Abstract
Omnicrises are systemic disruptions that transcend organizational boundaries, rapidly escalating across institutional domains and destabilizing the jurisdictional order through which social life is coordinated. Unlike conventional crises that are confined to specific organizations or industries, an omnicrisis triggers a state of jurisdictional fracturing, creating vacuums of authority that undermine communities’ sense of stability and continuity. We argue that omnicrises occur when systemic disruptions misalign established connections between occupational mandates, settled jurisdictions, and recognized expertise, compelling occupational groups to avow, delegate, or realign authority in response to unfolding threats. Resolution emerges through processes of institutional repair that stabilize a coherent jurisdictional settlement and enable the construction of a “new normal.” By incorporating insights from institutional theory and the sociology of occupations, we advance understanding of crisis governance, expertise under systemic threat, and the reconstruction of institutional order in an era of pervasive uncertainty.
But the pandemic hasn’t just been a science story. It is an omnicrisis that has warped and upended every aspect of our lives. While the virus assaulted our cells, it also besieged our societies, seeping into every crack and exploiting every weakness it could find. – Ed Yong, “What Even Counts as Science Writing Anymore?”
Crises like the 2001 terrorist attacks, the 2008 financial collapse, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine begin as localized disruptions but quickly metastasize into cascading breakdowns that unsettle multiple domains of social life at once and produce what we call an omnicrisis. This type of crisis represents a powerful manifestation of the “world risk society” (Beck, 1992), a condition of late modernity in which the production of wealth is systematically accompanied by the production of globalized risks, including ecological, financial, military, terrorist, biochemical, and cyber threats. As contemporary societies become increasingly prone to generating such risks, omnicrises have become more frequent, progressively undermining our collective need to maintain a sense of stability and continuity amid unfolding events (Giddens, 1991). Because an omnicrisis destabilizes the very institutional fabric of society, its resolution exceeds the capacity of individual firms. Instead, it requires the coordinated mobilization of diverse occupational groups (OGs)—including scientists, healthcare professionals, military experts, and financial regulators, as well as infomediary OGs such as journalists and analysts—whose expertise is crucial for interpreting evolving conditions and enacting effective responses. Despite the rising frequency of omnicrises, the dynamics through which OGs coordinate to reconstitute order remain significantly underexplored in management scholarship.
Management researchers have long conceptualized crises as discrete, organization-level “low probability/high consequence events” (Weick, 1988: 305) perceived by managers and stakeholders as salient, unexpected, and disruptive (Bundy, Pfarrer, Short, & Coombs, 2017; Hersel, Gangloff, & Shropshire, 2023). These events are typically “characterized by ambiguity of cause, effect, and means of resolution,” as well as by a “belief that decisions must be made swiftly” (Pearson & Clair, 1998: 60). This robust literature on organizational crisis management has successfully explored phenomena that are organizationally or industry-bound, such as corporate scandals, product recalls, or localized disasters, providing essential frameworks for organizational resilience and recovery (Coombs, 2010; Gephart, 2007; Weick, 1993). However, the primary focus on organizational and industry-level boundaries limits these theories’ applicability to omnicrises, which are multi-institutional and societal in scope. When a disruption simultaneously breaches political, economic, public health, and cultural domains, it erodes the foundational norms that govern societal behavior (e.g., trust in science, the integrity of markets). The challenge of omnicrises is thus not only organizational or industry failure but the contestation over legitimate authority and expertise across the entire institutional fabric (Meyer, 2025). This shift in scale necessitates a theoretical move toward examining how the occupational groups, acting as agents of institutions (Scott, 2008), govern and redefine jurisdictional boundaries to reestablish an impacted community’s 1 sense of stability and continuity.
To theorize how omnicrises unfold and are addressed, we draw on the research at the intersection of occupations and expertise (Anteby, Chan, & DiBenigno, 2016; Heimstädt, Koljonen, & Elmholdt, 2024; Nelsen & Barley, 1997). We identify occupational groups 2 as “socially constructed entities” comprising a category of work, its practitioners, their role-enacting actions, and “the cultural and structural systems upholding the occupation” (Anteby et al., 2016: 187). Because these groups possess the recognized authority that is either challenged or re-legitimated when social order collapses, they are central to understanding this phenomenon. We contend that OGs attempt to exercise authority in omnicrises through a conceptual triad of mandate, jurisdiction, and expertise. Mandates provide the institutional basis for an occupation’s existence and authority (Augustine, 2021; Nelsen & Barley, 1997), reflecting societal consensus on its purpose and “modes of thinking” (Hughes, 1958). These mandates are enacted through jurisdictions, which delineate the specific institutional domains and practical tasks an OG is permitted to control (Abbott, 1988; Nelsen & Barley, 1997). Finally, expertise provides the abstract knowledge and diagnostic tools through which mandates and jurisdictions are maintained and defended (Anteby & Iannucci, in press; Heimstädt et al., 2024). In an omnicrisis, disruptions simultaneously unsettle all three dimensions—challenging the right to act (mandate), the boundaries of control (jurisdiction), and the capacity to act (expertise). From this perspective, omnicrises are crises of authority, in which OGs struggle to define, manage, and contain systemic threats. 3 The simultaneous disruption of this triad necessitates a concentrated process of institutional repair where resolution is not merely a return to the status quo, but the stabilization of a new jurisdictional settlement. This structural stabilization ultimately rebuilds a community’s sense of stability and continuity, resulting in a “new normal” where social life is once again coordinated through recognized expertise.
Our article makes the following contributions. First, we advance crisis literature by conceptualizing omnicrises as systemic threats that call an established social order into question, put multiple institutions to test, and erode the collective sense of security of communities. This conceptualization helps to articulate a novel theory of how omnicrises are constructed, and how different OGs develop responses to these constructions. Second, we contribute to the literature on occupations and expertise by theorizing the contested authority dynamics—avowing, delegating, and realigning—through which occupational groups renegotiate the division of labor under systemic failure. This explains how authority is claimed and redistributed when the occupational triad of mandate, jurisdiction, and expertise is misaligned. Third, we contribute to institutional theory by elucidating the interplay between occupational agency and societal stability. By positioning OGs as agents of institutions, we detail how inter-occupational negotiation facilitates the transition from jurisdictional contestation to a “new normal,” where societal functioning is reestablished through either progressive or restorative repair.
Traditional Conceptualizations of Crises
Prior research on crises and crisis management has predominantly analyzed organizations. An organizational crisis typically threatens an organization’s goals and significantly impacts its stakeholder relationships (Bundy et al., 2017; Iqbal, Pfarrer, & Bundy, 2024). Early foundational studies investigated lethal incidents and major natural disasters resulting in injuries, loss of life, and massive organizational damage (Perrow, 1984; Shrivastava, 1987; Vaughan, 1996; Weick, 1988, 2010). More recent work has examined how scandals and misconduct (Clemente & Gabbioneta, 2017; Hersel et al., 2023; Patriotta, Augustine, & Voronov, 2025; Roulet & Pichler, 2020) affect public evaluations of organizational reputation, trust, and legitimacy (Coombs, 2007; Gillespie & Dietz, 2009; Patriotta, Gond, & Schultz, 2011; Pfarrer, Decelles, Smith, & Taylor, 2008).
This body of work views crises as socially constructed events arising from the interplay between internal organizational dynamics and external stakeholder pressures. Crises reveal the inherent tensions in managing risk, complexity, and technology (Bigley & Roberts, 2001; Gephart, Van Maanen, & Oberlechner, 2009; Perrow, 1984). Central to this perspective is the challenge to meaning-making processes whereby organizational actors must construct a coherent narrative to guide their response to the crisis (Coombs, 2010; Gephart Jr, 2007; Weick, 1988, 1993). Consequently, crisis responses are often framed as “coordinated communication and actions used to influence evaluators’ crisis perceptions” (Bundy & Pfarrer, 2015: 346). With respect to process, crises unfold through stages of precrisis, crisis management, and postcrisis outcomes (Bundy et al., 2017), each of which is situationally managed through response strategies aimed at reestablishing the organization’s operational continuity and reputational standing (Coombs, 2007).
Scholars have also extended the organizational focus by examining crisis spillover, focusing on how a single firm’s wrongdoing can impact an entire industry or network through media amplification, and emotional contagion (Haack, Pfarrer, & Scherer, 2014; Zavyalova, Pfarrer, Reger, & Shapiro, 2012). This work underscores how different organizational responses can either amplify or mitigate the diffusion of the crisis. While omnicrises require spillover to spread beyond their local hot spot, they differ in scope and consequence: An omnicrisis involves a specific type of a spillover that breaches multiple institutional boundaries simultaneously, triggering a systemic failure of containment that forces the agents of affected institutions into jurisdictional contestation.
Similarly, research on community resilience has explored major disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and nuclear accidents (Rao & Greve, 2018; Shepherd & Williams, 2014; Williams, Gruber, Sutcliffe, Shepherd, & Zhao, 2017; Williams & Shepherd, 2016), noting that these events produce disruptions across multiple sectors (e.g., infrastructure, housing, health). These studies have examined resilience in relation to significant challenges like climate change (Howard-Grenville, Buckle, Hoskins, & George, 2014), epidemics (Rao & Greve, 2018; Wright, Meyer, Reay, & Staggs, 2020), and post-disaster community recovery (Farny, Kibler, & Down, 2019), emphasizing the role of businesses and other organizations in reducing risk (Vegt, Essens, Wahlström, & George, 2015). However, large-scale disruptions do not necessarily constitute an omnicrisis. Most natural disasters remain bounded because the authority of key OGs, such as emergency responders, is typically affirmed through their coordinated response, reinforcing the foundational jurisdictional order. A crisis only escalates into an omnicrisis when the disruption triggers a systemic breach that fundamentally unsettles the triad of mandates, jurisdictions, and expertise across the system. Put differently, whereas most natural disasters reaffirm existing jurisdictions, an omnicrisis fundamentally destabilizes them, sparking a contestation over who has the right to lead. For example, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina became an omnicrisis not because of the storm scale, but because jurisdictional fragmentation led to a collapse of coordinated authority across federal and local occupational groups tasked with disaster response.
More recently, scholars have studied the COVID-19 crisis’ implications for management and organization, investigating its effects on work and professional competence (Compagni, Cappellaro, & Nigam, 2024), and education (Fleming, 2023; Howard-Grenville, 2021; Wright, Pereira, Berrington, Felstead, & Staggs, 2024), among other things. Additionally, outside of management, sociologists have examined how major crises increasingly reshape contemporary social life (Arcaya, Raker, & Waters, 2020; Klinenberg, Araos, & Koslov, 2020; Peek, Wachtendorf, & Meyer, 2021). While acknowledging the societal consequences of major crises, these studies have not examined how the fracturing of jurisdictional authority among OGs drives crisis escalation and resolution.
Overall, existing literature has provided a robust foundation by conceptualizing crises as organization-centered, socially constructed, and situationally managed events. However, the increasing frequency and scale of systemic disruptions suggest that the field must be expanded to address the inter-institutional dynamics and the associated contestation over expertise and authority that define the modern landscape of crisis. Our framework highlights the role of OGs as the vital agents who navigate these tensions. Without a clear understanding of how these groups negotiate and maintain jurisdictional order, management scholarship remains ill-equipped to explain the mechanisms of institutional repair during an omnicrisis. Shifting our focus to these occupational dynamics 4 is therefore essential for developing the theoretical tools required to understand how collective action is coordinated across fragmented domains to reconstitute social order and rebuild the sense of stability and continuity upon which organized life depends.
In the remainder of this article, we theorize the omnicrisis as a structural disruption of the triad of mandate, jurisdiction, and expertise. We argue that an omnicrisis is fundamentally a crisis of authority, where a systemic threat exposes a mismatch between an OG’s established expertise and its jurisdictional mandate. The progression through crisis stages is ultimately a movement toward a new jurisdictional settlement: a recalibrated alignment of the triad that reconstitutes the foundational social order.
Crises Versus Omnicrises
To clarify the theoretical boundaries of our construct, Table 1 contrasts the dimensions of crises that have been the focus of prior research with key aspects of omnicrises that inform our theorizing.
Standard Crises Versus Omnicrises
An omnicrisis involves the following four distinctive elements: (1) a breach that spans multiple institutional domains, (2) a systemic erosion of the jurisdictional order that undermines a community’s sense of stability and continuity, (3) jurisdictional contestation among occupational groups over the authority to interpret and manage the disruption; and (4) a requirement for collective repair through coordinated, expertise-based efforts across occupational groups to re-establish a stable jurisdictional order. We theorize how these elements interact in the unfolding of an omnicrisis.
Multi-institutional breach
Our theorization broadens the view of crises from organization-centric events to large-scale disruptions that simultaneously destabilize multiple institutional domains. While an omnicrisis may originate in localized hotspots, such as discrete organizational or industry-specific failures, its evolution is driven by inter-institutional interdependencies. When a disruption sits at a jurisdictional nexus, it can rapidly escalate, crossing institutional boundaries through a contagion-like mechanism (Roulet & Bothello, 2023). This differs fundamentally from a traditional spillover, which typically involves reputational effects radiating across similar organizations within a bounded industry (Haack et al., 2014; Zavyalova et al., 2012). In an omnicrisis, contagion simultaneously activates and destabilizes heterogeneous, interdependent institutions, overwhelming the containment capacity of any single domain. For example, the 2008 subprime crisis originated within the specific organizational context of mortgage lending. However, because these firms were linked to a nexus of finance, housing, and global markets, the disruption rapidly breached the containment capacity of localized risk managers. As the breach expanded, attributions of responsibility shifted from the negligence of individual lenders (Buchanan, Ruebottom, & Riaz, 2017) to a perceived failure of the broader jurisdictional order.
An omnicrisis is not simply a “large” event, but a process where the spread of disruption necessitates the activation of previously unrelated OGs. This shifts the crisis from a matter of organizational recovery to a systemic challenge of jurisdictional realignment. Recent cyber incidents such as the Change Healthcare ransomware attack demonstrate how an initially organizational crisis can transform targeted failures into omnicrises. What began as a targeted attack on a single healthcare payments platform rapidly cascaded across institutional domains, disrupting healthcare delivery, insurance reimbursement systems, regulatory oversight, and public trust in digital health infrastructure. As the breach exposed systemic interdependencies, it activated jurisdictional contestation among healthcare providers, cybersecurity experts, insurers, regulators, and government officials over who possessed the mandate and expertise to rebuild stability. Such cases illustrate how multi-institutional contagion ultimately erodes the foundational sense of stability and continuity that governs social life, signaling that the existing jurisdictional order is no longer capable of containment.
Institutional Consequence: Erosion of Sense of Stability and Continuity
The distinguishing institutional consequence of an omnicrisis is the systemic erosion of a community’s sense of stability and continuity (Giddens, 1991). 5 While conventional crises may cause localized community disruption, they typically leave the social order strained but stable because established institutions continue to shield communities from the disruption. In such cases, the jurisdictional order of key OGs is affirmed by their coordinated response, allowing disruption to be managed through existing protocols that preserve a sense of predictability.
In contrast, an omnicrisis fundamentally undermines the perception that institutions can protect communities from threat. Institutions are critical to structuring predictability and ensuring that people can navigate life with a sense of trust that “things work” (Lee & Whitson, In Press; Steele, 2021) as they “encounter and understand the world on a day-to-day basis” (Patriotta, 2016: 558). They provide a background of typificatory assumptions (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) that pre-interpret situations and largely relieve us from the burden of thinking (Gehlen, 1988). From this perspective, we experience everyday reality as a natural order that can be largely taken for granted and against which “we can exercise everyday practices, construct routines and, ultimately, function efficiently” (Patriotta, 2016: 560). Omnicrises undermine this aura of naturalness. By triggering a systemic undermining of society’s jurisdictional order, these events challenge collective perceptions of “normalcy” and taken-for-grantedness (Steele, 2021). This erosion necessitates institutional repair—a social construction effort aimed at interpreting the crisis, coordinating a response, and ultimately reconstituting the “taken-for-grantedness” required for societal functioning.
Jurisdictional Contestation
Standard crises are constructed through public sensemaking between a focal organization and its stakeholders (Patriotta et al., 2025), often resulting in mandate affirmation. In contrast, omnicrises are constructed through a broader process of jurisdictional contestation involving multiple institutions, their representative OGs, and impacted communities.
Institutions organize the world into jurisdictions—assemblages of actors, practices, audiences, and relationships—that define knowledge domains and the division of labor in society (Abbott, 1988). We theorize jurisdictional contestation as the fracturing of the occupational triad. In a stable social order, mandate (the societal “why”), jurisdiction (the functional “what”), and expertise (the professional “how”) are aligned. An omnicrisis forces these elements apart. Mandates may overlap or conflict when a breach spans multiple domains, thereby creating “vacancies” for control (Abbott, 1988) where multiple groups claim ownership. Simultaneously, functional gaps emerge as existing protocols fail, creating jurisdictional vacuums. Expertise becomes a site of contestation as occupational groups must “profess” their unique skills to audiences that no longer take their authority for granted (Eyal, 2013).
When contestations scale up, jurisdictional boundaries blur, triggering intense conflict over problem ownership. Because systemic disruptions breach multiple domains simultaneously, OGs—such as scientists, public health professionals, or political leaders—compete for the authority to interpret and manage the response. While these contests often involve competing ideologies, such as “follow the science” or “protect the economy,” these are not the jurisdictions themselves. Rather, they are rhetorical tools used by OGs to assert the legitimacy of their mandate. 6 The contest, therefore, is not over values per se, but over which occupational mandate–expertise alignment is granted jurisdictional authority in practice. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health professionals (medical OGs) and political leaders (governance OGs) directly contested the authority to set policy, with the former claiming jurisdiction based on medical expertise and the latter claiming jurisdiction based on elected authority over the state and economy. Ideological appeals to safety or freedom were the tools used to frame (Bouchard, Cruz, & Maguire, 2024) the underlying jurisdictional right to govern the population’s behavior.
The duration of this contestation depends on the speed of jurisdictional settlement. In some cases, such as the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, contestation between security and intelligence OGs was intense but led to a rapid settlement through the creation of new legislative mandates, such as the Department of Homeland Security. In other cases, contestation remains sustained because the occupational triad remains misaligned for an extended period (Skade, Lehrer, Hamdali, & Koch, 2025). Thus, the unfolding of an omnicrisis is fundamentally a process where the focal actors are never fixed and the authority to fill jurisdictional vacuums is socially and politically negotiated.
Expertise-Based Repair
An omnicrisis is a state of unsettled expertise that reveals a seemingly stable system of occupations as a fluid and contested ecology (Huising, Elmholdt, & Mäkinen, 2025). Within this “ecology of expertise” (Eyal, 2013), various OGs compete to control the interpretation and treatment of a specific domain of problems (Abbott, 1988). While certain OGs may possess the technical capacity to effect a specific outcome, such as virologists producing a vaccine, the systemic nature of an omnicrisis often reveals that such capacity does not guarantee the social authority required to lead a collective response (Anteby & Iannucci, in press). In this environment, expertise is distributed and contested across a diverse array of actors, and its role as the exclusive domain of established occupations is fundamentally challenged.
Because an omnicrisis destabilizes the jurisdictional order and undermines the community’s sense of stability and continuity, the repair mechanism must shift from situational reputation management to jurisdictional realignment. Unlike organizational crises, which are managed through localized response strategies that meet stakeholders’ perceptions, omnicrises require OGs to develop institutionally driven solutions that resonate with broader audiences (Bouchard et al., 2024; Giorgi, 2017). The trajectory of the crisis thus unfolds as a contest over expertise and problem ownership, where the repair involves a coordinated, expertise-based effort across OGs to reestablish an accepted division of labor. Ultimately, the resolution of an omnicrisis is found in the stabilization of this jurisdictional ecology, defining who is granted the authority to act and which interventions are deemed legitimate.
The relationship between conventional crises and omnicrises exists on a continuum of jurisdictional stability. A conventional crisis represents a state of contained disruption, where the occupational triad of mandates, jurisdictions, and expertise remains aligned and is often reinforced by the crisis response. In contrast, an omnicrisis represents a state of jurisdictional transition where the disruption exceeds the capacity of established OGs, triggering a systemic breach that necessitates a collective resettlement of the social order. Consequently, escalation into an omnicrisis occurs only when fragmentation or overlap among mandates (Abbott, 1988; Scott, 2008) ensures that no single OG possesses an uncontested right to define the problem or coordinate response. Omnicrises are therefore more likely when no widely accepted lead occupational group can successfully contain the disruption within an established jurisdiction. When these conditions are absent, even severe disruptions, such as many natural disasters, remain bounded crises, as the existing jurisdictional order is reaffirmed rather than eroded.
Institutional Dynamics of Omnicrises
We now theorize the process through which omnicrises unfold and the role of OGs in both defining the disruption and leading the response. We propose that omnicrises progress through cycles of stability, disruption, response, and construction of a new normal. Figure 1 synthesizes these dynamics, serving as a conceptual guide to the emergence, unfolding and settling of omnicrises.
A Process Model of Omnicrises
The figure portrays a process of institutional (re)construction of reality driven by the interplay between institutions, OGs, and impacted communities. Omnicrises are socially constructed through contested processes where institutions divide society into jurisdictions that pre-interpret social reality and address social complexity; OGs are the primary agents who define, govern, and contest those jurisdictions (Scott, 2008); and communities are the audiences whose sense of stability and continuity is tied to the stability of this jurisdictional order.
In routine situations, jurisdictional contestation is minimal. Order is maintained through ongoing micro-repairs (Heaphy, 2013; Steele, 2021) that resolve friction without challenging the foundational division of labor. An omnicrisis is triggered when a systemic institutional breach simultaneously destabilizes mandates across multiple domains. This disruption exceeds the threshold of institutional containment, fundamentally unsettling the occupational triad of mandate, jurisdiction, and expertise. The resulting jurisdictional misalignment creates a vacuum of authority that undermines the community’s sense of stability and continuity (Giddens, 1991; Meyer, 2025). In this vacuum, OGs serve as focal actors responsible for defining the boundaries of the crisis. Because problem ownership is no longer clear, these groups enter into active jurisdictional contestation, seeking to frame the crisis in ways that align with their mandates and enhance their legitimacy. Efforts to respond to omnicrises trigger a shift in expertise dynamics, as different OGs avow, delegate, or realign their specialized knowledge to meet the demands of the newly contested landscape.
A “new normal” is achieved when this contestation is resolved through a jurisdictional settlement that realigns the occupational triad. This resolution is realized through memory work—dynamics of remembering and forgetting that facilitate either restorative repair (reestablishing prior boundaries) or progressive repair (institutionalizing new jurisdictional shifts). Ultimately, the stability of the new normal is contingent upon a realignment of authority that reconstitutes the community’s sense of stability and continuity. While communities may contest or amplify occupational claims in specific cases, we foreground occupational groups as the primary agents of jurisdictional reconstruction, treating community response as the condition under which settlements stabilize.
Below, we unpack the different components of our process model, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a prototypical example alongside additional cases throughout for contrast. Table 2 provides comparative examples of the omnicrises mentioned in this article.
Examples of Omnicrises
Disruption and Activation of Institutions
The engine of the omnicrisis process is jurisdictional contestation (Abbott, 1986, 1988)—the high-stakes struggle between OGs over the authority to interpret and respond to a systemic disruption. As noted, jurisdictional contestation does not emerge in all crises. For instance, an outbreak of a familiar contagious disease (e.g., Ebola) typically follows stabilized institutional responses where medical OGs hold an uncontested mandate to lead (Wright et al., 2020). In contrast, the systemic nature of an omnicrisis means that no single group’s “standard response” is sufficient to encompass the entire problem. The undermining of the jurisdictional order creates a vacuum of legitimate authority, forcing OGs into an arena of active dispute. These disputes are fundamentally about problem ownership: They are not merely debates over competing ideological beliefs, but existential struggles over who possesses the mandate to act and which group’s expertise will be permitted to govern the reconstitution of order.
Occupational groups enter this arena from asymmetrical positions, which fundamentally shape the trajectory of the contestation. Dominant OGs possess longstanding mandates and institutionalized authority, while others occupy peripheral or emergent roles (Anteby et al., 2016; Benjamin-Pollak & Karunakaran, 2025). In a stable order, dominant mandates are treated as taken-for-granted rights to interpret disruptions. However, an omnicrisis creates a jurisdictional overstretch that forces these established groups to defend mandates that have become misaligned from the expertise required to address the evolving threat. This misalignment triggers shifts in perceived legitimacy, allowing peripheral OGs and other actors challenge the very mandates of mainstream groups (Bouchard et al., 2024). These peripheral actors do not merely offer alternative interpretations; they often leverage the vacuum of authority to frame established expertise as “elitist” (Nichols, 2017) or utilize alternative data to claim a more “authentic” understanding of the crisis (Greve, Rao, Vicinanza, & Zhou, 2022). By strategically filling jurisdictional vacuums with non-traditional alignments of authority, these emergent actors attempt to permanently elevate their standing and restructure the social order.
Omnicrises thus make the tenuous alignment between occupational mandates, jurisdictions and expertise both visible and contestable. As disruptions spread across domains, they expose the limits of dominant OGs’ mandates and create space for alternative expertise that aligns more closely with the specific mechanisms of threat transmission. While dominant OGs seek to defend or extend their authority, peripheral OGs strategically leverage these openings to claim new or expanded jurisdictions.
Changing Jurisdictional Dynamics
Omnicrises reshape jurisdictional dynamics by altering which OGs are recognized as relevant for defining and managing systemic threats. As a crisis spreads, it illuminates the interdependence of institutions and the interconnectedness of knowledge bases. We conceptualize the omnicrisis as a trigger for a fluid ecology of expertise. In this ecology, expertise is a “relational capacity for intervention” that is claimed and contested by various actors across a fractured institutional landscape (Huising et al., 2025).
We theorize these changing expertise dynamics as transformations in how mandates are activated, how jurisdictions are claimed or relinquished, and how expertise is mobilized to defend or reconfigure those claims. Within an omnicrisis, expertise becomes consequential only insofar as it reinforces, extends, or destabilizes existing mandates and jurisdictions. Omnicrises therefore create shifting landscapes where OGs must navigate a tension between their mandates and the emergent characteristics of the crisis that reveal possible disconnects between their authority and the expertise required to address the crisis (Heimstädt et al., 2024). Below, we distinguish between three dynamics: avowing, delegating, and realigning authority. Each corresponds to one dimension of the occupational triad: Avowing centers on the defense and performance of mandate-based authority; delegating involves the strategic reallocation of jurisdictional responsibility; and realigning reconstitutes the expertise landscape when established mandate–jurisdiction pairings no longer hold. Together, these dynamics explain how occupational groups actively engage in the reconstruction of jurisdictional authority.
Avowing authority
Occupations with established mandates enter omnicrises with ascribed jurisdiction, meaning that their authority to interpret and manage the disruption is initially taken for granted (Benjamin-Pollak & Karunakaran, 2025; Siebert, 2020). For these groups, there is considerable alignment between their mandate, jurisdiction, and expertise. Avowing authority is the process through which these groups publicly perform and reaffirm their expertise to protect their jurisdictional boundaries when their effectiveness is challenged. In other words, these occupational groups are seen “naturally” as bearing responsibility for dealing with certain disruptions as a part of their mandate (Augustine, 2021). Conversely, other occupations might claim jurisdiction by asserting expertise that is not traditionally seen as jurisdictionally relevant (Anteby & Holm, 2021) to a particular disruption.
Ascription is not a unilateral act but operates through a layered structure of audiences whose alignment shapes whether a group’s claim to jurisdictional authority is recognized and sustained. Regulatory bodies and the state confer formal mandate through legislation, licensing, and certification; Infomediary OGs, such as the media and independent analysts, amplify or contest expert credibility through framing and coverage (Chandler, Polidoro, & Yang, 2019; Clemente & Gabbioneta, 2017); and the broader public registers trust or skepticism through compliance, resistance, and the uptake of alternative expertise (Bouchard et al., 2024; Lounsbury, 2023). Infomediary OGs function as occupational agents in their own right, avowing a jurisdictional mandate to provide an authoritative interpretation of the disruption. Their involvement is often a matter of degree: although they may lack the technical mandate for direct intervention, they compete for jurisdiction over information (Benjamin-Pollak & Karunakaran, 2025; Jarvis, Goodrick & Hudson, 2025). By avowing the authority to frame which expertise is credible and which institutional responses are failing, infomediary OGs play a central role in the social construction of the crisis, offering continuous interpretations that often shape public perception before primary responders can fully realign their triad.
In stable times, these audiences broadly converge in affirming the same jurisdictional order. In an omnicrisis, they diverge: Regulatory bodies may formally authorize one OG while media and public opinion invest credibility in another. This audience divergence makes the ascription of jurisdiction contested and consequential. For example, while virologists and epidemiologists found their expertise naturally reaffirmed during the COVID-19 pandemic, HVAC engineers sought to expand their jurisdiction by demonstrating how ventilation expertise was essential to mitigating airborne pathogen transmission (Allen, 2024).
When OGs with ascribed jurisdiction are perceived as failing to arrest the crisis, trust erodes not only in their technical competence but also in their mandate-based authorization to act (Bouchard et al., 2024; Wang, Raynard, & Greenwood, 2021). This erosion motivates OGs with established mandates to act rapidly to prevent displacement by alternative knowledge claims (Huising et al., 2025). For instance, after 9/11, military experts intensified jurisdictional claims by framing security expertise as indispensable, marginalizing diplomatic actors in the process. Conversely, sustained perceptions of failure can destabilize long-standing jurisdictional settlements, making the loss of jurisdictional authority increasingly likely. As confidence in an OG’s expertise declines, alternative actors—whether adjacent OGs or non-institutional challengers—gain traction by contesting the incumbent’s expertise and proposing rival interpretations of the disruption (Anteby & Iannucci, in press; Bouchard et al., 2024; Lounsbury, 2023). During the pandemic, both conventional and social media enabled epidemiological experts and conspiracy entrepreneurs alike to amplify perceived failures of medical and public-health authorities (Berr, 2025; Greve et al., 2022), thereby contesting not only their technical expertise, but also their continued jurisdiction over defining and managing the crisis (Caulfield, 2020; Thorp, 2022).
Delegating jurisdictional authority
Delegation allows actors with broad mandates, such as governments, to preserve jurisdictional primacy over crisis resolution while temporarily reallocating responsibility for specific tasks. When an omnicrisis exposes the limits of their capacity to manage all aspects of the disruption, delegating specific tasks—also called hiving them off (Abbott, 1988)—enables these actors to contain public anxiety and deflect blame without relinquishing ultimate control. Consistent with relational accounts of expertise (Heimstädt et al., 2024), delegation serves as an audience-oriented strategy through which actors with broad mandates mobilize expert authority to manage public uncertainty while retaining ultimate jurisdictional control. In this sense, delegation is a strategic partial shedding of jurisdictional responsibility designed to stabilize governance under pressure.
For example, public health officials were initially granted narrow jurisdiction over managing COVID-19 (Skade et al., 2025), consistent with their mandate and expertise (i.e., advise government officials on mitigating community impact of the virus). As the crisis revealed its economic and political dimensions, however, decision-making over specific domains was progressively delegated to economists and policymakers. Such delegation “invites in” OGs to exercise expertise within narrowly defined boundaries, often under conditions set by the mandate holder. This arrangement, however, is not always desired (Cohen & Bui, 2025). Some groups may adopt a defensive posture, adhering strictly to protocols to avoid professional risk. In these cases, OGs act as administrative conduits, effectively hiving off their own professional judgment to shield themselves from future blame. Furthermore, this arrangement exposes delegated actors to the risk of cooptation, as their expertise may be mobilized to legitimize decisions over which they exert limited influence. Chief medical officers, for example, were often delegated as public faces of scientific information, positioning them as lightning rods for discontent without granting them actual policy authority (MacAulay et al., 2022; Smith, Macintyre, MacAulay, & Fafard, 2024). Thus, delegation is not necessarily recognition of superior expertise; it is a defensive governance strategy used when mandate legitimacy is threatened. Its transient nature ensures that as the perceived locus of the crisis shifts, delegated jurisdictions may be withdrawn or reassigned to facilitate the eventual realignment of the occupational triad.
Realigning authority
While delegation preserves the existing jurisdictional hierarchies, realignment reconstitutes them. Realignment occurs when a crisis exposes persistent mismatches between established mandates, jurisdictions, and the expertise required to confront the disruption (Heimstädt et al., 2024). Unlike delegation, which is a predominantly top-down strategy aimed at preserving the jurisdictional primacy of powerful actors, realignment is a more bottom-up and emergent process that unfolds when existing mandate–jurisdiction alignments can no longer plausibly organize action (Augustine, 2021; Eyal, 2013). The multi-domain impact of omnicrises forces OGs to collaborate in unanticipated ways, creating opportunities for new jurisdictional settlements and the recombination of expertise across previously distinct domains (Huising et al., 2025).
For example, the 2008 global financial crisis, which originated in the banking sector, rapidly spread across economic, political, and social domains, necessitating coordination among financial regulators, central banks, political leaders, and social policy experts (Riaz, Buchanan, & Bapuji, 2011; Riaz, Buchanan, & Ruebottom, 2016). As the disruption scaled from banking to mass unemployment, finance professionals were compelled to integrate their efforts with government, social welfare experts, and public administrators to address mass dislocation and social unrest. Similarly, the aftermath of 9/11 forced intelligence experts, military strategists, law-enforcement officials, policymakers, and financial regulators to realign responsibilities to address cascading effects across security, finance, transportation, and civil liberties. Intelligence agencies expanded collaboration with financial institutions to trace terrorist financing, while aviation authorities introduced new security protocols that reshaped the airline industry. At the same time, public debates over the balance between national security and individual rights drew legal experts and human-rights advocates into the crisis arena. These examples illustrate how omnicrises compel traditionally separate occupational groups to integrate their expertise through negotiated redefinitions of jurisdictional responsibility when no single OG can plausibly claim authority over the full scope of the disruption (Raynard, Kodeih, & Arjaliès, 2025).
The pluralization of relevant knowledge domains intensifies realignment, as interdisciplinary solutions become unavoidable and established occupational boundaries lose their organizing capacity (Eyal, 2013; Heimstädt et al., 2024). However, realignment rarely unfolds on a level playing field; jurisdictional settlements continue to reflect asymmetries in status, institutional embeddedness, and proximity to authoritative decision arenas (Abbott, 1988; Benjamin-Pollak & Karunakaran, 2025). As a result, expertise generated at the periphery often requires mediation by more established OGs (Benjamin-Pollak & Karunakaran, 2025; Berr, 2025; Raynard et al., 2025) before it can meaningfully shape collective response efforts, reinforcing the stratified character of the jurisdictional order even as it is being rebuilt (Eyal, 2013; Heimstädt et al., 2024).
Constructing “New Normal”
The sense of normalcy that signals the end of an omnicrisis is inevitably a “new normal,” as it is impossible to reverse the systemic changes that occurred during the disruption. This condition signifies the successful realignment of the occupational triad necessary to reestablish the shared confidence that the social order is once again stable and predictable. The term “new normal” refers to a post-crisis state that differs meaningfully from the pre-crisis state (“the old normal”). It reflects enduring shifts in social, economic, or cultural life that eventually become accepted as part of everyday reality. Commonly invoked after major disruptions such as omnicrises, the concept captures how people adjust to a transformed world. Importantly, the “new normal” is not simply the opposite of the “old normal”; rather, it stands in contrast to the “abnormal” state of crisis, during which communities experience a prolonged suspension of predictability. The consolidation of a new normal reflects the stabilization of occupational mandates, the resettling of jurisdictional boundaries, and the routinization of specific expertise as the authoritative lens for interpreting and managing the transformed social reality.
A crisis response is considered effective when the community no longer perceives the situation as a crisis. Much like the onset of an omnicrisis, the conclusion is marked by collective experience rather than the objective resolution of conditions that precipitated the crisis. What matters is that “through processes of adaptation and acceptance, the unconventional becomes the everyday” (Bridoux et al., 2024: 705). The construction of new normal is accomplished, in important ways, via the strategic deployment of memory work, that is, the selective remembering and forgetting by OGs.
By curating a narrative that links the current state with a desired future, OGs facilitate the re-legitimation of their mandates and the normalization of their newly defined authority. Memory work—the shared representations of the past that communities construct, maintain, and contest (Coraiola, Foster, Mena, Foroughi, & Rintamäki, 2023) plays an important role here. It is the interpretive dimension through which avowing, delegating, and realigning operate at the settlement stage. OGs engage in memory work by producing authoritative accounts of the crisis that selectively emphasize certain failures, achievements, or turning points while marginalizing others (Coraiola et al., 2023; Crawford, Coraiola, & Dacin, 2022). An OG avowing its post-crisis mandate may foreground its decisive role during the acute phase, while one seeking realignment may emphasize incumbent failures to justify a restructured jurisdictional order. Ultimately, the construction of the new normal signals that the situation has been successfully redefined as manageable rather than exceptional, allowing the jurisdictional order to return to a state of relative stability and routine micro-repair.
Conditions of new normal
A stable new normal emerges when OGs solidify their jurisdictional claims and institutions regain public credibility (Möllering, 2006). Such stabilization depends on the reestablishment of confidence that the occupational groups exercising jurisdictional control are legitimately mandated to do so and possess the expertise to sustain it. The nature of the response influences the character of the new normal (Skade et al., 2025). For instance, in the 2008 financial crisis, the implementation of new safeguards gradually stabilized markets, allowing the once-contested expertise of regulators to become embedded in revised mandates. Over time, these arrangements rendered the post-crisis order “natural” and self-evident. Conversely, in cases where OGs remain locked in sustained jurisdictional competition over how to define, prioritize, and address an ongoing disruption, stability remains elusive (Schilke, Bachmann, Blomqvist, Krishnan, & Sydow, 2026). These struggles reflect deeper conflicts over which occupational mandates should govern crisis interpretation and whose expertise should anchor the collective response.
Reestablishing a community’s sense of stability and continuity is crucial to the emergence of a new normal (Lee & Whitson, in Press; Steele, 2021), thereby bringing an omnicrisis to a conclusion. Communities transition away from a crisis state when they no longer experience a threat as immediate, even if objective risks persist (Cooper & Voronov, 2024). This shift is shaped by OGs, who construct narratives that normalize specific interpretations of risk and responsibility. Through this narrative work, OGs re-embed expertise within settled mandates and jurisdictions, transforming extraordinary interventions into routine conduct. For example, despite ongoing concerns over terrorism, security professionals and policymakers have (successfully) framed heightened security measures as routine, marking the shift to a post-9/11 new normal. In contrast, the war in Ukraine—where active conflict, geopolitical instability, and economic disruptions sustain a sense of immediate threat—has been characterized by a struggles to settle into a stable post-crisis order. The occupational triad remains misaligned as shifting alliances and contested narratives prevent the formation of a coherent jurisdictional settlement.
Progressive versus restorative repair and the construction of new normal
The settlement of a new normal depends on how collective memory (Coraiola et al., 2023) is managed, shaping what aspects of the pre-crisis status quo and crisis-induced adaptations are retained or forgotten. As OGs construct narratives to repair the sense normalcy, they engage in two distinct trajectories of repair: progressive and restorative.
Progressive repair acknowledges that returning to the pre-crisis status quo is neither possible nor desirable. It allows pre-crisis versions of normalcy to fade from memory, making room for new institutional arrangements to take hold (Brammer, Branicki, & Linnenluecke, 2020). This trajectory tends to dominate when the pre-crisis institutional arrangements are broadly revealed as inadequate, unjust, or unsustainable, creating a societal impetus for change. OGs whose expertise gained legitimacy during the crisis use their expertise to promote long-term adaptations. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, engineers and public health professionals used their enhanced visibility to push for permanent reforms in indoor air quality standards (Morawska et al., 2024), reframing ventilation as a core public health issue rather than a niche engineering concern. This exemplifies how omnicrises expose blind spots in institutional design and potentially open space for new norms and building more resilient institutional arrangements (see also Kahn, Barton, & Fellows, 2013). Similarly, the 2008 financial crisis prompted economists, regulators, and policymakers to rethink systemic risk management, leading to progressive regulatory reforms such as the Dodd-Frank Act and international banking safeguards (Acharya, Cooley, Richardson, Sylla, & Walter, 2011). Even when disruptive, such changes often become routinized—as seen in the enhanced airport security protocols following 9/11, which redefined public expectations of safety and normalized previously unthinkable surveillance practices. Progressive repair thus often entails a redefinition of the occupational triad, as expertise born of the crisis becomes codified into enduring jurisdictional authority.
In contrast, restorative repair attempts to reinstate the pre-crisis state, prioritizing continuity and familiarity (Duyvendak, 2011). This trajectory involves OGs working to erase or delegitimize crisis-induced change to restore an earlier version of normalcy. Restorative repair is likely to dominate when the crisis is framed as an aberration rather than a systemic failure, and where powerful OGs—especially those in political or economic domains—work to suppress or delegitimize changes that threaten existing hierarchies or interests. For instance, after the initial COVID-19 emergency, many political and business leaders moved swiftly to roll back public health precautions such as mask mandates and remote work policies, framing them as temporary intrusions into normal life. Despite calls from medical experts for continued vigilance, these rollback efforts gained traction by appealing to a collective longing for pre-pandemic normalcy. Restorative repair is also apparent in the post-Katrina rebuilding of New Orleans, where efforts prioritized economic recovery and tourism rather than addressing the systemic racial and infrastructural vulnerabilities that the disaster had laid bare (Durant & Sultan, 2008). Restorative repair relies on selective forgetting to reestablish prior institutional arrangements. It is oriented toward defending pre-crisis mandates and jurisdictional arrangements by delegitimizing crisis-induced expertise and reasserting familiar authority structures.
In practice, most communities institutionalize a mix of progressive and restorative repair, with the balance shifting over time based on occupational influence and public receptivity. Which trajectory predominates is shaped by conditions at the point of settlement. Progressive repair is more likely when the pre-crisis institutional arrangement is broadly perceived as having caused or enabled the disruption, discrediting the occupational groups that upheld it and creating space for OGs whose crisis-born expertise carries reform-oriented authority. Restorative repair gains traction when the disruption is framed as exogenous to the institutional order—an aberration rather than a systemic failure of institutions and OGs as their agents—allowing incumbent OGs to reassert their prior mandates as fundamentally sound. The relative power asymmetries among OGs at the settlement stage is a key factor (Abbott, 1988). Where crisis-empowered OGs lack the institutional embeddedness (Heimstädt et al., 2024) to sustain their claims beyond the acute phase, restorative forces are more likely to prevail.
This dynamic determines whether crisis-induced practices endure or fade (Tukiainen & Granqvist, 2016). Disruptive at first, some practices become routine—airport security measures like removing laptops and liquids reflect progressive repair emphasizing vigilance, while remote work, initially a pandemic necessity, has evolved into a debated but increasingly accepted norm (Hassard & Morris, 2024). Across both progressive and restorative trajectories, the construction of a new normal ultimately reflects the stabilization—temporary or enduring—of occupational mandates, jurisdictional settlements, and the forms of expertise deemed authoritative in defining post-crisis reality. Both repair approaches involve selective memory to shape a new normal. Ultimately, the trajectory is determined by whether a community views its past as a set of flaws to be mended (favoring progressive repair) or a golden age to be recovered (favoring restoration; Brunk, Giesler, & Hartmann, 2018).
Discussion
In this article, we develop a theory of how omnicrises position occupational groups (OGs) as the central agents in the social construction, escalation, and settlement of pervasive societal disruptions. An omnicrisis is a crucial real-world phenomenon (Lumineau, Kong, & Dries, 2025) that begins as a local event whose chain-like contagion intensifies when the existing jurisdictional order fails to contain it. This breakdown triggers a misalignment of the occupational triad, sparking intense jurisdictional contestation among OGs that determines whether the disruption culminates in progressive or restorative repair and the establishment of a new normal.
We make three contributions to the literature. First, we conceptualize omnicrises as breakdowns of the interinstitutional system that erode communities’ sense of stability and continuity required for social order. Second, we extend research on occupations and expertise by theorizing the contested authority dynamics of avowing, delegating, and realigning. We explain how OGs renegotiate the division of labor under systemic failure, moving beyond routine boundary work to explain how authority is reconstructed when traditional mandates are jurisdictionally overstretched. Third, we advance institutional theory by showing how stability and change are accomplished through memory work. By distinguishing progressive from restorative repair, we demonstrate how OGs mobilize selective remembering and forgetting to construct the “new normal”—either to institutionalize crisis-induced change or to reassert prior hierarchies.
An Institutional Perspective on Crises
Organizational research has long conceptualized crises as bounded events that unfold within specific organizational or industry domains, affecting organizational goals, legitimacy, or stakeholder trust (e.g., Bundy et al., 2017; Iqbal et al., 2024; Patriotta et al., 2011; Williams et al., 2017). From this perspective, crises are often constructed and resolved through a set of coordinated communication and actions (Bundy & Pfarrer, 2015; Coombs, 2007; Patriotta et al., 2025) aimed at addressing stakeholders’ multiple sociocognitive concerns—rational, emotional, and moral (Iqbal et al., 2024). Yet, in the face of (increasingly common) crises that do not conform to our conventional conceptualizations, Meyer (2025) argues, “we need to adapt our notions and models of crisis to account for the multiple interlinked scales of wicked crises, as well as for organizational and societal fragmentation and the related processes of organizing and disorganizing” (p. 878). Our theory extends the impact of crises to the broader inter-institutional level, framing omnicrises as systemic disruptions that destabilize the jurisdictional order and the collective sense of stability and continuity of affected communities.
This shift in perspective offers three primary advancements. First, whereas most organizational crisis research focuses on reestablishing firm-level stability or reputation, our framework highlights how omnicrises expose the fragility of the entire interinstitutional system. The distinctive aspect of omnicrises is that they transcend single-domain disruptions, leading to the systemic erosion of jurisdictional authority, and compounding the loss of sense of stability and continuity. Resolution, therefore, requires reconstructing societal normalcy by realigning the jurisdictional order. In this regard, omnicrises constitute a higher-order crisis archetype that foregrounds interinstitutional linkages, social order, public experience, and the interdependence of OGs.
Second, we extend the dynamic range of crises from organizational containment to institutional amplification and from single-domain spillover to multi-domain contagion. While scholars have pointed out the importance of spillover effects of across similar firms (e.g., Haack et al., 2014; Veil, Dillingham, & Sloan, 2016; Wang & Laufer, 2024; Zavyalova et al., 2012), our theory emphasizes how disruptions spread across heterogeneous institutions, triggering cascading failures that outstrip the containment capacity of any single entity. This shows how crises that spill beyond organizational or single-institution boundaries give rise to inter-institutional dynamics that current frameworks only partially capture. More broadly, focusing on the institutions as enacted and reproduced by occupational groups through mandates, jurisdictions, and claims to expertise is vital for studying crises in general, not just omnicrises: A “lesser” crisis occurs when occupational groups are able to coordinate and contain a disruption within an accepted jurisdiction before it profoundly unsettles social order. In contrast, the resolution of an omnicrisis implies that a socially and politically acceptable jurisdictional settlement has been reached, effectively reestablishing predictability even if the underlying problem persists.
Third, our framework reorients the focal actor-audience relationship in crisis analysis. Organizational crisis research often centers on organization-stakeholder relationships and accordingly examines responses to crises in terms of managing key stakeholder concerns (Bundy et al., 2017). In contrast, omnicrises threaten the taken-for-granted continuity of everyday life (Steele, 2021) and the inter-institutional system that ensures such continuity. We emphasize the role of OGs as institutional agents who construct and respond to crises through jurisdictional contestation, and impacted communities as the audience whose collective experience defines the crisis’s end. Omnicrises therefore highlight processes of co-construction of social order, involving interactions between institutions, occupations, and communities.
Our theory applies beyond global omnicrises such as pandemics and financial crises. Geographically contained events—earthquakes, hurricanes like Katrina, industrial disasters like Fukushima—become omnicrises when they generate cascading failures across multiple institutional domains. The critical distinction is not geographic scale but institutional scope: The moment a breach mobilizes diverse OGs in jurisdictional contestation across multiple domains, it has entered the realm of the omnicrisis. Foregrounding the institutional embeddedness of OGs and communities offers a productive lens for studying crises generally.
Future research could fruitfully explore the tipping points under which localized disruptions escalate into omnicrises versus remaining contained within single institutional domains. As a start, empirically identifying an omnicrisis requires assessing whether a disruption has triggered a systemic misalignment of the occupational triad rather than merely straining it. We suggest several indicators that researchers might use. First, multi-domain activation: An omnicrisis mobilizes OGs from institutionally distinct domains (e.g., public health, finance, security) into simultaneous jurisdictional claims over the same disruption. Second, mandate contestation: The authority to define and lead the crisis response is publicly disputed among OGs, rather than being ascribed to a recognized lead actor. Third, erosion of community stability: Affected communities exhibit a widespread loss of confidence that existing institutions can manage the threat, as evidenced by declining public trust, non-compliance with established protocols, or the uptake of alternative expertise. Where these indicators converge, a disruption has likely crossed the threshold from a contained crisis into an omnicrisis. Although the transition from crisis to omnicrisis is a matter of degree rather than kind, we argue that these markers offer a starting point for empirical work.
Occupational Groups and Expertise
Recent research in organizational studies has increasingly recognized the evolving role of experts and occupational groups in responding to complex societal disruptions (Compagni et al., 2024; Heimstädt et al., 2024; Huising et al., 2025). Furthermore, scholars have connected occupational dynamics within the broader institutional landscape, highlighting that occupational groups are not just problem-solvers but also institutional agents (Muzio, Brock, & Suddaby, 2013; Scott, 2008) whose interpretations and actions shape the reconstitution of institutional orders. Our theory extends this work by placing occupational dynamics at the center of crisis escalation and resolution, specifically in the context of omnicrises. We argue that omnicrises not only unsettle existing jurisdictions, but also create high-stakes arenas where OGs must actively negotiate their authority amid institutional breakdown. In this sense, crises become sites of institutional reconfiguration, where knowledge, legitimacy, and authority are redistributed. By focusing on how omnicrises destabilize the occupational triad of mandates, jurisdictions, and expertise, we explain how disruption provides impetus for ongoing jurisdictional renegotiation as crises progress and interact with different institutions. The dynamics underpinning authority reconfiguration during omnicrises—avowing, delegating, and realigning—deepen understanding of how institutions are reshaped through the relational interplay of occupational groups.
More broadly, while researchers have increasingly acknowledged threats to expertise as an important societal challenge (Heimstädt et al., 2024; Nichols, 2017), our article proposes an integrated theory of expertise under systemic threat, where occupational groups simultaneously represent, perform, and reconstruct an institutional order. It suggests that jurisdictional contestation involves more than control over resources or status (Abbott, 1988). Rather, it is a process of meaning-making in the face of an overwhelming threat that reveal an occupational group’s limitations in demonstrating its expertise. Our research underscores the importance of cross-sectoral collaboration (delegating and realigning expertise) among various occupational groups and institutions in addressing omnicrises (see also Minniti, Rodriguez, & Williams, 2024), extending beyond the traditional focus on individual occupations or institutions and the limiting assumption of competition as the primary way to respond to jolts and instability. Hence, we explain how multiple occupational groups interact—collaborating, competing, and coopting one another—in the collective construction of omnicrises.
Furthermore, by building on the concept of “ecologies of expertise” (Eyal, 2013; Huising et al., 2025), we move away from the assumption that competition is the primary response to institutional jolts. We demonstrate that omnicrises create interdependencies that necessitate cross-sectoral collaboration. Examples range from medical professionals ceding space to engineers in pandemic response (Greenhalgh, Fisman, Cane, Oliver, & Macintyre, 2022) to military strategists encouraging closer partnerships with cybersecurity specialists and climate scientists actively seeking out partnerships with indigenous knowledge holders in designing local resilience strategies. These interactions among heterogeneous OGs, and the related dynamics of jurisdictional contestation, are central to how omnicrises are interpreted, managed, and ultimately normalized.
We should note, however, that the three dynamics likely apply asymmetrically across different types of OGs, and not all OGs might be equally able to utilize these strategies. Infomediary occupational groups, for instance, primarily operate through avowing and realigning—asserting authority over crisis interpretation and repositioning which expertise is treated as credible (Benjamin-Pollak & Karunakaran, 2025)—but do not delegate in the same sense as actors with formally conferred mandates, who possess jurisdictional authority that can be strategically parceled out. This asymmetry reflects the distinct institutional basis from which different OGs enter jurisdictional contestation.
As researchers acknowledge more fully that crises often transcend a particular organization, a closer connection between crisis management and occupations literature (Anteby et al., 2016) could be fruitful to understand better the social complexity of crises and their resolution. While prior research emphasizes the tendency of occupational groups to compete for jurisdiction, we argue that the systemic scope of an omnicrisis creates opportunities for greater collaboration. However, we recognize that our focus on avowing, delegating, and realigning represents a theoretically derived set of dynamics that does not capture the entire universe of potential responses. In practice, systemic disruptions may also trigger more passive behaviors, such as jurisdictional retreat or strict rule-following driven by fear of liability. While we theorize these as subsets of our primary dynamics—prioritizing the study of how authority is actively negotiated—we acknowledge the necessary incompleteness of our theory. It is intended as a focused lens on the institutional facets of systemic crises, leaving space for additional research to disentangle the occupation-specific factors—such as status and power (Cohen & Bui, 2025; Heimstädt et al., 2024; Raynard et al., 2025), commitment to occupational values (Wright, Zammuto, & Liesch, 2017), and the perceived legitimacy of alternative knowledge systems (Anteby & Iannucci, in press; Berr, 2025)—that influence a group’s willingness to collaborate or defend their boundaries under pressure.
Institutional Stability and Change
Recent scholarship in institutional theory has examined institutional dynamics related to societal problems, disruptions, and shocks (Basir, Ruebottom, & Auster, 2022; Galleli & Amaral, 2026; Roulet & Bothello, 2023), field-level change (Jing, Goodrick, Reay, & Huq, 2024; van Wijk, Stam, Elfring, Zietsma, & den Hond, 2013), and institutional work (Kodeih, Schildt, & Lawrence, 2023; Schuessler, Lohmeyer, & Ashwin, 2023). Our theory of omnicrises advances this research by linking institutional disruption to the erosion of a collective sense of stability and continuity, and by theorizing the “new normal” as a contested, socially constructed condition rather than a mere outcome of repair.
First, our conceptualization of omnicrises as disruptions that both expose and reshape interinstitutional systems provides a novel lens on institutional fragility and adaptive capacity. Omnicrises do not just disrupt individual institutions but destabilize the very relationships between institutions, making it harder to rely on institutional compartmentalization for stability. This suggests that institutional stability is increasingly contingent on inter-institutional robustness—how institutions hold together in the face of multi-domain disruption—not just on the strength of individual institutions.
Second, we reframe institutional change as a battle over interpretive control. The dynamics of avowing, delegating, and realigning expertise highlight how crises function as “critical junctures” where OGs exploit jurisdictional fluidity to reassert, redefine, or temporarily cede authority. This extends theories of field-level change (Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002; Leibel, Hallett, & Bechky, 2018; van Wijk et al., 2013) by emphasizing crisis-triggered jurisdictional fluidity rather than gradual diffusion or exogenous shocks.
Third, our work enables a deeper account of institutional stability and stabilization (Reinecke & Lawrence, 2023) as the continuity of meaning and the predictability of daily life. Our conceptualization of the “new normal” as a reestablished jurisdictional settlement mirrors the “relational recovery” found in earlier crisis research (Kahn et al., 2013). We show that the stabilization of an omnicrisis requires a reconstitution of the relational and institutional links between mandates, jurisdictions, and expertise. When institutions fail to offer up the material and cultural resources to address a societal threat, as in the case of omnicrises, it is not just a shift in practices or logics but a disruption of lived normalcy that must be reassembled. We theorize the construction of the new normal as a mnemonic struggle over what is to be remembered and what is to be forgotten (Crawford et al., 2022; Zerubavel, 2003). Progressive repair involves the remembering of institutional failures and vulnerabilities to justify reform, typically mobilized by OGs seeking to institutionalize crisis-induced change. In contrast, restorative repair relies on institutional forgetting—the erasure or minimization of crisis experiences that threaten the legitimacy of pre-crisis norms and practices.
We thus enrich current views on the social construction of crises with a mnemonic dimension: Post-crisis stability is rebuilt through contested memory work that constructs a collectively acceptable narrative of continuity. This helps explain why different communities settle into different “new normals,” even when exposed to the same omnicrisis, and why such settlements may later unravel when suppressed memories of institutional failure resurface. Beyond crises, this distinction between progressive and restorative repair invites further exploration into the robustness of emergent orders and the extent to which communities can resist or undo institutional change they cannot control.
Relatedly, our theory foregrounds cases where jurisdictional settlement is achieved among OGs, but does not fully account for cases where communities reject these settlements—as seen in persistent conspiracy movements post-pandemic or sustained distrust of financial regulators after 2008. In such cases, the occupational triad may be formally realigned while the sense of stability and continuity remains beyond reach. Future research should examine the conditions under which OG-constructed settlements fail to gain community legitimacy, producing a state of incomplete resolution.
Conclusion
This article advances our understanding of omnicrises by conceptualizing them as profound disruptions that destabilize the interinstitutional system and erode the jurisdictional order through which social life is ordinarily coordinated. We show how omnicrises originate in localized disruptions but escalate when their cascading effects fragment established mandates, unsettle expertise, and force occupational groups into jurisdictional contestation across institutional domains. By foregrounding OGs as agents of institutions, our theory explains how crises are socially constructed, governed, and ultimately settled through processes of jurisdictional realignment that reconstitute—or fail to reconstitute—social stability. We thus shift attention from organizational crisis containment to the reconstruction of institutional order, offering a process model that links disruption, expertise dynamics, and the construction of a new normal.
Importantly, failures of jurisdictional realignment carry consequences that extend well beyond the acute phase of disruption. When jurisdictional authority remains unsettled or is prematurely stabilized through restorative repair, crises may be prolonged and institutional fragility entrenched. In such cases, communities continue to experience uncertainty despite the reassertion of familiar arrangements (Möllering, 2006; Steele, 2021). Moreover, misrecognition of occupational authority—where mandates and expertise are perceived as misaligned—can undermine trust in institutions long after material threats recede. This misalignment complicates future efforts at collective coordination (Lounsbury, 2023; Meyer, 2025), leaving the social order ill-equipped to face the next systemic threat. Ultimately defining challenge of an omnicrisis is not the resolution of the disruption itself, but the repair of the jurisdictional order that interprets it; an omnicrisis ends when a coherent realignment of mandate, jurisdiction, and expertise reconstitutes a community’s sense of stability and continuity.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to our editor, Mike Pfarrer, and the anonymous reviewers for the insightful feedback and guidance throughout the review process. We also thank John Amis for the feedback on an earlier draft. Early versions of this article were presented at Alberta Institutions Conference 2022, EGOS 2022, and AoM 2023. The article also benefitted from attendees’ feedback during the presentations at ESCP Paris, Esade Business School, IESEG, Rotterdam School of Management, University of Bath, University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, University of Warwick, and ZHAW School of Management and Law.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
