Constructing Crisis: Leaders, Crises and Claims of Urgency, Bert Spector, Cambridge University Press, 2019

What exactly is it about a crisis that elicits the worst in leaders especially those with capitalist motives? In Constructing Crisis Spector wades into this debate that has seemingly failed to command a prominent following much to the dismay of mainstream management and organization theorists (Roux-Dufort & Lalonde, 2013). He does so by taking an unconventional approach to studying the construction of a crisis. Rather than limiting himself to a single-sided understanding, Spector performs a high-stakes balancing act that lives up to normative expectations – orienting a crisis as a process of organizational weakening (Roux-Dufort, 2007) – while simultaneously problematizing the taken-for-granted narratives of extant theory that posit crises as unexpected or unanticipated ‘events’ as shock to the status quo (Pearson & Clair, 1998). He does this brilliantly; careful not to wed his conceptualization to some wholesale transformation that upends and dismisses the work of so many in management and organization studies focusing on allied interests (e.g., stakeholder and issue analysis, see Bundy, Pfarrer, Short, & Coombs, 2017). In doing this, we are greeted with the idea that Provocative in his interpretive effort, Spector reels in his readers by focusing not so much on the fractious character of crisis and crisis management streams of research demoralized by a lacking consensus around how it may be understood (see James, Wooten, & Dushek, 2011, for a detailed accounting of the evolving definitions) but challenging how crises may actually be used to supplant collectivism in organizing with tropes of managerialist ideology. He would not be the first to raise this concern. In a recent article in the Academy of Management Annals, Williams, Gruber, Sutcliffe, Shepherd, and Zhao (2017) found, in their systematic approach to the literature, that how an organization responds to negative externalities is partly an outcome of traditional control mechanisms within an organization, chief among them being the actions by leaders to exploit (or ignore) vulnerabilities that ultimately result in major disruptions of what is deemed normal. People crave status quo and managers know this. Leaders in Corporate America and public service know this too. After all, it was Rahm Emanuel (2020), then-chief of staff to President Barack Obama throughout the first two years of his presidency, who let slip: “Never allow a good crisis go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do the things you once thought were impossible” (para. 1). The argument Spector forwards is that crises present leaders with an indelible opportunity to seize control. The context of crisis is an incredibly timely one that Spector points out at the forefront of the book. He lets readers know that as he sat down to began writing in 2016, “a wave of migration convulsed Europe… In June, citizens of the United Kingdom voted to exit the European Union… In the United States, competing claims of crisis dominated the presidential campaign” (Spector, 2019, p. ix). We know with the benefit of hindsight that that was just the tip of the metaphoric iceberg. In terms of an organizational perspective, adversity has been commonplace for as long as humans, being the social creatures that we are, have sought association one with another. Be it early primal instincts of ‘fight or flight’ or more present-day threats of information systems malfunction, for example, moments of uncertainty have presented the social world with an existential angst. There is, arguably, no better example of crisis (or crises) than the multiple troubles that besiege us now. Take stock of the critical moment we face: a novel virus that has infected tens of millions; a global economy teetering on the brink of yet another collapse, and; political …