A New Order? Crisis as Context Collapse in Higher Education During Pandemic Times

Abstract How do organizations create order during crises? Although crises have been extensively studied, the COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to examine how organizations establish order under such conditions. This article explores the unique case of KU, a HEI in Sweden, and how the management negotiated order amid the Swedish government’s exceptional strategy of not imposing restrictions or lockdowns. As HEIs in Sweden operate as autonomous government authorities, decision-making remained delegated, leaving them to develop their own strategies and measures. At KU, a crisis management team was established to limit the spread of the virus. Drawing on this team’s meeting minutes, we demonstrate how the crisis entailed a “context collapse,” whereby previously distinct contexts converged into a single overarching issue, for which few normative guidelines were initially provided by the institutional field. By using negotiated order theory, we illustrate how these negotiations were organized across contexts, but also, crucially, how those negotiations themselves invoked a new order. As a new order emerged from within the negotiations, that order incorporated elements of the collapsing context, which also involved a repositioning of KU in the field of HEI.