Salvage Business: Theorizing Organizations in Post-Disaster Contexts

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 10: Organizational Change and Survival

Abstract

Disasters, events which cause large-scale social disruption and pose major challenges to routine functioning, have dramatic implications on virtually all spheres of the communities they affect. However, scholars of work and organizations have examined disasters under limited circumstances. Meanwhile, when disaster scholars have examined organizations, their focus has been on the emergence of organizations geared towards disaster response, the survival of businesses or the recovery of efficiency. This paper extends scholarship of post-disaster organizational contexts in two ways. First, I bring attention to the importance of considering and distinguishing between a wider variety of organizational actors in discussions of post-disaster organizations. While the interests and aims of actors like business owners, managers, and workers may overlap, they may be distinct and even in conflict with each other in ways that shape organizational outcomes as a whole. Second, I posit that when disasters strike, new strategic action fields emerge. Organizations as a whole as well as their actors manage new contexts where rules are in flux and opportunities for shifts in the distribution of resources emerge. Disasters cause loss of material resources, the utility of familiar scripts, and even life. At the same time, disaster relief and emergent social safety net programs, both for businesses and for individuals, act as emergent resources which can be a basis for different kinds of action. New cultural resources also emerge which actors may use to achieve their ends. Drawing on my empirical research, I flesh out these theoretical points through the case of restaurants amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Author

• Ewa Protasiuk, Temple University