Reconceptualizing Crisis: An Empirically Based Investigation

Crisis is predominantly characterized in terms of its detrimental consequences. Drawing on in‐depth semi‐structured interviews in Melbourne and Taipei, the article provides a critical and distinctive understanding of crisis. Crisis is conceptualized here as a disruptive prefiguring of new possibilities, both agentic and structural. In crisis, a situation of adversity is combined with a positive prospect of possibility previously unnoticed or unavailable that is exposed or generated by the disruption. Against the traditional or established tendency to define crisis as a moment or a turning point, the article argues that crisis is best understood as an unfolding dynamic process of change or courses of generative development. In explicating crisis, a counter‐transformation approach is developed. Drawing on empirical data, the article expands the sociological understanding of crisis.