“I Fought for the Shawarma”: Bureaucratic Cannibalism and Totalizing Speciation of the Russian State in Polycrisis

• In Event: Economic Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 10: Theorizing Organizations

Abstract

This paper advances organization theory by treating institutional collapse not merely as a breakdown of order, but as a systemic adaptation to polycrisis; an organizational death that unfolds through adaptive survival. Using 12 purposively selected interviews with Russian prisoners of war nested within a corpus of 1,500 publicly available interactions, I operationalize the interrogation room as a breaching experiment that exposes the state’s failure of mythmaking. Through a multi-circuit framework of coercive, facilitative, and systemic power, I introduce the concept of bureaucratic cannibalism - the process by which institutions consume their own agents in the fight to sustain legitimacy. The findings show that as the state’s rationalized myth collapses, actors substitute ideological scripts with market rationality in an evolutionary pivot from “patriot” to “mercenary.” This logic substitution from moral to material survival is a form of adaptive institutional exaptation of the contract. By tracing how organized ignorance gives way to market rationality, I advance a Sociology of Rupture, explaining how organizations pilot and perpetuate crises when their myths can no longer endure material reality.

Author

• Iva Petkova-Cutler, Ringling College of Art and Design