From Seidman to Silverton
One academic's preparation for data generation in the extreme
One academic's preparation for data generation in the extreme
We live in an age of “normalized unprecedentness” (Atwater, 2021), where extreme weather events, geopolitical tensions, threats of violence, and cyber-attacks—to name a few—offer frequent doses of disruption for organizations. Keeping pace with such disruptive patterns that challenge organizations’ capacities to cope, the field of organization theory has witnessed an explosion of articles exploring how individuals and organizations navigate extreme contexts (e.g., Crawford & Dacin, 2021; Hällgren, Rouleau, & de Rond, 2018; Kent & Granqvist, 2024). One critical characteristic of this stream of research is that much of it is reliant on generating rich interview data by placing both the researcher and participants in harm’s way, inviting elements of danger, uncertainty, and violence into data generation (Crawford, Chiles, & Elias, 2021; de Rond, Lok, & Marrison, 2022). The purpose of this sabbatical project, therefore, is to shed light on the importance of preparation for organizational researchers exploring extreme contexts, including how thoughtful and intentional preparation might set researchers up to successfully navigate the unique vulnerabilities of extreme contexts.
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Benjamin Franklin

Brett Crawford (pictured alongside his better half) is an Associate Professor of Management at the Seidman College of Business, Grand Valley State University. He is an organization theorist by training who relies primarily on qualitative methods (e.g., long multimodal interviews, oral histories, robust archives) to explore how actors (real and imagined) organize to protect and repair institutions. Brett's research is multifaceted, having published empirical, theoretical, and methodological papers in a variety of top journals, including Organization Studies, Strategic Organization, Journal of Management Inquiry, Organization Theory, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations, among others. Brett is also a published poet, having his work featured in The American Fly Fisher. He has held a number of faculty and research appointments prior to returning to GVSU (he played baseball for GVSU as an undergraduate student), including Purdue University, the University of Pittsburgh, Northwestern University, and Stanford University. Brett earned his Ph.D. in Management and Organization Studies from Copenhagen Business School (Denmark) and his MBA from the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
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