Management of Extreme Situations

11Scope and Limits of Extreme Situations for Highly Reliable Organizations: A Pragmatic Interpretation

11.1. Introduction

The notion of an extreme situation has undergone significant growth in recent years in the field of analysis of organizations and industrial risk management. Beyond the obvious contributions of this notion, this chapter draws on John Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy to question the empirical and theoretical limits of extreme situations. It then aims to specify some conditions under which the use of the concept seems to be most successful for organizational sciences in general and for high reliability organizations (HROs), in particular.

11.2. The growing interest in extreme situations

A recent study (Hallgren et al. 2018) shows that managerial literature is increasingly showing interest in the “extreme” nature of situations and different contexts in which organizations operate. Extremity is addressed here under its most radical aspect insofar: the “life or death” issue for the organization, as well as for the actors involved in the situation. The number of articles published on this topic in international scientific journals has increased dramatically over the past 30 years: from 16 articles in the 1980–1989 to 60 articles during 2000–2009.

These studies give “extremity” the status of an explanatory factor of performance, good or bad, of the organizations considered. Extreme situations are defined (Bouty et al. 2012) by their evolutionary (or even disruptive), ...