Is Crisis Management (Only) a Management of Exceptions? Christophe Roux-Dufort EM Lyon, 23 avenue Guy de Collongue, 69130 Ecully, France. E-mail: roux-dufort@em-lyon.com This paper revisits the concept of crisis within the field of crisis management and puts forward a series of avenues for building a theory of crisis that is in closer relation with the mainstream of organization theory. We suggest that if crisis management still limits itself to the analysis of exceptional situations, it might never go beyond the sphere of exception management and will for a long time remain an isolated discipline with little room for innovation and progress. As an alternative we analyze crises as a process of incubation that starts long before the triggering event. This proposition implies revisiting other related notions that have seldom been discussed by authors: first the status and place of the triggering event that should be viewed both as a fault line and a hinge between a degenerative organizational past evolution and a future of change; second, the temporality of a crisis so as to extract it from the urgency it is traditionally associated with; third and contrary to authors who see in the crisis a collapse of meaning and of sensemaking, we analyze it as a surge of meaning that fosters organizational change and transformations. Introduction C rises, often reduced to major events such as natural disasters (Hurricane Katrina), the collapse of financial empires (Enron, Worldcom or Parmalat), major terrorist attacks (9/11), unprecedented diseases (Asian influenza), etc., are traditionally perceived as exceptional situations. As such, research studies in crisis management often derive part of their legitimacy from the power of the event they investigate. The more critical the event, the more it appears to legitimize scientific examination, as if in itself, the incomprehen- sion it arouses justifies a crucial need for knowledge. Although the credibility of this stream of research cannot be questioned, we believe, however, that the exceptionality of the situations that crisis management examines contributes to isolating this discipline from organization theory and damages its legitimacy within this area. As Scott (1994) put it: ‘One of the puzzling aspects of the growing literature on organizations prone to accidents [crises] . . . is the lack of connection to mainstream organization theory. Why does not the stream of work connect more directly with the large body of theory and research on organizational effec- tiveness, or with the growing body of work on organi- zational learning? Perhaps these organizations are too special, too exotic, too ‘‘far out’’ to be compared with the prosaic world of everyday organizations.’ (Scott, 1994: 25, our emphasis). What’s more, some authors have recently substituted the concept of crisis for a number of notions which, according to them, prefigure a new generation of events entirely beyond the control and understanding of tradi- tional organizations and thus making almost obsolete the traditional crisis management concepts, methods and tools. The notion of rupture is thus favoured over crisis (Lagadec, 1999), and inconceivability replaces uncertainty (Rosenthal, 2003). Although these analyses are relevant, this semantic escalation contributes to widening the distance between crisis management and the preoccupa- tions of managers and organization theorists. The concept of crisis has never made it into organi- zation theory whereas it has for a long time found a strong theoretical legitimacy in other fields of human and social sciences such as economics, political sciences or sociology, where it stands as a structuring notion. Crisis management is perceived as the management of exceptional or out-of-the-ordinary situations, but it & 2007 The Author. Journal compilation & 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA, 02148, USA Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management Volume 15 Number 2 June 2007