The study has ended, but you can still get in touch.
Thank you to all participants
An enormous thank-you goes out to everyone who shared their time, their stories, and their candor. Your contributions are the backbone of this work, and they will help shape a clearer understanding of how challenges and crises move between organizations.
Study outcomes
This study examined externally caused crises confronting organizations in the United States wine industry and advanced the inter-organizational concept of crisis propagation, defined as the tendency for a crisis in one organization to result in a crisis for another. The investigation was guided by four research questions:
- Do organizations in the wine industry recognize crises?
- How do organizations in the wine industry perceive crises?
- How do crisis recognition, and perceptions inform the strategic decisions made by stakeholder organizations in the wine industry?
- How do the strategic decisions made by stakeholder organizations, coupled with recognition, and perceptions of the situation, result in crisis propagation within the wine industry?
The research employed Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory methodology, supported by a meso-level approach and a process-oriented perspective. Seventeen interviews were conducted with ten top-level leaders in the wine industry, eliciting the perspectives of stakeholders situated across the value chain.
Participants defined organizational crisis as a situation that existentially threatened the viability of an organization’s value chain. The crisis propagation phenomenon was explained through an input-output value chain mapping approach. External crises were found to originate in an organization’s inputs or outputs, and the resulting model demonstrated how such crises impacted an organization by producing value chain imbalances.
An organizational strategy framework was proposed to characterize the options available to organizations for managing crises, and the implications of each for crisis propagation were examined.
The study further contended that the use of existing theory was necessary for constructivist grounded theory to advance academic understanding. To this end, it introduced absence coding, a method for testing the relevance of existing theory while preserving the spirit, discipline, and rigor of the grounded theory approach.
Collectively, these contributions supported a unified theory of organizational crisis by proposing a universal definition of the term and introducing a value-chain approach to understanding complex crisis situations.