Globalization, disasters, and disaster response

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The sociology of disasters is concerned commonsensically with disasters, which may be defined as unscheduled events caused by nature or by human interventions. It deals with their consequences for human societies, responses to post-disaster adjustments, and longterm recovery. These disasters include a wide variety of calamities from natural to nuclear disaster. Over the years, as the field has grown, it has included within its range of investigation diverse types of disasters and hazards, their causes, both short-and longterm consequences and the processes of rehabilitation. In recent years some authors have included subjects such as wars, civil wars, large-scale human rights violations, and even terrorist attacks within the purview of disaster sociology. The growth of the field has been slow, partly owing to the penchant for sociology as a discipline to study social order and continuity in society. As sociology evolved into more inter-disciplinary fields and began to expand its horizons, social discontinuity and more atypical aspects of society came under its purview. This development opened the door to the study of disasters and other disorderly and disruptive events and processes in society. Over time policy makers too recognized the importance of disaster research in public-policy making that would minimize disaster losses and became supportive of this field of study. Unlike other fields of sociology, disaster sociology lacks the benefit of contributionsfrom classical sociologists. The first systematic social and behavioural study of a disaster was Samuel Prince’s study of the Halifax explosion in 1920 based on the disastrous collision of a Belgian and a French ship carrying TNT. Although it was the study of a single case, important propositions and hypotheses were contained in that study (Drabek, 1986: 1). After a hiatus in the 1960s, disaster as a topic and a research area once more attracted the attention of social scientists and policy makers. In social sciences, disaster as a topic was initially viewed as an example in the field of social problems and thus a chapter on disaster written by C. E. Fritz was included in Social Problems, which was edited by Robert Merton and Richard Nisbet (1961). Nearly a decade later, Allan Barton (1970) presented a sociological contribution highlighting individual behaviours in times of disasters with a focus on role definition, competence, and conflict under disaster conditions(Quarantelli and Dynes, 1977: 26). After a lull of over two decades came Pitirim Sorokin’s Man and Society in Calamity (1942). Owing to the influence of behaviourism, earlier works on disaster focused more on the psychological consequences of disasters viewing them as generating high stress in individuals (Baker and Chapman, 1962). In 1963 the Disaster Research Center was established at Ohio State University by two of the pioneering figures in disaster sociology, E. L. Quarantelli and Russell Dynes. The Disaster Research Center, according to the Center’s website, is the first social science research centre in the world devoted to the study of disasters. The Center was moved to the University of Delaware in 1985. Accordingly,[t]he Center conducts field and survey research on group, organizational and community preparation for, response to, and recovery from natural and technological disasters and other community-wide crises. DRC researchers have carried out systematic studies on a broad range of disaster types, including hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, hazardous chemical incidents, and plane crashes.