through everyday practices; they are ongoing social accomplishments (Orlikowski, 2002). For instance, vulnerability, exposure, and capacities of communities in relation to the disasters they experience are constructed through a nexus of practices – political, discursive, and interpretative – that may exacerbate the very effects they seek to contain (Kornberger et al., 2019; Sele et al., 2024).
 
Accordingly, this sub-theme is interested in bringing together a community of scholars who are using a practice theory lens to theorize on how the ecosystem of ‘natural’ disasters is created, including the way that these disasters are ‘naturalized’, and how we might reconstruct those practices to improve our knowledge of and response to these disasters. Given this, and in light of the “creativity that goes a long way” topic of EGOS 2025 Colloquium, this sub-theme seeks to move beyond explanations on how organizations respond to grand challenges, wicked problems, extreme contexts, etc. (Seelos et al., 2023), to examine the practices, processes, and overarching patterns of practicing disasters that are often characterized as natural.
 
Guiding questions might include, but are not limited to:
 
(1) The consequentiality of practices and action patterns in the context of ‘natural’ disasters across time and space:

• How do disaster management/mitigation practices generate unintended consequences, both positive and negative?

• How are systemic inequalities, risks, and vulnerabilities mitigated/amplified in the everyday practices of those within the disaster ecosystem?

• How and why do these practices change and evolve over time?

 
(2) The effects, construction, and legitimization of concepts and tools in disaster management:

• How are specific vulnerabilities to ‘natural’ disasters constructed in practice? What consequences do these constructions entail, e.g. responsibilities, power, moral attributions?

• How do datafication, quantification, and commensuration practices, shape the way practitioners understand and work within the disaster ecosystem?

• How do key practices within the disaster ecosystem (e.g. funding practices, report writing, monitoring and evaluation practices) interact and what are the implications of the nexus of practices created?

• How are disasters constructed as ‘natural’ within these practices?

 
(3) Governance practices for ‘natural’ disasters:

• How are the governance structures surrounding disasters practiced and enacted and how do they evolve over time?

• How are the practices of multiple stakeholders within the disaster ecosystem co-enacted, aligned, or misaligned, and with what effects on efforts to collaborate in the management of disasters?

• How do collaborative governance practices circumvent or even exacerbate the disasters that they were established to manage and mitigate?

References

• Couture, F., Jarzabkowski, P., & Lê, J.K. (2023): “Triggers, Traps, and Disconnect: How Governance Obstacles Hinder Progress on Grand Challenges.” Academy of Management Journal, 66 (6), 1651–1680.

• Feldman, M.S., & Orlikowski, W.J. (2011): “Theorizing practice and practicing theory.” Organization Science, 22 (5), 1240–1253.
• Frey-Heger, C., Gatzweiler, M.K., & Hinings, C.R. (2021): “No end in sight: How regimes form barriers to addressing the wicked problem of displacement.” Organization Studies, 43 (10), 1559–1582.
• Gümüsay, A.A., & Reinecke, J. (2022): “Researching for desirable futures: From real utopias to imagining alternatives.” Journal of Management Studies, 59 (1), 236–242.
• Howard-Grenville, J., & Spengler, J. (2022): “Surfing the grand challenges wave in management scholarship: How did we get here, where are we now, and what’s next?” In: A.A. Gümüsay, E. Marti, H. Trittin-Ulbrich, & C. Wickert (eds.): Organizing for Societal Grand Challenges. Leeds: Emerald Publishing Limited, 279–295.
• Jarzabkowski, P., Bednarek, R., & Spee, P. (2015): Making a Market for Acts of God. The Practice of Risk Trading in the Global Reinsurance Industry. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
• Jarzabkowski, P., Bednarek, R., Chalkias, K., & Cacciatori, E. (2022): “Enabling rapid financial response to disasters: Knotting and reknotting multiple paradoxes in interorganizational systems.” Academy of Management Journal, 65 (5), 1477–1506.
• Jarzabkowski, P., Chalkias, K., Cacciatori, E., & Bednarek, R. (2023): Disaster Insurance Reimagined. Protection in a Time of Increasing Risk. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
• Kornberger, M., Leixnering, S., & Meyer, R.E. (2019): “The logic of tact: How decisions happen in situations of crisis.” Organization Studies, 40 (2), 239–266.
• Nicolini, D. (2013): Practice Theory, Work, & Organization. An Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
• Orlikowski, W.J. (2002): “Knowing in practice: Enacting a collective capability in distributed organizing.” Organization Science, 13 (3), 249–273.
• Orlikowski, W.J., & Scott, S.V. (2023): “The digital undertow and institutional displacement: a sociomaterial approach.” Organization Theory, 4 (2), https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877231180898.
• Reinecke, J., & Ansari, S. (2015): “When times collide: Temporal brokerage at the intersection of markets and developments.” Academy of Management Journal, 58 (2), 618–648.
• Revet, S. (2020): Disasterland. An Ethnography of the International Disaster Community. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Schatzki, T.R. (2002): The Site of the Social. A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. University Park: Penn State University Press.
• Schatzki, T.R., Knorr Cetina, K., & von Savigny, E. (2001): The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. New York: Routledge.
• Schneider, S., Radtke, K., & Weller, D. (2021): Climate Change, Disaster Displacement and (Anticipatory) Humanitarian Action: Challenges Ahead. Berlin: CHA – Centre for Humanitarian Action, https://www.chaberlin.org/en/blog/anticipatory-humanitarian-action-2/.
• Seelos, C., Mair, J., & Traeger, C. (2023): “The future of grand challenges research: Retiring a hopeful concept and endorsing research principles.” International Journal of Management Reviews, 25 (2), 251–269.
• Seidemann, I., Geiger, D., & Harborth, L. (2023): “System Level Dynamics in the Emergence and Navigation of Multi-Actor Paradoxes.” Academy of Management Proceedings, 2023 (1), https://doi.org/10.5465/AMPROC.2023.77bp.
• Sele, K., Mahringer, C., Danner-Schröder, A., Grisold, T., & Renzl, B. (2024): “We are all pattern makers! How a flat ontology connects organizational routines and grand challenges.” Strategic Organization, 22 (3), 530–549.
• Wijkman, A., & Timberlake, L. (2021): Natural Disasters. Acts of God or Acts of Man? New York: Routledge.
• World Meteorological Organization (2021): “Weather-related disasters increase over past 50 years, causing more damage but fewer deaths”, https://wmo.int/media/news/weather-related-disasters-increase-over-past-50-years-causing-more-damage-fewer-deaths.
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