Book contents
- Constructing Crisis
- Constructing Crisis
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Tables
- Preface
- 1 Undertaking a New Interpretive Effort
- 2 Crisis as a Reification of Urgency
- 3 Advancing the Crisis-as-Event Model
- 4 Problems, Crises, and Contextual Constructionism
- 5 An Objective Description and a Subjective Uh-Oh!
- 6 Believing Claims of Urgency – Or Not
- 7 The Power of a Good (Crisis) Narrative
- 8 To Create Such a Crisis, to Foster Such a Tension
- 9 Beyond Forged-in-Crisis Leadership
- 10 So What?
- References
- Index
2 - Crisis as a Reification of Urgency
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 August 2019
- Constructing Crisis
- Constructing Crisis
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Tables
- Preface
- 1 Undertaking a New Interpretive Effort
- 2 Crisis as a Reification of Urgency
- 3 Advancing the Crisis-as-Event Model
- 4 Problems, Crises, and Contextual Constructionism
- 5 An Objective Description and a Subjective Uh-Oh!
- 6 Believing Claims of Urgency – Or Not
- 7 The Power of a Good (Crisis) Narrative
- 8 To Create Such a Crisis, to Foster Such a Tension
- 9 Beyond Forged-in-Crisis Leadership
- 10 So What?
- References
- Index
Summary
When Stanford University’s Larry Diamond worried about a “crisis in the liberal democratic order,” he called attention to a “zeitgeist” in which “around the world, many democracies were hanging by a thread and aspiring autocrats were preparing more savage assaults on what remained of freedom.” Diamond’s argument was powerful and, perhaps to some, persuasive. But let’s face it. Zeitgeist is not a thing, not a material object. Like its first cousin, culture, zeitgeist is a conceptual shortcut for offering an interpretation of a prevailing spirit or mood. Deploying the term “zeitgeist” amounts to an attempt to amass the thoughts and behaviors of individuals into a coherent whole and then to proceed as if that whole was a real thing.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Constructing CrisisLeaders, Crises and Claims of Urgency, pp. 18 - 36Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019