[Conference] ‘Toward Just Institutions: Fostering Institutional Capacity In Response To Creeping Crises’
June 18th, 2025
2:30pm – 4pm in Promenade Building (PR13) & on Zoom
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Speaker: Johanna MAIR – Stanford University, USA
Co-authored with Fenja Nolting
abstract
How do organizations foster just institutional arrangements in response to slow-burning societal threats?
While organized responses to episodic crises have been widely studied in organization theory, less is known about how organizations engage with creeping crises—gradual, cumulative threats that undermine institutional legitimacy over time.
Drawing on a longitudinal case study of a nonprofit organization addressing systemic migration challenges in Germany, we examine how efforts to confront a creeping crisis contributed to more inclusive, equitable, and resilient forms of cooperation.
We identify three generative mechanisms—constructing collaborative infrastructure, embedding relationships, and activating collective agency—that enabled the organization to make progress on the creeping crisis and foster institutional capacity, that is, the ability of institutions to establish and maintain fair terms of societal cooperation (Lechterman& Mair, 2024).We contribute to organization theory by (1) extending the concept of creeping crises into the organizational domain, (2) advancing a processual view of institutional change, emphasizing how learning, experimentation, and emergent action—rather than predefined strategies—can foster transformation, and (3) introducing a normative lens to assess institutional change based on its contribution to institutional capacity.
This perspective shifts analytical attention from fixed outcomes to the quality and direction of the change process, offering a framework for evaluating how organizations address complex societal challenges and reshape institutional arrangements.