Coping with Katrina: Assessing Crisis Management Behaviours in the Big One

Abstract

Hurricane Katrina continues to capture attention and influence scholarship including official reports that focus more on event chronologies than on conceptual patterns. Our paper explores conceptual patterns crisis management behaviour, drawing upon Lalonde's (2004) archetypes of crisis managers as collectivists, integrators, and reactives. We add a paralytics archetype for our analysis. Key findings include an imbalance between counterproductive and constructive archetypes. Reactive and paralytic crisis manager behaviours were over‐represented, significantly contributing to conflict, communication failures, and the systemic failure of governments. Collectivist and integrator archetypes were badly under‐represented, limiting intergovernmental relations, cooperation, and communication embedded in these behaviour types. Crisis management performance with future crises would benefit from a systematic assessment of crisis management styles and behaviours.