Abstract
Bert Spector’s book Constructing Crisis centers on understanding claims regarding crisis, and underscores our appreciation of the socially constructed nature of crisis claims and their reception. Such a book is long overdue. Those looking for a ‘how to’ manual for the most effective ways to respond to a crisis may come away with some important insights, but consider this first line in the preface: ‘The central assertion of Constructing Crisis is that there is no such thing as a crisis’ (p. ix). Clearly, from the outset, this book is intent on challenging orthodox conceptualizations of crisis and crisis management. So how radical is Spector’s approach to understanding crisis? His preliminary chapters offer broad examples of previous paradigms of research taking on what he dubs a ‘crisis-as-event’ (i.e., positivist; reified) model to understand crisis. At the outset Spector informs the reader that the book ‘is not intended as an empirical work. My goal is not to prove something. It is, rather, to provoke thought’ (p. xvii, original emphasis). Clearly what is meant here is that the book doesn’t explicate the findings of an empirically grounded research project per se. That said, the book is highly engaging, grounded by a wealth of well-considered and, perhaps ironically, empirically grounded examples.
The book follows a line of thinking that works effectively to convey Spector’s arguments. Most chapters include short paragraphs dedicated to making explicitly theoretical or conceptual points (a bit more of this necessarily in the early chapters), but these are followed by extended considerations of case studies. This works well. Spector’s previous research and expertise comes from examinations of business, and many of his examples center on large multinational corporations grappling crises (these range from Facebook, United Airlines, to Enron, among others). The early chapters distinguish between the prevailing ‘crisis-as-event’ model and Spector’s preferred ‘crisis-as-claim’ model; the latter enabling new conceptual directions for researchers to follow. The crisis-as-claim framework ‘shifts analysis away from the event [i.e., the crisis at hand] and to the claim’ (p. 15). Spector rejects the notion of ‘discovering’ a crisis which only awaits description and a clarion call for action; this is rejected for mistaking ‘the content of claims for descriptions of objective truths’ (p. 16). Crises are often treated as objective social facts, and in so doing act to reify urgency. The task becomes ‘to find an approach to distinguish the legitimacy in a claim’ (p. 81).
As the book proceeds, Spector unpacks his conceptual map further, arguing that claims of urgency regarding a crisis contain both objective description and subjective ascription. The former deals with ‘“brute facts” that cannot be wished away’, and involves assessment of a claim’s accuracy, while the latter ‘seeks to define the import and meaning of those brute facts,’ and deals with a claim’s plausibility (pp. 87, 89). Examples of such brute facts include ‘storms forming in the Atlantic, faulty parts installed in millions of cars, a nascent AIDS epidemic, “White-Only” signs in Birmingham storefronts’ (p. 231; these examples are unpacked in detail in various sections of the book). Spector ultimately builds a typology for his crisis-as-claim model that delineates between claims of urgency which are accurate or inaccurate, as well as plausible or implausible (p. 94). He argues that a claim’s ‘accuracy is a much simpler concept to understand’ and explicate than plausibility, since it pertains to ‘cold, hard facts’ (p. 89). This is an important distinction, as most of the book is dedicated to systematically showcasing examples of how such an analysis can be accomplished. Reading this section of the book I was struck by its adroit application of a conceptual frame arguably in line with Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) original treatise on the sociology of knowledge, with its careful (albeit separate and distinct) consideration of both objective and subjective aspects of knowledge production and sociality.
The book proceeds by considering the impact leaders play on influencing the framing and interpretation of crises. Here power plays a central role, including leaders who are successful (or not) in deflecting blame for crises (e.g., arguing that a crisis is an ‘act of God’ whose etiological origin negates human – especially personal – error), and in some cases leaders who engender a crisis in order to accomplish particular goals. The former, perhaps more ubiquitous response to crisis, involves ‘pattern recognition’ linked to common sense ideas (p. 113). Central to the task of effective claims-making regarding crisis is narrative – a topic Spector explicates in Chapter 7. Narrative is of course central to the ‘constructionist imagination’ (e.g., Loseke, 2018), and Spector makes good use of the argument that ‘all crisis narratives should be appreciated as textual performances’ (p. 148, original emphasis), including ‘master’ narratives regarding crises framed as the ‘once-glorious-kingdom under-threat’ (p. 150), or ‘a-few-bad-apples’ (p. 154), or ‘the forces-beyond-our-control’ (p. 157). In some cases, as mentioned above, certain leaders purposefully create a crisis in order to push particular goals. This is amply demonstrated by Spector in Chapter 8, in the case of Martin Luther King Jr’s campaign of civil disobedience in Birmingham, Alabama during the early 1960s; the goal of course being desegregation in the United States as a whole.
Spector reveals that his early academic training was as a historian (p. xiii), and this training becomes integral to the arguments he develops. The legitimacy of a crisis claim often rests on how it is framed (here Spector draws on Goffman, 1974), and this rests pivotally on periodization. Indeed, the value of Spector’s analysis is best revealed with examples that indicate how looking back in time illuminates antecedent contexts to claims-making regarding crises; claims which often rely on presentism to project or deflect culpability. A leader is less able to deflect blame, in other words, when wider sociohistorical contexts are considered. The accuracy of claims made by executives of Enron, or United States officials in relation to Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction – examples Spector unpacks in well-considered detail – rests on what we ‘now know’ to be ‘inaccurate’ (p. 116). In other places he reveals claims-maker intentions are better appreciated ‘from a distance of many decades’ (p. 166). In many respects his conceptual framework, then, rests on the ability of the analyst to have historical distance and context to best gauge claim accuracy and also plausibility. One of the most striking examples offered throughout the book is the case of Hurricane Katrina. Spector, as always, carefully unpacks the events regarding the flooding of New Orleans and the crisis situation that unfolded in 2005. Drawing from historical sources, he effectively argues that when the narrative of the ‘initiating event’ (p. 161) is pushed farther back in time, and greater historical context is revealed, the particular crisis narratives of key leaders become far less convincing. Spector’s considerable skills interweaving empirical examples with his conceptual arguments are apparent in many places, but especially this section of the book.
The variant of social constructionism Spector is most inspired by is ‘contextual constructionism.’ Drawing from Spector and Kitsuse (1973), Spector refers to claims-making as ‘activities of groups making assertions of grievances and claims to organizations, agencies, and institutions about some putative conditions.’ A number of debates emerged during the 1980s and 1990s that Spector, in my view correctly, largely sidesteps (see Best, 2003; Ibarra and Kitsuse, 2003; Woolgar and Pawluch, 1985). In Chapter 4 he introduces ‘strict’ constructionism as a more ‘exacting’ variant of constructionism that ‘insist[s] that there is no such thing as an objective fact’ (p. 66). Spector isn’t directly critical of strict constructionism, but clearly favors the ‘contextual’ alternative, which permits ‘judgment about the legitimacy of a claim’ (p. 76). It is also clear that he is highly persuaded by the reasoning behind ‘contextual constructionism’ as offered by the influential constructionist scholar Joel Best, both through Best’s published writings (Best, 1995, 2003) as well as personal correspondence (p. 77).
Spector’s draw to contextual constructionism is obviated by his desire to assess claims regarding crisis: ‘a claim may be legitimate, or it may not be’ (p. xv). ‘There are real facts,’ he argues later, which ‘become crises only through the act of asserting a claim’ (p. 35). This is of course purposeful, geared to making the book’s particular approach relevant to readers. Indeed, the final chapter seems to anticipate this, given its title ‘So What?’ While reading, I kept thinking of Barry Glassner’s (1999) The Culture of Fear as a potential influence, which openly declares on the cover its goal of uncovering ‘why Americans are afraid of the wrong things.’ For instance, on page 71 Spector asks why United States President George HW Bush’s crisis response to crack cocaine in the 1980s was emphasized over ‘more damaging’ problems related to alcohol and tobacco. While I don’t remain fully convinced that the constructionist analyst is ultimately able to – or should – delineate between the ‘brute facts’ of a crisis versus its interpretive elements (indeed, the analyst becomes a claims-maker in the process of crisis attributions when doing so), the approach taken by Spector is convincing, adroitly applied, and eminently useful.
At times Spector’s discussion doesn’t push hard enough on questions of wider social forces and structural inequalities that may help better situate individual responses, such as those from organizational leaders in business. For instance, on pages 113–115 he draws on cognitive scientists’ designations of people with lower vs. higher ‘cognitive complexity,’ and the implications for how such individuals may interpret ‘categorical distinctions’ versus ‘paradoxes and contradictions’ (p. 114). While noting this relates to a ‘combination of experience and biology’ (p. 114), I was nevertheless struck that the book didn’t delve further into how experience is mediated by, say, socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, and so forth. In some spots Spector does refer to how individuals’ ‘cognitive process[es],’ including their beliefs regarding claims of crisis, ‘are shaped and reinforced by like-minded others’ (p. 123). This reveals a more social-psychological influence, but more generally, the book’s focus on the discourse of claims-making, even when considering power, sometimes sidelines questions of how power is itself patterned and structured. Of course, this is likely purposeful and linked to the conceptual framework of contextual constructionism. Pros and cons here, depending on one’s analytical goals. More widely, it is noteworthy to mention recent critiques of social constructionism, which point to its willful agnosticism towards material conditions and class inequalities (see especially Dello Buono, 2015).
Considerations of the best audience for this book are linked to questions regarding its overall intent. Certainly, this book will be of great interest to social constructionist scholars and scholars sympathetic to a sociology of knowledge framework. Academics who specialize in crisis may find the conceptual approach refreshing, and the book is written with such engaging and vivid examples that its appeal is likely to extend well beyond the ivory tower. What about business and governmental leaders themselves? Perhaps some may gain a bit of a sociological imagination, if not constructionist imagination, regarding crisis narratives. I could, however, see a scenario where the interpretive insights rendered throughout the book are deployed strategically, and ironically, through a sort of doubled down ‘crisis-as-event’ narrative. It’s still an open question how constructionist arguments are appropriated by various publics (Best, 2004). 1
Constructing Crisis is well edited with very few errors (e.g., a repeated footnote on pages 133 and 135). Indeed, errors are so minimal that they need no further explication here, save for the citation to Spector and Kitsuse’s Constructing Social Problems as 1987, not 1977 on page 69. The edition cited is 1987, yes, but the original publication date in the late 1970s matters here to inform readers of the correct timeline. On page 70, moreover, Thomas Szasz’s research on the social construction of madness is referred to in a paragraph discussing research ‘after’ Spector and Kitsuse, despite Szasz’s work dating back to 1970. Kitsuse is also misreferred to as ‘Krause’ on page 75, and his name is missing an ‘s’ on page 80. To be sure, small editorial errors like these are found in every book, and here do nothing to besmirch the wider readability and argumentation of the book.
Spector answers his own ‘So What?’ question by arguing that the constructionist theory influencing his conceptual framework can help ‘impact thinking about acting’ regarding crises (p. 251, my emphasis). I read this book during a particular global singularity: the outbreak of COVID-19, which was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020. My reflections on the book became braided with the wider set of circumstances governed by this pandemic. Indeed, the ‘brute fact’ of the virus becomes quickly set against the various interpretations regarding appropriate, and inappropriate responses. I found Spector’s arguments eminently applicable to the current pandemic and its variegated claims of crisis, and I would hardly be surprised if Spector is already hard at work on such a topic. This is a good book; one that would have been prescient despite COVID-19. I’m sure it will inspire both sociological and historical imaginations regarding crisis narratives and responses.