Russian Journal of Economics and Law (Sep 2021)
Crisis as a threat to organizational adaptation
Abstract
Objective: to substantiate the feasibility of adopting and developing a research program in the field of crisis management. Methods: general methodological principles of constructing scientific theories, understanding their maturity, differences between the pre-paradigm and paradigm stages of a scientific discipline development, studying their foundations, formulating an understanding of the organizational crisis as maladaptation on the basis of methodological and general principles of the population-ecological sphere in economic research.Results: based on the analysis of scientific literature, the existence of many competing, and sometimes mutually exclusive approaches to the theoretical understanding of the nature of organizational crises is determined. This leads to considering the crisis as an organizational maladaptation, i.e. as a certain loss of a feature of adaptation, adaptability to the occupied population-ecological niche due to internal or external changes.Two approaches are used to diagnose a state of maladaptation (crisis) or an immediate threat of such a state and to plan measures to overcome it. The first one is crisis determinism, focused on identifying and assessing crisis threats and developing measures to overcome them. The second approach focuses on neutralizing the adverse factors, affecting the organization, by mobilizing, first of all, its human resources. This subjective side of management under a crisis is characterized by the concept of intentionality - will, desire, intention to overcome the crisis.Scientific novelty: the two selected approaches to understanding the essence of crisis management serve as the basis for a co-evolutionary method of studying organizational adaptation and prospects for maladaptation. On this basis, a coevolutionary model of the crisis as a maladaptation is proposed. The model is based on the idea of the crisis as a two-phase process: in the first phase, there is a gradual decrease in organizational adaptation under the influence of destructive environmental factors, in the second - an avalanche-like development of the crisis, where the importance of the intentional, subjective aspect of the crisis is especially great. The model implies that the successful overcoming of the crisis means the restoration of the organization’s adaptation to the external environment. If this does not happen, the organization is eliminated by natural selection and the composition of the population changes.Practical significance: the coevolutionary model of crisis can serve as a basis for developing specific recommendations based on a balanced view of the crisis as a process that has a deterministic component (objective cause-effect relations) and an intentional one (subjective factors of crisis management related to skills, abilities and a will to overcome the crisis consequences).
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