The Temporality of Crisis and the Crisis of Temporality: On the Construction and Modulation of Urgency During Prolonged Crises

Despite the increasing frequency and awareness of large‐scale crises, our knowledge of how organizations construct urgency to act in these extreme contexts – especially if they are prolonged disasters rather than single events – remains limited. By undertaking an explorative study of the Robert Koch...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of management studies Vol. 62; no. 3; pp. 1087 - 1120
Main Authors: Skade, Lorenzo, Lehrer, Elisa, Hamdali, Yanis, Koch, Jochen
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Hoboken, NJ Wiley 01.05.2025
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Subjects:
COVID-19
Crises
crisis
Cues
Disease control
Disease prevention
extreme context
German language
Organizations
Pandemics
Robert Koch Institute
staged performance
temporality
Time
Time use
Urgency
ISSN:1467-6486, 0022-2380, 1467-6486
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Despite the increasing frequency and awareness of large‐scale crises, our knowledge of how organizations construct urgency to act in these extreme contexts – especially if they are prolonged disasters rather than single events – remains limited. By undertaking an explorative study of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the central German organization for disease control and prevention during the COVID‐19 pandemic, we address the research question of how organizations construct urgency during prolonged crises. In doing so, we develop a process model of the construction and modulation of urgency. Specifically, we draw on a temporal perspective to argue that the RKI translated temporal cues of the crisis to mobilize different forms of urgency via the central mechanism of modulating urgency (i.e., by speeding up or slowing down activities) over an extended period of time. Our findings contribute to an advanced understanding of the role of temporality and urgency during prolonged crises by (1) showing how urgency is enacted through temporal practices, (2) extending the literature on temporality and how organizations materialize temporality to construct and modulate urgency, and (3) demonstrating that various forms of urgency exist, rendering it a much more multifaceted concept than previously suggested.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ISSN:1467-6486
0022-2380
1467-6486
DOI:10.1111/joms.13124