The role of mortality awareness in hero identification

Organization encounters a new virus: A cautionary tale of othering and (not) learning

The world’s dire experience with a new coronavirus has shown that the (re)organization embedded in managing a virus and knowledge on organization(s) and management are out of joint. This article entwines life story into reflections on the pandemic to illustrate how knowledge relations are afflicted by othering that constrains learning and facilitates the conditions of possibility for precarious pandemics. In doing so, the account scrutinizes both knowledge activities and domains of scholarship as it navigates tensions between the works of Latour and Foucault. The article is structured into four parts. Theoria focuses on the textual body and the politics of ‘willful blindness’ that segregate the ‘theoretical other’; Praxis addresses the human body, operational knowledge and the ‘everyday geopolitics of fear’ that heroicize the ‘essential other’; Regimen examines the social body, regulatory knowledge and the ‘political economy of truth’ that contests the ‘prescribing other’ and Poiesis addresses the global body, productive knowledge and the international geopolitics that distance the cultural and national other. Each activity poses relational tensions that confront organization which compel us to extend organizational scholarship in ways that facilitate its articulation with scholarship on the virus and invite us to approach knowledge on pandemic (re)organization as a joint cause.

Benefits of heroes to coping with mortality threats by providing perceptions of personal power and reducing unhealthy compensatory consumption

Mortality threats are among the strongest psychological threats that an individual can encounter. Previous research shows that mortality threats lead people to engage in unhealthy compensatory consumption (i.e., overeating), as a maladaptive coping response to threat. In this paper, we propose that reminders of heroes when experiencing mortality threat increases perceptions of personal power, which in turn buffers the need to engage in unhealthy compensatory consumption. We test and find support for our predictions in a series of four studies that include real-world Twitter data after a series of terrorist attacks in 2016-2017, and three experimental studies conducted online and in the field with behavioral measures after Day of the Dead and during COVID-19 pandemic. These findings advance the literature on compensatory consumption, mortality threats, and the psychological functions of heroes.