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Markus Hällgren, Oscar Rantatalo and Ola Lindberg examine the interface between research on extreme contexts and strategy as practice research. The authors argue that combining these two bodies of literature can help management and organization researchers to develop more impactful research. They start by discussing what an extreme context is, followed by an overview of how strategizing plays out in risky, emergency, disruptive and surprising contexts. Then, the authors provide an empirical vignette from their own research as an example of strategy work in a risky setting. This example uses incident command organizing to perform strategic work during extreme situations. The case study illustrates how strategic change entails a dynamic and political process during which actors within the same practice may act with different objectives. While the authors show that excellent work has already been done at the interface of extreme contexts and strategy as practice research, they suggest future research avenues that would allow reinforcing the bridges between these two areas of research.

This article investigates how participants in simulations of extreme events handle inadequacy, contributing to the discussion on workplace learning in high-pressure and unpredictable scenarios. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted across five simulations in three organizations (military, police, and county administrative board), involving 288 h of observations, ethnographic interviews, and 18 semi-structured interviews. The analysis focused on identifying episodes where participants encountered inadequacy, exploring how they recognized, attributed, and addressed it. Our findings reveal that inadequacy disrupts routine practices but also fosters opportunities for learning and innovation. Key conditions for effectively handling inadequacy include the voicing of inadequacy, which requires psychologically safe environments, and proactive responses such as improvisation or acceptance under urgency. Additionally, simulations, while controlled and artificial, effectively expose inadequacies, revealing gaps in preparedness that can inform future crisis responses. This article contributes to professional learning by highlighting inadequacy as a critical factor in both individual and collective learning, offering insights into how simulations can be designed to enhance preparedness for unpredictable, high-stakes events.

This article explores how guides negotiate uncertainty in a risky mountain environment based on three years of participant ethnography with Norwegian ski guides. This study makes two primary contributions. First, we introduce the literature on organizational routine dynamics to adventure tourism research; this helps to explain how guides perform and adapt routines to socio-ecological uncertainty. Second, our socio-ecologically informed approach highlights how social interactions impact the ‘more-than-human’ post-materialist discourse in adventure tourism research. These two contributions, in combination, suggest that negotiating uncertainty is dependent on the evolving nature of socio-ecological entanglements.

This special issue advances our understanding of organizing and strategizing in extreme contexts by focusing on temporality, emotions, and embodiment. Extreme contexts – marked by unpredictability, high stakes, and urgency – challenge organizational capacities and demand innovative responses. Drawing on the foundation of extreme context research, this introduction explores three perspectives: extreme as an event, a situational context, and a socially constructed practice. Together, these perspectives illuminate how organizations navigate, adapt to, and construct extremeness through temporal, emotional, and embodied processes. The contributions span diverse empirical settings and theoretical frameworks. By examining the contributions in the light of these dimensions, this introduction highlights the evolving and contested nature of extreme context research. The introduction concludes with a call for future studies to deepen engagement with materiality, relational dynamics, and methodological innovations, reinforcing the relevance of this field to broader management and organization studies.

The role of first responders during extreme crisis events consists of improvising under time pressure to retain control of the unfolding situation and mitigate harmful effects to help organizations restore their 'normal' functioning. This pervasive view of crises as cosmologic events obscures their transformational dimension and their long-term positive outcomes. In this article, we explore how actors respond to time pressure and vital stakes while identifying and actualizing a novel trajectory. They improvise to overcome limitations, create, and enact a desirable future to seize an opportunity that arises due to unexpected surprises. We argue that the actualization of novel trajectories relies on a combination of the enactment of a duplicate temporality that combines the chronological time-pressure of the unfolding event and kairotic time, in which critical decisions and actions actualize the desired future. Our contributions to the crisis management literature are twofold. First, we conceptualize chronological and kairotic improvisation practices to acknowledge that crisis response is not only about acting quickly but also about doing the right thing at the right time. Second, we shed light on crises as 'cosmologic' events, showing that they can be a point of origin for long-term positive outcomes. Finally, we advocate for a deeper and fine-grained consideration of time and temporality to advance crisis management studies.

How can we understand the demands on leaders who will have to deal with extreme events that have not occurred before? This is becoming increasingly important as organizations need support to prepare for unknown, unprecedented, and unimaginable events. In a workshop with a police incident command team, we explore how extreme fiction—radically imaginative narratives of accidents, crises, and disasters—can help. To do this, we conducted a workshop with the team, responding to a scene from the apocalyptic television series The Walking Dead. We make two contributions. First, we show how extreme fiction can help to reimagine assumptions about crisis leadership. Specifically, we find that crisis leadership can benefit from weaknesses as it increases the response approach. Second, we find that extreme fiction creates engagement and reduces the reliance on simple, formulaic solutions that may be of little use in the future. This helps practitioners prepare and build resilience for handling surprising, unimaginable extreme events.

Research has focused on episodic crises (e.g., fire extinguished), with regard to causality, management, and recovery. But some crises (e.g., illegal migration) are continuous, with no clear conclusion, and the nature and timing of the recovery phase are indeterminate. To explore the challenges facing leaders in a continuous crisis, we turn to ‘extreme fiction’ – a radically imaginative narrative of possible accidents, crises and disasters. The television series The Walking Dead is an example of a continuous crisis. This is also a novel crisis, which means that crisis management routines, protocols, and standard operating procedures may not apply, and the value of past experience may be limited. Our analysis offers a novel perspective on the nature of the crisis leadership role, by showing how a continuous crisis generates three paradoxical leadership agendas: managing the crisis (which includes unmanageable elements), managing conflict (while initiating and participating in conflict), and managing values (which may have to be temporarily abandoned). Our findings also demonstrate how contextual properties shape the leadership role in a continuous crisis.

There is an increasing discussion on the role of projects and temporary organising in the face of global and local crises. Categorically, the temporary, non-linear and complex nature of crisis from its onset has several theoretical and methodological parallels in the study of projects. To provide an outsider perspective in the process of cultivating this research stream within Project Studies, we interviewed Christine Pearson, Professor of Global Leadership at Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University. Pearson is globally known for her work on organisational crisis and is the author of the seminal work “Reframing Crisis Management.” In this interview, Pearson unpacks the evolution of conceptual frameworks in crisis research and elaborates on the role of projects in the face of crisis, specifically emphasising the non-linear conceptualisation of crisis. She highlights the role of project leadership in the context of crisis and finishes with potential future directions for contribution of the discipline of Project Studies to crisis literature, as she calls this research stream a “fertile territory.” These insights can be specifically used by project scholars in view of crisis associated with man-made hazards, natural hazards, or accidents, as well as broader management scholars to use theories developed in study of crisis by project scholars.

We explore how management and organization scholars theorize when undertaking research on extreme contexts, which are organizational settings where potential adverse events arise from risks, emergencies and disruptions. We propose that different ‘modes of engagement’ arise as researchers connect different aspects of the self to the extreme context; namely, personal self, professional self, moral self and vulnerable self. Each self-context connection plays out in different modes of engagement in the conduct of empirical research and enables different theorizing practices. We present these self-context connections as four ideal-typical modes of engagement. Adventuresome inquiry connects a personal self to the extreme context and theorizes by phenomenon-driven problematization. Instrumental scholarship expresses a professional self in the extreme context and theorizes by theory elaboration. Ideological improvement galvanizes a moral self in the extreme context and theorizes by change-driven abstraction. Reflexive labor exposes a vulnerable self and theorizes by dialectical interrogation. Our comprehensive framework of theorizing as mode of engagement contributes to extreme context research by elucidating how theorizing in and through such contexts is accomplished by researchers with multiple selves and by offering some guidance on how the four modes can be used dynamically to ensure generative theorizing. We also contribute to the broader literature on theorizing in management and organization studies by highlighting the need to consider the interplay between the researcher and the academic contributions they produce and by proposing a reflexive and dynamic framework of theorizing as modes of engagement.