This Special Issue examines how organizations navigate extreme contexts – from crises and disasters to high-risk environments – where time pressures, emotions, and material conditions can mean the difference between failure and survival.
The articles explore themes of temporality, embodiment, and materiality: how urgency and crisis reshape strategy, how emotions and the human body shape collective resilience, and how tools, technologies, and environments influence organizing under duress. Studies span contexts such as humanitarian crises, migration, healthcare, policing, and maritime rescue, showing how people and organizations make sense, adapt, and act in the face of extraordinary challenges. Together, the collection deepens our understanding of how organizations can prepare for, respond to, and even grow from extreme events, offering valuable lessons for leaders, practitioners, and policymakers confronting today’s “age of normalized unprecedentedness”
Read the full issue here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14676486/2025/62/3 or browse the individual articles below.
Organizing and Strategizing in and for Extreme Contexts: Temporality, Emotions, and Embodiment by Markus Hällgren, Daniel Geiger, Linda Rouleau, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe and Eero Vaara
The Temporality of Crisis and the Crisis of Temporality: On the Construction and Modulation of Urgency During Prolonged Crises by Lorenzo Skade, Elisa Lehrer, Yanis Hamdali and Jochen Koch
Constructing a World for Compassion: How Temporal Work Can Preserve Compassion in Extreme Contexts by M. Dolores del Rio, Pablo D. Fernández, Ignasi Marti and Alberto Willi
Desperate Journeys to Europe: Sensebreaking in Extreme Contexts by Amna Chaudhry and John M. Amis
Reframing Silence as Purposeful: Emotions in Extreme Contexts by Madeleine Rauch and Shahzad Shaz Ansari
Multimodal Collective Sensemaking in Extreme Contexts: Evidence from Maritime Search and Rescue by Thomas Lübcke, Norbert Steigenberger, Hendrik Wilhelm and Indre Maurer
Finding your Sea Legs: Exploring Newcomer Embodied Learning in an Extreme Context by Ila Bharatan, Eivor Oborn and Jacky Swan
Embodied Connection Work: The Role of the Lived Body in Routine Recreation in Extreme Contexts by Kathrin Sele, Anja Danner-Schröder and Christian A. Mahringer
List of People Who Reviewed for this Special Issue
