Resourcing Agency for Sustained Collective Action Amid Creeping Crises

In the wake of the Beirut blast, we use Lebanon as an empirical context to examine how a group of scholar-activists organized to support ongoing collective action in the context of creeping crisis. Using the lens of resourcing theory, we provide a process model of resourcing agency as a fractal and embodied form of critical action, augmented and transformed by critical reflection, and collective healing and striving. We make four contributions. First, we demonstrate why organizational scholarship needs to attend to the increasing relevance of creeping crises and we model an approach to understanding both the lived experience of creeping crises and the implications for the situated cultivation of agency. Second, we extend resourcing theory by uncovering resourcing agency as an integral, embodied process in the context of crisis, particularly creeping crises, and show how it is itself a vital instantiation of agency. Third, further extending resourcing and process theories, we identify two types of ampliative cycles (sustaining and transformative cycles) implicated in resourcing agency when organizing in support of collective action amid creeping crises. Finally, our findings demonstrate the benefits of using a processual approach that attends to the embodied and fractal nature of action in creeping crises and other extreme contexts. We close with a discussion of the implications for engaged scholarship as a framework for action.