Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Attention to extreme contexts research has been growing rapidly in recent years, seen in reviews (Hällgren et al., 2018), special issues (Hällgren et al., 2025), methodological pieces (Wright et al., 2023), and the EGOS standing working group (2020–2025). Scholars have turned to extreme contexts—settings marked by risks, emergencies, and disruptions—to learn about a variety of organizational phenomena. What is striking about the growing literature is the duality of human and organizational experience represented in it. Studies of extreme contexts show that the darkest moments of organizational life can bring out people’s best. Hence, in extreme contexts we find individual and organizational resilience (Caza et al., 2020), organizational learning leading to new capabilities (Christianson et al., 2009), improvisation under uncertainty (Geiger et al., 2021), social bonding (O’Neill & Rothbard, 2017), personal and professional growth (Kent & Dacin, 2025), and profoundly meaningful work (Kent, 2019)—processes which appear to be enabled or encouraged by the extremeness of the situation itself. But good exists alongside the bad. Extreme contexts are also where scholars look when they want to learn about vulnerability (Weick, 1990), impaired decision-making (Cornelissen et al., 2014), trauma (Stackhouse, 2025), loss of meaning (de Rond & Lok, 2016), and helplessness (Rauch & Ansari, 2025). These dualities mirror findings in other fields that associate growth with (some) adversity: consider ecosystems becoming more resilient after mild disturbances (intermediate disturbance hypothesis), damaged tissue growing back stronger after exercise (hypertrophy), the concept of antifragility, and immune systems learning from childhood exposure to microorganisms (hygiene hypothesis). Therefore, we believe it is time to gain a broader perspective of how “good” and “bad” both arise in and from extreme contexts. In this subtheme, we wish to direct attention to two areas that can inform theorizing about the duality of the extreme.

First, we invite scholars to advance our understanding of how resilience and vulnerability emerge in extreme contexts. Research on organizational resilience has expanded rapidly but remains conceptually fragmented, with scholars differing on whether resilience is a trait, a capacity, a process, or an outcome, and on which unit of analysis matters (individuals, teams, or organizations) (Caza et al., 2023). Extreme context research can clarify how resilience is enacted by illuminating contextual boundaries, temporal dynamics, relational factors, and levels of analysis. In contrast, vulnerability highlights how extreme contexts can undermine meaning and morality in work, exposing individuals and organizations to emotional, physical, or moral harm (e.g., Rauch & Ansari, 2025), asking who is at risk, under what conditions, and how vulnerability unfolds. 

Second, we invite scholars to investigate how resilience and vulnerability may themselves create what are, or are experienced as, extreme contexts. Emerging work suggests that situations become extreme through the ways actors interpret, coordinate, and respond to unfolding conditions, rather than through inherent features of the environment (Hällgren et al., 2025). Applying this lens to resilience and vulnerability invites new questions. Efforts to sustain resilience may escalate risk, amplify pressure, or unintentionally narrow available courses of action, thereby contributing to a sense of extremeness. Likewise, practices rooted in vulnerability such as meaning loss, moral strain, or impaired judgment can intensify ambiguity and destabilize routines, producing the very conditions later labeled extreme. This view highlights a recursive relationship in which resilience and vulnerability do not only emerge in extreme contexts but actively create in shaping their dynamics.

We therefore invite papers that deal with the following themes, but are not limited to exploring:

• How can researchers grapple with the dualities of extreme contexts, where opposites seem to arise together, for example, hopelessness and profound purpose? What about the extreme seems to bring these different processes about? 

• How do patterns of resilience and vulnerability in and around extreme contexts play out at different levels of analysis (e.g., individual, group, organizational, societal)?

• How can accounting for different perspectives—such as objective measures (e.g., mortality rates) versus subjective experiences (e.g., a sense of meaning)—help explain when growth arises from adversity?

• How can accounting for different temporalities (e.g., short- and long-term) account for the relationship between the extreme, resilience, and vulnerability?

• How do practices of resilience and vulnerability contribute to the enactment and shaping of what becomes defined as an extreme context?

• How do interactions between resilient and vulnerable actors create feedback loops that amplify or diminish extremeness over time? Does growth from adversity differ across extreme contexts—for example, in unexpected and rare events, versus those that are recurring? 

• How do cultural, institutional, or political environments influence when resilience or vulnerability becomes salient in extreme contexts?

• Caza, B. B., Barton, M. A., Christianson, M. K., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2020). Conceptualizing the who, what, when, where, why and how of resilience in organizations. In A. Duchek, S. Eckerlin, & W. Mayrhofer (Eds.), Research handbook on organizational resilience (pp. 338–353). Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Christianson, M. K., Farkas, M. T., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Weick, K. E. (2009). Learning through rare events: Significant interruptions at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum. Organization Science, 20(5), 846–860.
• Cornelissen, J. P., Mantere, S., & Vaara, E. (2014). The contraction of meaning: The combined effect of communication, emotions, and materiality on sensemaking in the Stockwell shooting. Journal of Management Studies, 51(5), 699–736.
• de Rond, M., & Lok, J. (2016). Some things can never be unseen: The role of context in psychological injury at war. Academy of Management Journal, 59(6), 1965–1993.
• Geiger, D., Danner-Schröder, A., & Kremser, W. (2021). Getting ahead of time—Performing temporal boundaries to coordinate routines under temporal uncertainty. Administrative Science Quarterly, 66(1), 220–264.
• Hällgren, M., Geiger, D., Rouleau, L., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Vaara, E. (2025). Introduction to the special issue. Journal of Management Studies, 62(3), 1063–1086.
• Hällgren, M., Rouleau, L., & de Rond, M. (2018). A matter of life or death: How extreme context research matters for management and organization studies. Academy of Management Annals, 12(1), 111–153.
• Kent, D. (2019). Giving meaning to everyday work after terrorism. Organization Studies, 40(7), 975–994.
• Kent, D., & Dacin, M. T. (2024). After the crisis: Explaining stories of professional identity growth from collective action. Organization Studies, 46(7), 995–1022.
• O’Neill, O. A., & Rothbard, N. (2017). Is love all you need? The effects of emotional culture, suppression, and work–family conflict on firefighter risk-taking and health. Academy of Management Journal, 60(1), 78–108.
• Rauch, M., & Ansari, S. S. (2025). Reframing silence as purposeful: Emotions in extreme contexts. Journal of Management Studies, 62, 1191–1219.
• Stackhouse, M. (2025). Work-related psychological trauma research: A multidisciplinary review and integrated trauma response and adaptation model. Academy of Management Annals, 19(2), 763–799.
• Weick, K. E. (1990). The vulnerable system: An analysis of the Tenerife air disaster. Journal of Management, 16(3), 571–593.
• Wright, A. L., Kent, D., Hällgren, M., & Rouleau, L. (2023). Theorizing as mode of engagement in and through extreme contexts research. Organization Theory, 4(4).