Bridging worlds in crisis: adaptive leadership in a culturally secluded ultra-Orthodox city in Israel
Yael Elraz-Shapira, Moshe ZviranPurpose
This paper examines public leadership as legitimacy work during the COVID-19 crisis in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox city in Israel, where formal state authority initially lacked both reach and cultural legitimacy. Drawing on Complexity Leadership Theory (CLT), Adaptive Leadership, and Public Leadership, the study examines how public leadership mobilized coordination and compliance and what mechanisms enabled adaptive spaces across competing authority systems.
Design/methodology/approach
The study adopts an instrumental qualitative case study approach. Data were drawn from semi-structured interviews with key actors involved in the crisis response, including municipal leaders, senior military commanders recruited to assist with the pandemic, and emergency headquarters personnel. These data triangulated with internal municipal operational records, daily situation reports, protocols, an operational compendium, real-time epidemiological dashboards and public-facing municipal communication materials. Triangulation across multiple data sources enhanced analytic rigor.
Findings
The findings identify five mechanisms through which leadership operated under contested legitimacy: adaptive space construction, religious reframing, boundary-spanning translation, hyperlocal coordination, and calibrated engagement and enforcement. These mechanisms supported cross-sector coordination and helped translate national public health mandates into locally legitimate obligations. The response combined operational discipline, community-based infrastructure, and targeted enforcement, enabling coordinated public health action despite limited formal authority and early community resistance.
Research limitations/implications
The study has several limitations. It is based on a single instrumental case and therefore does not claim statistical generalizability; its contribution lies in analytic generalization to other contested legitimacy settings. Retrospective interviews create risks of recall bias and retrospective rationalization. The focus on key leadership actors underrepresents dissenting residents, civil society critics, and community members who resisted the intervention. Some internal documents used for triangulation are not publicly available, limiting external auditability. Finally, the temporal alignment between leadership actions and epidemiological improvement supports analytic plausibility but does not establish causality.
Practical implications
Practically, the findings suggest that crisis leaders working with culturally insulated or politically polarized communities should not rely solely on formal mandates or uniform communication. Effective response requires identifying locally recognized authorities, creating adaptive spaces for institutional and community actors, translating directives into legitimate moral frameworks, and pairing enforcement with welfare provision and relational trust. These insights may apply to public health, emergency management, and other settings where formal authority lacks cultural resonance.
Originality/value
This study extends Complexity Leadership Theory (CLT) to public governance by demonstrating how adaptive spaces can be intentionally constructed under conditions of contested legitimacy. It shows how enabling leadership can generate coordination and adaptive capacity through locally initiated action, independent of central authorization, offering transferable insights for crisis governance in polarized settings.