Questioning the Concept of Organizational Crisis from a Complexity Perspective: Towards a Reconstruction of the Concept in Light of Edgar Morin’s Thought

Abstract

This study seeks to question the concept of crisis in organizational studies, starting from the observation that prevailing perspectives tend to reduce it to a binary opposition between threat and dysfunction, on the one hand, and opportunity and change, on the other. Such a reduction may obscure its complex and dynamic nature. To overcome this reductionism, the study draws on Edgar Morin’s complexity perspective by employing the principle of the conjunction of opposites, the cybernetic perspective, and the relationship between entropy and negative entropy (negentropy), with the aim of reconstructing the concept of crisis as a process arising from the interaction of contradictions inherent within the organization and their acceleration under certain conditions. This process affects mechanisms of regulation and equilibrium and makes attempts to regain control potentially capable of generating new disturbances.

Based on this perspective, the study proposes an operational definition of organizational crisis and identifies several types of crises according to the mechanisms through which they emerge, including crises related to human resources, the uncontrolled growth of entropy and negentropy, and the absence of certainty resulting from knowledge gaps and the overlapping of specialized perspectives. The study also reconceptualizes the life cycle of a crisis as a transition from the detection of contradictions to the actualization of the crisis situation, followed by attempts to regain control and restore organizational order. In this context, the study discusses the limitations of relying exclusively on quantitative approaches and highlights the importance of organizational ethnography for understanding the meanings, interactions, and contexts through which crises emerge and are reshaped.

The study concludes that understanding and managing crises requires moving beyond reductionist frameworks and viewing crisis as a complex and cybernetic phenomenon in which processes of disturbance, regulation, and reorganization intersect. Accordingly, crisis-control strategies themselves may become part of the crisis dynamics and a source of its reproduction.