Organizational Renewal

Organizational renewal focuses on how an organization can experience growth, learning, rebirth, and resurrection through crisis awareness. Organizational renewal does not ignore the fact that those who violated laws and policies precipitated the crisis. The primary focus, however, is on moving forward to manifest an organization that is better equipped to avoid and manage crises than it was prior to the difficulty. Thus, a discourse of [Page 550]renewal can serve as the primary narrative inside and outside the organization, can compete with accusatory narratives, or can complement the critical or accusatory narrative. This forward-looking, or prospective, discourse of renewal has been studied in a range of crises, such as organizational accidents, recalls, terrorism, and natural disasters.

When organizations encounter crises, questions of accountability, responsibility, and blame ...