Crisis? What Crisis? Strategic Crisis Management, and the GM Ignition Switch Crisis

摘要

An organizational crisis can threaten firm survival, making crisis management a strategically critical issue for organizations. Sense-making is a cognitive mechanism that allows action to continue amid the chaos of a crisis. Sense-making may inform crisis management theory and practice by providing methods to improve comprehension when a crisis appears unmanageable and provide direction on how to take control of a crisis that appears uncontrollable. This paper is an initial effort in developing a model of managing crises in sense-making terms. The 2014 General Motors ignition switch crisis, when GM recalled almost 2.6 million vehicles, is used to illustrate sense-making's role in crisis management. Managerial and research implications are discussed.