Crisis Response Organizations Research Articles

Emergent organizing: Origins and evolution of temporary crisis response organizations

Projects and other temporary organizations play a key role in crisis response. However, little is known about how these organizations adapt and change over time as crises last. We conducted a qualitative, longitudinal study of emergent organizing in temporary crisis organizations. This paper focuses on the origins and development of three temporary organizations responding to the COVID-19 crisis in the Netherlands and how these evolved during the crisis. Results of this study show three stages of emergent organizing: identification of operational voids, dynamics of emergent organizing, and solidification. As such, we theorize how emergent organizing is initiated and how it unfolds in longitudinal crises. In this way, our study contributes to literature on project management, crisis management theory, and the general organization and management literature.

Meeting information needs in a natural hazard: Development of crisis information needs and adequacy for internal stakeholders (CINA-IS) scale

Natural-hazard crises generate much uncertainty among individuals, organizations, and communities. As feelings of uncertainty grow, individuals experience higher levels of stress and negative impacts to their psychological well-being. People desperately seek information and guidance on what to do and expect, along with how to adapt when faced with crises. While crisis-response organizations are key information disseminators, individuals also seek information from non-crisis-response organizations such as places where they work, volunteer, attend school, or worship. As the frequency of natural-hazard crises increases, so do the expectations of non-crisis-response organizations as valuable information sources.However, there is limited research on the information needs of internal stakeholders and the adequacy of the information provided. In this paper, a new reliable and valid scale, Crisis Information Needs and Adequacy for Internal Stakeholders (CINA-IS) is introduced. Three studies to develop and test this scale are described in detail. This 6-item, one-factor scale can be used to assess the adequacy of the information provided during a crisis from the perspective of internal stakeholders. Organizations and those who study them are encouraged to use this scale to improve internal crisis communication. Adequately meeting internal stakeholders' information needs has the potential to help reduce uncertainty and negative psychological impacts on an organizations’ most important asset – its people.

DISASTER: A Study on the Manual of a Multiple-Use Facilities to Work in the Crisis Situation

Purpose: Multi-use facilities frequently used by unspecified people can cause a lot of casualties if a crisis occurs, so prepare and train manuals for crisis situations from peacetime. Based on three years of multi-use facility crisis preparation and training consulting experience commissioned by the Ministry of Public Administration and Securi-ty, this study aims to provide development plans and policy suggestions on how to prepare and train multi-use facility manuals to operate in crisis situations. Method: To achieve the purpose of the research, the conceptual research on multi-use facility manuals and government policies were first analyzed through literature surveys, case studies on major accidents in multi-use facilities were derived through various papers and research reports, and the actual situation was analyzed based on the consulting experience of multi-use facility. Through this, it was studied by presenting development projects and policy suggestions to prepare multi-use facility manuals that can operate in crisis situations. Results: Multi-use facilities will need to analyze vulnerabilities and identify crisis types in preparation for crisis situations, organize and dress up crisis response organizations, secure and operate communication networks to control crisis situations, and re-establish training. It should also reflect guidelines on securing a command and communication network in the Ministry of Public Administration and Security s standard manual, preparing for crises linked to multi-use facilities, and long-term development plans(including securing budgets) to compensate for vulnerabilities against crises. Conclusion: The Ministry of Public Administration and Security is preparing a manual to prepare for a crisis, even though many multi-use facilities at the site need to apply it according to the facility characteristics to prepare for the crisis. Development tasks and policy suggestions presented in this study should be utilized to prepare for crisis situations by preparing manuals for crisis situations at ordinary times.

Public Discourse on Environmental Pollution and Health in Korea: Tweets Following the Fukushima Nuclear Accident

Public discourse on environmental and health issues has risenon social media. Upon an environmental crisis, various chatterssuch as breaking news, misinformation, and rumor couldaggravate social confusion and proliferate negative publicsentiment. In an effort to study public sentiments on environmentalissues in South Korea, we analyzed 158,964 tweetsgenerated over a 4-year period following the Fukushima accidentin 2011, the largest release of radioactivity to environmentin recent history. This event led to a significant increasein public’s interest on environmental and nuclear issues inKorea. We employed Bayesian network and recursive partitioningto observe the classification regression tree structureof major topics. Topics on health and environment were interlinkedclosely and represented both apprehension and concernabout health threats and pollution. Our methodologyhelps analyze large online discourse efficiently and offers insightto crisis response organizations.

A Study on the Characteristics of the Initial Response System in Military Crisis

The security situation facing Korea requires a very active initial response in the event of a military crisis. The survey was conducted on the professional working group regarding their initial responses and the core items and contents of the initial responses derived from the survey were analyzed and synthesized by the descriptive statistics method. In the first stage of situation determination, accurate situation recognition and evaluation are needed based on the analysis of situation judgment, resolution, and response. In the second stage of decision, it is necessary to determine a clear goal for initial response and a crisis response plan, to timely report situations, to spread an alarm, and to cultivate a decision ability to form an appropriate crisis response organization. In the third stage of response, establishing the on-site command and control system is critical along with close information sharing and cooperation with the media and private organizations. This study highlights the importance and necessity of the initial response in military crisis since it could minimize the damage to the military and civilian infrastructure and prevent the expansion of operations.

Crowdsourcing-Enabled Crisis Collaborative Decision Making

Crisis events put crisis response organizations in a unique and complex situation that requires critical real-time distributed decision-making so that lives and properties are saved and protected. With the growing development of collaborative technologies, citizen participation to the crisis management process has shifted from the passive one-way contribution of social networking data to a more active participation by performing specific tasks related to crisis data processing. This article presents a comprehensive approach for integrating the crowdsourcing process to the collaborative decisional process in crisis situations. Within the approach three aspects are highlighted: the coordination work that exists between the relevant stakeholders in making collective decisions, the modeling of case dependent activities within the decisional process, and the detailed modeling of decision-related tasks. The authors investigate the applicability of the proposal with a real-world case study of the Desert Locust Plague carried out in the Algerian National Institute of Plant Protection.

Characterizing Collective Attention via Descriptor Context: A Case Study of Public Discussions of Crisis Events

Social media datasets make it possible to rapidly quantify collective attention to emerging topics and breaking news, such as crisis events. Collective attention is typically measured by aggregate counts, such as the number of posts that mention a name or hashtag. But according to rationalist models of natural language communication, the collective salience of each entity will be expressed not only in how often it is mentioned, but in the form that those mentions take. This is because natural language communication is premised on (and customized to) the expectations that speakers and writers have about how their messages will be interpreted by the intended audience. We test this idea by conducting a large-scale analysis of public online discussions of breaking news events on Facebook and Twitter, focusing on five recent crisis events. We examine how people refer to locations, focusing specifically on contextual descriptors, such as “San Juan” versus “San Juan, Puerto Rico.” Rationalist accounts of natural language communication predict that such descriptors will be unnecessary (and therefore omitted) when the named entity is expected to have high prior salience to the reader. We find that the use of contextual descriptors is indeed associated with proxies for social and informational expectations, including macro-level factors like the location's global salience and micro-level factors like audience engagement. We also find a consistent decrease in descriptor context use over the lifespan of each crisis event. These findings provide evidence about how social media users communicate with their audiences, and point towards more fine-grained models of collective attention that may help researchers and crisis response organizations to better understand public perception of unfolding crisis events.

Toward a Legal Perspective on Crisis Information Management: Legal Values and Privacy-Sensitive Information at Odds?

Abstract Recently, crisis response organizations are adopting a networked communication structure, as a means to connect different sources of crisis information and enable a more effective crisis response. However, this change has introduced legal complications that so far remain unaddressed, for instance regarding the exchange of privacy-sensitive information aimed at rendering a coherent picture of the crisis. This paper examines how information managers interpret legislation during crises. We analyze our results by drawing on Radbruch’s tripartite taxonomy, showing that information managers oscillate between the values of certainty of law and purposiveness in regards to legislation, while the value of justice remains remarkably absent in their interpretation. By introducing a legal perspective on crisis information management we provide an important contribution to the crisis coordination debate.

Decentralization and decomposability: determinants of responsive crisis deployment

Purpose– Crisis management entails among other things developing organizational systems that are capable of reacting to unpredictable and different types of crises. It also involves designing cohesive operational elements to deal with the local dynamics of an actual crisis situation. This challenge of responsiveness – where organizations simultaneously need to react to change demands of different task environments – has hardly been investigated in management theory. The purpose of this paper is to initiate to shed more light on this blind spot.Design/methodology/approach– Modular organizing and organizational sensing are introduced as key drivers of organizational responsiveness. Based on a large-scale survey among 1,200 senior officers the study investigates how these two variables have influenced the responsiveness of the Netherlands armed forces for crisis response deployment.Findings– The findings indicate that the level of modularization is an important facilitator of organizational responsiveness. Organizational systems that are made up of semi-autonomous work groups are in a better position to simultaneously live up to the change demands of different environmental levels than organizations that follow a fine-grained modularization approach.Originality/value– It uses the military crisis response organization as an exemplary case for project-based organzations in general to take advantage of.

Engaging environmental turbulence: drivers of organizational flexibility in the armed forces

Since the transformation was set in motion to change Western armed forces from large-scale mechanized defensive organizations into smaller agile expeditionary crisis response forces, the call for organizational flexibility has rocketed. Yet, actual research into the key organizational drivers of flexibility has hardly been done. To bridge this gap, the present study has analyzed to what extent modular organizing and organizational sensing have contributed to flexible military crisis response performance. The study uses the Netherlands’ armed forces as a representative example of a contemporary Western crisis response organization and empirically draws upon its recent operational experiences. It has uncovered that within most mission contexts, modular organizing acts as a facilitator for the organizational sensing process. Yet, within highly turbulent crisis response missions, organizational sensing becomes the predominant driver, stimulating ad hoc solutions that challenge existing structures, available technology, and standard procedures.

Drivers of Organizational Responsiveness: Experiences of a Military Crisis Response Organization

The topic of organizational responsiveness – where organizations need to flexibly react to strategic and operational demands simultaneously – has been under-explored in strategic management research. Our study was initiated to shed more light on this topic, primarily by studying an organization specifically designed to handle crises. By definition, crisis response organizations have to be prepared to react to unpredictable events. Moreover, the volatility of the crisis situation itself requires a high degree of flexibility to get or keep the situation under control. The study hypothesizes modular organizing and organizational sensing to be key drivers of organizational responsiveness. Empirically, we examine the effect these two variables have on the responsiveness of the Netherlands armed forces for crisis response deployment. Findings indicate that modular organizing and organizational sensing are drivers of responsiveness. In addition, our study uncovered the importance of an organization’s level of system decomposition to responsiveness. A high degree of system granularity can lead to a predominantly inward focus whereas organizational responsiveness calls for a strong external orientation.

Developing a multi‐agent system of a crisis response organization

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present the development of a multi‐agent system (MAS) used to simulate a crisis response organization.Design/methodology/approachFollowing an agent‐based approach, the model is developed using the GAIA methodology and implemented in the Java Agent Development framework.FindingsThe GAIA methodology can be combined with an additional GAIA2JADE process to bridge the gap between design and implementation. Keeping the MAS organization separate from the crisis scenario model enables testing different configurations of the crisis response organization in different scenarios.Research limitations/implicationsThe simulation model is provided as proof of concept along with preliminary experiments. Additional detailed experiments and validation are ongoing.Practical implicationsThe model can be configured differently to deal with an emergency scenario developed separately, providing a test bed for simulating coordination in crisis response. Such simulation forms the basis for exploring different coordination mechanisms and can also be adapted and extended for training and decision support.Originality/valueThe characteristics of the response organization and the study of structured vs emergent coordination fit with the capabilities and nature of a MAS. The structure and process are useful for modelling similar ad hoc, multidisciplinary organizations.

Improving Decision Making in Crisis Response through Critical Thinking Support

In this study, we describe how to use innovative techniques to improve the decision-making process in crisis response organizations. The focus was on building situation awareness of a crisis and overcoming pitfalls such as tunnel vision and information bias through using critical thinking. We started by observing typical difficulties in crisis management in a field study. The essential elements of concern were a deficit in sharing and communicating understanding and a patchy overview of the topics communicated, within as well as between teams. Communication frequently did not entail the reasoning behind a decision that was made. We therefore developed a critical thinking tool that made the reasoning process more explicit and at the same time more robust by tying it to specific hypotheses. We studied a candidate support tool in a controlled setting and found that people made better judgments, particularly in situations where they would be prone to decision biases. We subsequently extended the critical thinking tool to a team setting. We list a number of requirements that are essential for support systems that intend to limit tunnel vision and alleviate communication and coordination problems in crisis response organizations.