Organizing and Strategizing in and for Extreme Contexts: Temporality, Emotions, and Embodiment

Organizing and Strategizing in and for Extreme Contexts: Temporality, Emotions, and Embodiment

ABSTRACT This special issue advances our understanding of organizing and strategizing in extreme contexts by focusing on temporality, emotions, and embodiment. Extreme contexts - marked by unpredictability, high stakes, and urgency - challenge organizational capacities and demand innovative responses. Drawing on the foundation of extreme context research, this introduction explores three perspectives: extreme as an event, a situational context, and a socially constructed practice. Together, these perspectives illuminate how organizations navigate, adapt to, and construct extremeness through temporal, emotional, and embodied processes. The contributions span diverse empirical settings and theoretical frameworks. By examining the contributions in the light of these dimensions, this introduction highlights the evolving and contested nature of extreme context research. The introduction concludes with a call for future studies to deepen engagement with materiality, relational dynamics, and methodological innovations, reinforcing the relevance of this field to broader management and organization studies.

INTRODUCTION

Extreme contexts are often defined as settings where extreme events may occur and exceed an organization's capacity to prevent harm, leading to significant physical, psychological, or material consequences. Extreme contexts are typically characterized by unexpected material and environmental conditions, the physical presence of heterogeneous actors, and intense time pressures. In drafting the call for this special issue we sought to advance research on organizing and strategizing processes for these types of conditions. In our call we focused particularly on three aspects: temporality, such as the need to accelerate or postpone decision-making under time pressure; embodiment, which becomes crucial due to the physical demands of potentially life-threatening situations; and materiality, evident in how organizations and actors navigate and adapt to volatile environments. Given the unpredictable, urgent, and materially demanding nature of extreme contexts, attention to these topics potentially offers both fresh and nuanced insights into how organizations navigate under extreme conditions.

Our call for papers was received enthusiastically, showcasing a range of empirical phenomenon. A first glance at the submitted papers revealed a surprisingly strong scholarly interest in temporality, embodiment, and emotions in extreme contexts while the theme of materiality was far less popular. We wondered if it was by chance or simply a reflection of the literature produced on extreme contexts during the past decade. We also noticed and welcomed the variety of the theoretical and methodological approaches used by researchers to study the processes of organizing and strategizing in and for extreme contexts. Finally, we were intrigued by the ways in which management and organization scholars framed their extreme context work. Some scholars framed their contributions almost exclusively as a contribution to what has become to be known as the extreme context research instead of developing generative theorizing around the central paper's empirical object. More frequently, however, this framing was not central; in some cases it was criticized.

These observations invited us to reflect on the nature and scope of the extreme context research as described that has become popular over the past decade. The extreme context literature is not a theory per se - nor do we believe that it should be. The notion of extreme context is an 'umbrella construct' that encompasses a diversity of existing approaches, empirical phenomena, and disciplines. Therefore, extreme contexts research can be seen as a perspective that defines and embraces knowledge produced in related domains. With this in mind, we reviewed the recent literature and reflected on knowledge production in this growing area of research. This led us to realize that this field is characterized by 'contested knowledge' through challenging conversations within which new contributions, as for example in this special issue, on temporality and emotion and embodiment, are developing. This reflection allowed us to identify and elaborate on three perspectives on the extreme - as an event, a situational context, or a practice - and how they can be applied.

Before presenting the papers composing this special issue, we first offer a quick recap and extension of extreme context research since its recent inception in management and organization studies. Second, we introduce three challenging debates related to the distinctiveness of the rationale domain, the definitional knowledge claims, and the theoretical contributions constituting extreme context as contested knowledge. Third, we present and discuss the selected contributions with a focus on temporality, emotions and embodiment. Finally, we end with brief directions for future research on extreme contexts.