Crisis response operations are increasingly important due to the rising number and impact of crises. Frontline personnel of crisis organizations conduct this live-saving and risky work under conditions of uncertainty, threat, and time pressure. Some notable examples are emergency responders, military personnel, and humanitarian aid workers. Although their crisis response activities may vary considerably, they operate under similar circumstances and face the same operational dilemmas. This introduction presents eleven crisis response dilemmas that crisis responders face again and again. Still, little is known about how to deal with these dilemmas and dispersed research findings offer competing solutions. By integrating existing research on frontline crisis response, this book problematizes simple solutions to crisis response dilemmas and provides a basis for reflective thinking about possible improvements. As such, it gives an insight into the main theories and research topics on crisis response, and provides a comprehensive analysis of how frontline crisis responders organize and implement their activities amidst the chaos of crises.

The book’s Introduction addresses the ways in which the notion of crisis functions conceptually to name not only moments of economic and cultural rupture, which become normalized within capitalist modernity, but also moments of epistemological doubt, when the taken-for-granted relationship between language and the social is called into question and subjected to critique. The Depression represented not only a breakdown of the smooth functioning of modernity and its market-based social organization, but also a parallel breakdown in a collective investment in the idea that language can represent the social, as language came to be regarded with suspicion for its role in perpetuating forms of commodification and appropriation associated with a crisis-ridden modernity. In response to this crisis, poetic language was forced to reconfigure its relationship to a society that was itself always in flux. The book’s Introduction thus establishes a basis for its survey of a broad cross-section of the poetic idioms associated with the Depression as both critiques of the idea of market modernity as a progressive, developmentalist force, and efforts to shore up language’s efficacy as a social and cultural form.

Chapter 8 examines the government’s ambiguous social protection response to the growing shortages of land and employment. The government’s initial development strategy aimed at broad-based growth that would obviate the need for programmes to address poverty and food insecurity. The increasingly acute shortage of land and employment, however, constituted a growing distributive crisis during the 2000s. The government did adopt social protection programmes in an attempt to address this distributive threat. However, resource constraints and the government’s ideological resistance to state handouts meant that this response was highly ambiguous. The result was that the government saw social protection as little more than a sticking plaster, temporarily supporting the most vulnerable while buying time for implementation of the national development strategy. Consequently, social protection did little to address the growing distributive problems highlighted in previous chapters.

How might histories of fascism in interwar Europe help us today? Languages of “fascism” are now constantly in play – as warning and slogan; as emotional rallying-point; as rhetorics of recognition and abuse; as a boundary of legitimate politics – but rarely as carefully informed argument. For effective politics, though, we need historically grounded analysis that can avert tendentious and direct linkages that may be emotionally satisfying, but fail to capture fascism’s distinctiveness as a type of politics or explain how it comes to power. What might be consistent across such vastly variable contexts as the early twentieth century and now? Fascism silences and even murders its opponents rather than arguing with them; it prefers authoritarianism over democracy; it pits an aggressively exclusionary idea of the nation against a pluralism that values and prioritizes difference. So what are the circumstances under which fascism builds its appeal? What makes it desirable as an “extra-systemic” solution, as an alternative to the practices of democratic constitutionalism? What kind of crisis brings fascism onto the agenda? What is the character of the fascism-producing crisis?

Theoretical suppositions of business crisis in the literature are largely drawn from studies conducted in North America and Western Europe. Chapter 6, on the other hand, examines a Chinese approach to crisis. Based on the notion of paradoxical integration, this approach informs not only crisis management in China and East Asia, but potentially has general application. In this conceptualization, crisis is not necessarily treated as a consequence of discord or disruption, but rather is understood as an aspect or phase of an unfolding process, even in the most difficult circumstances. This approach, then, offers a course toward future business success even in the face of significant loss, without suffering desperation or self-destruction. Three strategies which entrepreneurs adopt to crisis are examined in the chapter, namely, the combination of the old with the new, or path dependence; second, seeking facilitating relationships with other members of a business community, or guanxi accommodation; and finally, reordering priorities and available resources, including familial and personal, or self-reflexivity.

The Introduction outlines the historical, social, and cultural background of business in China since the economic reforms commencing in the late-1970s. The empirical material regarding entrepreneurs and business in present-day China deployed in this book is described, and an account of the research methods employed in acquiring it is outlined and discussed. In addition, the Introduction provides a detailed summary of the six chapters that constitute this book, including a preliminary discussion of the issues treated throughout. By presenting select examples of fieldwork findings, discussed in the context of a broader background indicated in official and related sources of data, as well as findings and theories presented in the published literature, the Introduction details the range of substantive issues that are treated in and which are the focus of each of the six chapters to follow.

The Conclusion highlights how an examination of entrepreneurs in contemporary China, including a careful and empirically grounded account of business and social relations in China, challenges many conventional approaches to research and research findings regarding such core concepts as trust, social networks, crisis, gender, family business, and e-commerce, and shows how standard conventions that are widely accepted in the scholarly and research literatures are in need of revision. It is shown how this book provides a clarification and extension of the conceptualization of a number of core theoretical notions by drawing on the details of the many cases that are explored in the six chapters of this monograph. It is shown how the research findings reported in this book will serve the purpose of stimulating and encouraging further research on erstwhile neglected aspects of business relations as well as the development of new theoretical frameworks for understanding social exchange dynamics in business, not only in China but more generally.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has grown to become one of the world’s most influential standard developing organizations since its creation in 1947. This chapter examines empirically the evolution and resilience of ISO, in relation to crisis. It departs from the assumption that ISO’s evolution can be explained in relation to its ability to respond and adjust to dynamics and relating challenges in its environment. ISO has experienced rapid transformation especially during crisis moments posing a threat or risk to the organization. First, this chapter provides an illustrative example of a crisis moment that originated from the needs of ISO members from developing countries, identifying its drivers and ISO’s responses and adaptations. It then illuminates certain traits that confer resilience onto the organization, how ISO has acquired or built these traits during crisis moments, and their cultivation over time. This chapter finds that ISO over the decades through strategies and meeting challenges has grown stronger and more influential, also in relation to the state.

While it is only recently that disgust has been (re)assessed as a category of analysis for the Early Modern period, its temporalities are in need of further investigation. The chapter argues that disgust is triggered and represented by material memory objects in Hamlet and Othello. Here, disgust serves as affective response to the pressure of seemingly paradoxical temporalities – Hamlet’s experience of a past that is embodied in the untimely object of the skull, and Othello’s experience of a ‘future anterior’ that is mediated by and manifested in the handkerchief, respectively. In the two plays, the temporality of disgust is paradoxical: it simultaneously lags behind the memory object from which it recoils and generates the object in the very act of recoiling. By reading the respective temporalities of disgust both tragedies display, I suggest that the affective dynamics of disgust find literary analogy in the structural dynamics of both Hamlet’s and Othello’s fundamental dramatic conflict.

One of the major aesthetic and philosophical frameworks that has been used to represent and think about the modern environmental crisis is the sublime. This chapter traces how a tradition of the sublime traceable directly to Romantic literature and culture has been used to conceptualize both the forms of nature that we should cherish, such as particular landscapes, and the forms of nature that we should shrink from, such as extreme weather events. The chapter also addresses how in the twenty-first century the sublime, and specifically a ‘Romantic sublime’ based mainly on Kant’s writings, has been condemned as an aesthetic that assumes a distance between human and nonhuman, and which creates a false impression that humans can transcend or solve the environmental crisis. Finally, the chapter considers whether a Romantic eco-sublime might still have a useful role in helping us to think about the nonhuman world and our relationship with it in a time of crisis.

The Coronavirus pandemic brought a lot of disruption to all aspects of modern society, including social, economic, political and international aspects. The resulting crisis presented various risks and hazards globally, but where there are threats for some actors, others sense opportunities for attaining their goals. Consequently, around the virus pandemic was an infodemic that tested individual, organisational and governmental responses to COVID-19.

Hybrid warfare is a widely interpreted and highly contested concept and also a label for opponents and targets in conflict or competition in international relations. It is often projected as being something underhand undertaken by the other, however, this chapter examines the conceptual and operational history of Western hybrid warfare. This refers to creating suitable environmental conditions in the information and cognitive domain as a means to subvert a target government and bring about regime change.

This chapter investigates how the International Organization for Migration (IOM) dramatically expanded its involvement in humanitarian emergencies over the past three decades. Building on insights from historical institutionalism in international relations, we hypothesize that crises which touch upon matters of migration may constitute opportunities for IOM to expand the range of its activities as contingencies call for flexible responses that the organization is (the only one) apt to deliver. The 1990-91 Gulf War served as a ‘critical juncture’ in this regard, where IOM started to expand more forcefully into the broad realm of humanitarian assistance. It set a precedent that served as best-practice example and led to an ex post formalization of the institutional expansion through corresponding frameworks for action. As we show in case studies of the 2011 Libyan civil war and the 2014-16 Ebola crisis, this pattern holds across a variety of crisis contexts: humanitarian emergencies expose gaps in the governance architecture that IOM is quick to fill, thereby increasing the range of its activities which is later normalized in institutional rules and practice. Today’s vast array of humanitarian and other crisis-related tasks fulfilled by IOM attest to the lasting ‘power of precedent’.

Emergency care teams need to organize their response to crises around shared assessment procedures. This chapter describes how MBT can inform emergency care when a crisis is handled by the multidisciplinary team of mental health practitioners in psychiatric emergency settings. Development of the formulation according to mentalizing principles creates compassionate care in emergency settings. The chapter outlines the key factors that commonly contribute to the development of a crisis, and includes a discussion of the centrality of loss of mentalizing and collapse of agency of the self that are part of any acute crisis. Focusing on all of these aspects of a psychiatric emergency can de-escalate an immediate crisis and pave the way for planning how to prevent a recurrence in the future. Understanding of the triggers that can lead to a crisis and development of a plan for reducing the risk of recurrence are illustrated with clinical examples, and the four steps of MBT-informed emergency care are described.