Resolving Identities: Successive Crises in a Trading Room after 9/11

Daniel Beunza and David Stark

05-02-003

How do organizations cope with extraordinary crisis? In this paper we study the case of a Wall Street investment bank that lost its entire office and trading technology in the terrorist attack of September 11th. The paper documents the six months the traders spent in a makeshift trading room in the New Jersey suburbs as they had to deal with fears and insecurities inside the company as well as outside it: anxiety about additional attacks, questions of professional identity, doubts about the future of the firm, and ambiguities about the future re-location of the trading room. The trading room did not face one crisis---the immediate aftermath of September 11th---but many. A given crisis was resolved by restoring identities; but identities, once restored, redefined the situation and lead to new crises. That is, the successive waves of crisis were produced by each success in managing crisis.