Abstract

In the decade since the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008, significant earthquakes have occurred in Yushu, Lushan, and Ludian in China. A comparison of the collaborative behaviors of emergency organizations in these four cases reveals some trends or regularities. This study uses complex adaptive network theory to examine three propositions: first, organizational collaborative behaviors are driven by tasks; second, government departments show less initiative in cross-sector cooperation than NGOs and enterprises; and third, the emergency management network has a core-periphery structure. All of these propositions are supported by our social network analysis (SNA), which considers modularity, centrality, cliques, and singular value decomposition (SVD) in a two-mode network. The results support the three propositions given above and suggest that emergency management networks are time-variant systems. In particular, we argue that estrangement between different sectors needs to be overcome to improve these networks.

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