How a crisis spreads from one company to the next.
My doctoral research followed a simple but slippery question: when one organization is hit by a crisis, why does it so often become a crisis for others? Here’s the story of what I found — and how I got there.
The question
Crises don’t stay put. A problem at one company can ripple outward and become a problem for others — sometimes for businesses that did nothing wrong. We tend to treat that spread as messy and unpredictable: something to weather rather than understand.
I wanted to understand it precisely — how a disruption travels between organizations, and what determines whether it stops or keeps going. That idea, inter-organizational crisis propagation, sits at the center of the dissertation.
How I studied it
I studied the question up close in a single setting: the U.S. wine industry — an interconnected web of growers, producers, distributors, and retailers where a shock in one place is quickly felt elsewhere. Seventeen interviews with ten top-level leaders across that value chain gave me a real view of how crises are recognized, perceived, and acted on.
The method was Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory, supported by a meso-level, process-oriented lens — an approach built for turning the messy reality of interviews into a disciplined, testable model. Four questions guided the work:
- 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?
- How do those strategic decisions, together with recognition and perceptions, result in crisis propagation across the industry?
What I found
By mapping each organization as a chain of inputs and outputs, the research traced how a disruption at one point throws the whole chain out of balance — and how that imbalance is what spreads to others. It turns a vague notion of “contagion” into something you can actually see and reason about.
- A working definition of organizational crisis: a situation that existentially threatens the viability of an organization’s value chain.
- A model of how externally caused crises take hold — originating in an organization’s inputs or outputs, then spreading through value-chain imbalances.
- A strategy framework laying out leaders’ options for managing a crisis, and what each choice means for whether it propagates onward.
- A methodological contribution, absence coding, for rigorously testing whether existing theory applies within grounded-theory research.
- A step toward a unified theory of organizational crisis: a universal definition, plus a value-chain lens for making sense of complex situations.
Why it matters
For leaders, the value is practical. If you can see your organization as a value chain and spot where an external crisis enters, you can reason about where it is likely to travel next — and the strategy framework lays out the options for responding, along with what each one means for whether the crisis spreads. It reframes crisis response from pure reaction into something closer to navigation.
Watch the defenses
The full story, in my own words — from the early proposal through to the final dissertation defense.
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The full abstract
For the formal, academic version of everything above:
This study focuses on externally caused crises faced by organizations in the US wine industry and elaborates on the inter-organizational concept of “crisis propagation” – defined as the tendency for a crisis in one organization to result in a crisis for another. Research questions asked how crises are recognized and perceived, as well as how strategic decisions influence crisis propagation. Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory methodology was used for this investigation, supported by a meso-level approach and process-oriented perspective. 17 interviews of ten top-level leaders in the wine industry were conducted, revealing the perspectives of various stakeholders across the value chain. Participants defined organizational crises as situations that existentially threaten the viability of an organization’s value chain. The crisis propagation phenomenon was explained with an input-output value chain mapping approach. External crises were found to originate from the inputs or outputs of an organization, and the value chain model illustrates how crises impact an organization by causing value chain imbalances. An organizational strategy framework was proposed to explain organizations’ options for managing crises, and the implications for crisis propagation were discussed. This study also proposed that the use of existing theory is necessary for constructivist grounded theory to advance academic understanding. Absence coding was introduced to test the relevance of existing theory while respecting the spirit, discipline, and rigor of the grounded theory approach. This research contributes to 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.
About the study
Want the background — who took part, what the study asked, and why it matters? The study overview page tells that side of the story, including how to get involved.