How and why stakeholders join forces to address moral crises

For the past few decades, the world seems to have been staggering from one crisis to another, from financial crashes to the COVID-19 pandemic, not to mention floods, nuclear disasters and waves of desperate migrants landing on European shores after arduous escapes from war and misery.

Because these unexpected, threatening events have a high impact, they tend to provoke change in organizations and institutions. As such, they have received ample attention from researchers. Yet so far, academics have adopted a rather instrumental approach, often examining how effectively organizations deal with the adversity by which crises affect them.

Therefore, we know a lot about the structures and practices that allow companies or public bodies and their members to bounce back. But much less is known about how institutions manage to cope with crises, institutions being understood in the wider sense of a collective of diverse actors (public, private and/or non-profit) that constitute a field or an industry.

This is why I decided to investigate institutional resilience, i.e. the ability to deal with adversity that occurs at the level of fields or industries. In an article published in the Journal of Business Ethics, I explain that this may help derive implications for more systemic responses to crises. In other words, I investigated how partnerships can move towards “transformational development”, instead of engaging in more incremental forms of collaboration.

In addition, crises are such complex problems – by sheer definition – that they require multistakeholder collaborations: organizations must join forces (the title of my article, actually) to respond to such large-scale trouble and increase institutional resilience.

In consequence, I chose to adopt a “normative” approach to wide-spanning crises, such as the economic crisis of 2008 and the refugee crisis of 2015. These foremost represent moral crises, especially in advanced economies. While natural disasters, accidents or even major corporate scandals are emergencies that force organizations to react immediately, simply because livelihoods are in peril, moral crises are of a different nature. In these situations, organizational survival is not at stake; only disadvantaged groups in society are under high and material adversity, meaning organizations may or may not feel responsible to act and meet the adversity.

To understand how institutions cope with moral crises and how and why organizations collaborate to increase resilience, I examined the work integration field, i.e. the institutional arrangements meant to integrate disadvantaged groups into the labour market. I specifically studied multistakeholder partnerships (MSPs) as a novel, integrated response to skilling, educating and employing people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

As professors Barbara Gray and Jill Purdy explain, “... organizations turn to multistakeholder partnerships to meet challenges that they cannot handle alone. By tapping the resources of diverse stakeholders, MSPs develop the capability to address complex issues and problems, such as healthcare delivery, poverty, human rights, watershed management, education, sustainability, and innovation.”

The United Nations also recognizes MSPs as “... important vehicles for mobilizing and sharing knowledge, expertise, technologies and financial resources to support the achievement of the sustainable development goals in all countries, particularly developing countries.”

It even developed The 2030 Agenda Partnership Accelerator in collaboration with The Partnering Initiative to that end. Multistakeholder partnerships are also high on the agenda of the World Economic Forum.

The moral character of the economic crisis and the refugee crisis meant that public, private and non-profit actors chose to engage or not to engage out of a sense of responsibility. It also provided an opportunity to advance the business ethics discourse as to when, why and how organizations choose to act on challenges where these challenges do not directly inhibit them. My research revealed that a lot of the action, in this case, was driven by public perceptions and media reporting, including moral evaluations.

The countries I selected for comparison were France, Germany and Spain. In Germany, the non-profit sector is an important provider of work integration programmes, but the field is strongly state-dominated. In France, cooperation between the state and the non-profit sector has traditionally been high. By contrast, the Spanish state has a relatively low involvement in active employment policies and lets the market shape the field, while the non-profit sector is traditionally strong to compensate for cases of market failure.

Because each of the three countries had different institutions at the beginning, they were affected by the crises, and responded to them, in different ways. These differences depended on “nested contingencies”: the first contingency (or relation between two variables) existing between the capacity of existing institutions to deal with crises and the level of adversity; the second existing between traditions in the field and the direct/indirect influence of the crises on existing institutions (like controversial public discourse for example).

While France stayed in "the default position" because it had invested in MSPs early on, German partners only got active when the discourse surrounding refugees became dominated by xenophobia. In Spain, the inhibition of state capacity led to large-scale solidarity action involving more than 1,000 partners.

In view of multiple impending societal crises, policy-makers would do well to continuously encourage multistakeholder collaboration, which they spurred through large-scale events in the context of COVID-19 for instance, instead of committing the mistake of seeing such acts of proactive brokerage as one-off events within a specific crisis context.

Stakeholders from all sectors should more actively explore options for how a proactive approach to collaboration can spur institutional innovation such as that of the MSPs instead of waiting for these to be coerced as crises occur.

For this to happen, it is essential to understand that many, even universal crises have a moral character, including paradoxically the climate crisis: those who contribute the most to it will be affected the least or the latest. This is why mobilizing action based on pragmatism or even scientific evidence alone has failed, to date. Instead, effective climate action requires taking an explicit normative stance, namely that of taking over responsibility for others and for future generations.

Organizations should more consciously acknowledge the benefits of taking on a normative and moral rather than an instrumental view on crises throughout. It can open up entirely new opportunity spaces for how organizations deal with purpose, promote problem-solving, and think about partnerships.