Adaptive responses to crisis rely on effective cognitive frames: understanding what is going on amid unfolding crisis and what should be done to address it. Research has shown that failing to drop a routine cognitive frame exacerbates crises, while nimbly adopting a novel frame enhances resilience. This suggests that actors in crisis have an urgent dual mission: to simultaneously destroy and construct frames. Existing research offers little guidance on how actors can accomplish this in the midst of their struggles to survive threatening and disruptive circumstances. I address this shortcoming by drawing from a 22-month ethnography of a Detroit business incubator, analyzing how it gradually developed a novel diagnostic and prognostic frame of the city’s unfolding crisis. I propose and show that actors amid crisis construct a novel frame—while dismantling an old one—through a process of frame restructuration: the novel frame emerges from and co-evolves with unconventional actions that pragmatically address the exigencies of the crisis. Mutual constitution between pragmatic actions and the emergent frame can be critically propelled by the use of metaphor, which helps actors instantly reframe the context.

对危机的适应性应对措施依赖有效的认知框架：了解危机在不断发展的过程中所发生的情况以及应采取的应对措施。研究表明，不能放弃常规的认知框架会加剧危机，而灵活采用新型框架会增强弹性。这表明处于危机中的行为者具有紧迫的双重任务：同时破坏和构建框架。现有研究很少提供有关演员如何在艰难的生存环境中生存的斗争的指导。我通过底特律一家企业孵化器的22个月民族志研究了这一缺陷，分析了它是如何逐步发展出该城市正在发生的危机的新颖的诊断和预后框架的。我提出并表明，危机中的参与者通过框架重组的过程构建了一个新框架，同时拆除了旧框架：新框架来自非常规行动，并且与非常规行动共同发展，这些非常规行动务实地解决了危机的紧迫性。可以通过使用隐喻来严格地推动务实行动与紧急框架之间的相互构成，这有助于演员立即重新构筑上下文。