Managing Complex Crises

Abstract

The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership under Pressure. By Arjen Boin, Paul ‘t Hart, Eric Stern, Bengt Sundelius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 194 pp., $70.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-84537-8), $27.99 paper (ISBN: 0-521-60733-7). The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership under Pressure, by Boin et al., marks the end of a significant cycle of research conducted over the past decade. Summarizing and integrating the findings of numerous individual cases from Europe and beyond, the book provides a general theory of crisis management that is thoroughly supported by extensive empirical evidence. Recent research on crisis management has focused on individual crises, triggered by such things as natural disasters, epidemics, technological failures, human mistakes, political conflicts, terrorist attacks, and the like. These crises were predominantly investigated through a cognitive-institutional approach that stresses such analytical themes as crisis preparedness, prevention and mitigation, leadership, decision units, problem perception and framing, value conflict, politico-bureaucratic cooperation and conflict, crisis communication and credibility, transnationalization and internationalization, temporal effects, and learning. Several of the studies, conducted as part of the Crisis Management Europe project, followed a common research design—including a common theoretical starting point and methodological approach (see, for example, Newlove, Stern, and Svedin 2000; Porfiriev and Svedin 2002; Bos 2003; Hansen 2003; Brandstrom and Malesic 2004). Case-by-case and country-by-country, the reports generated by these studies have thoroughly assessed crisis management in particular institutional contexts. However, they have not attempted to provide a systematic set of generalizations based on the various findings. The only real attempt to generalize from these rich empirical data— Managing Crises: Threats, Dilemmas, Opportunities by Rosenthal, Boin, and Comfort—appeared in 2001. However, that volume was limited by the number of studies available at the time and by the book's lack of a common theoretical and methodological approach. The Politics of Crisis Management goes well beyond the scope of the Rosenthal et al. volume. This book reflects, first and foremost, the multidisciplinary nature of crisis management, involving disaster sociology and psychology, international relations, …