Crisis como alarma: de la urgencia a la convergencia de las expectativas sociales

Abstract

This article explores the genesis of the perceptive dimension of social crises. It is argued that crises correspond to a social alarm, as regulatory devices that the social agents activate to change the social structure (morphogenesis) or to preserve it (morfoestasis). We propose that crises unfold when the distance between the promises of the shareholders and the expectations of the stakeholders has surpassed a critical threshold of tolerance, which propagates the experience of crisis within and between three social planes: in the coordinated or uncoordinated civil society, at organizational scale, and systemic-institutional level. As for its functionality, social crises mainly correct social disintegration (its perceptive dimension) and only in a tangential way the systemic disintegration (its objective dimension). The theoretical approaches are illustrated through a case study that analyzes two Chilean crises: the pension crisis and the crisis of political disaffection.