Crisis Readiness in Turkey and the United States

Crisis management seeks to minimize the impact that crisis events have on organizations. While the crisis management literature is replete with studies of large organizations in developed countries, little has been written on this subject concerning businesses in emerging nations. This exploratory study investigates the perceptions and experiences of Turkish managers in relation to crisis events. Crisis readiness in Turkey and the United States is compared and contrasted. The results indicate that a majority of these organizations do not have formal crisis management plans. Recommendations are offered and implications for management are presented.     

Simulating US Foreign Policy Crises: Uses and Limits in Education and Training

Crisis policy simulations can provide instructors with valuable tools for (1) increasing student awareness of the complexities of the real-life policy environment; (2) enhancing their empathy for the challenges faced by actual policymakers; and (3) providing vivid illustrations of difficult theoretical concepts associated with individual or group decision making and crisis management. This article explores the value of classroom simulations and the requirements for their successful construction and use.     

Training Civil Servants for Crisis Management

This article describes and reflects upon actual experiences in training leaders in the Swiss government. Five thematic areas that are fundamental to preparing a government for leadership in a crisis are presented. Additionally, planning the training, the use of expertise and factors which facilitate or hinder strategic learning are discussed. The author recommends the development of a model learning strategy for governments, with the assistance of the European Academy for Crisis Management.     

Social media mapping innovations for crisis prevention,response, and evaluation

Social media has had a noticeable influence on the practice of crisis communication. Crisis managers are becoming increasingly attracted to social media because of the ability to expand the communication options available to organizations and their publics during a crisis. Previous researchers have identified a variety of benefits and challenges presented by the use of social media for crisis communication. Two new social media mapping applications, SituMap and PhotoSorter, were recently developed to cultivate participation, collaboration, and conversation specifically for crisis communication. The purpose of the present investigation is to explore the features of these applications and discuss the potential benefits of these features for crisis managers in each stage of the crisis lifecycle.     

Organizational Crisis Preparedness in Heterogeneous Societies: The OCPH Model

The populations of European societies are heterogeneous and a crucial part of effective crisis preparedness is to customize contingency planning and crisis communication to these populations. The aim of this study is therefore to develop a theoretically based model of organizations' crisis preparedness in heterogeneous societies. Through theoretical and empirical analyses the model for ‘Organizational Crisis Preparedness in Heterogeneous societies’, the OCPH model, is developed. The model provides a theoretical foundation for the understanding of organizational crisis preparedness and also has practical implications: It offers a tool with which to develop organizational contingency planning further. For authorities that supervise municipalities or other local authorities, the OCPH model can be used to analyse and evaluate organizations.     

A simulation framework for crisis management: Design and use

A perennial simulation framework is proposed within the domain of crisis management simulation. Motivated by a need for establishing information superiority through decision-support analysis, the framework is designed to use symbiotic simulation and is also suitable for the hindsight and foresight studies that drive crisis-related preparedness exercises. The framework provides a novel feature of incorporating Human in the Loop simulations using virtual reality as a part of the symbiotic simulation. We coin the term perennial simulation to refer to our framework being enduring (the simulation working symbiotically with the real system), and recurring (performing “what-if?” simulations and continually providing feedback to the real system).Three case studies examine the application of the framework to crisis-related scenarios. The framework is shown to be useful and capable of dealing with crisis situations and adding value to existing expert advice, forming a symbiotic feedback loop that aids crisis management.     

Understanding the use of social media by organisations for crisis communication

Many businesses have commenced using social media for crisis communication with stakeholders. However there is little guidance in literature to assist organisational crisis managers with the selection of an appropriate crisis response strategy. Traditional theories on crisis communication may not adequately represent the social media context. This study took a qualitative approach and explored organisational use of social media for crisis communication at seventeen large Australian organisations. An analysis of 15,650 Facebook and Twitter messages was conducted, drawing on the lens of Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) (Coombs & Holladay, 2002). Findings suggested that when large Australian organisations responded to crises via social media, they lacked an awareness of the potential of social media for crisis communication. Organisations often did not respond to stakeholder messages or selected crisis response strategies that may increase reputational risk. The paper contributes important understandings of organisational social media use for crisis communication. It also assists crisis managers by providing six crisis response positions and a taxonomy of social media crisis messages that stakeholders may send to organisations. Key implications are discussed.     

TECHNICAL NOTE: Design criteria for microclimate cooling systems

Abstract

This paper identifies and described 25 design criteria that are desirable characteristics for a microclimate cooling system (MCCS). These criteria can be used as a check list by designers when developing an MCCS, and by organizations when evaluating and selecting MCCSs for use by their employees.     

Decentralization in Crisis: The Case of Everest Double Glazing Installation

Change and turn-around strategies in business need to draw upon more than a literature of corporate culture for analysis and understanding. The Everest Double Glazing Company experienced an organizational transformation which precipitated rapidly into a crisis situation. The history of this case study in decentralization shows how intended management strategies aimed at change can be frustrated by complexities in behaviour and volatility in business environments. This case study brings to the fore the role of self-inducement in the evolution of crises, questions the extent to which business organizations can prepare for crisis in their own strategic planning, and clarifies comment on the mobilizing, rather than demobilizing role of crisis in corporations. Crisis management theory contributes to the understanding of many ongoing issues that contemporary management literature seems unable to explain.     

Crisis communication,learning and responding: Best practices in social media

As noted by Seeger (2006) the notion of best practices is often use to improve professional practice; to create research and functional recommendations to use in a specific situation. This essay describes best practices in crisis communication specifically through the use of social media. It provides suggestions and approaches for improving the effectiveness of crisis communication and learning with and between organizations, governments and citizens. Seven best practices for effective crisis communication using social media are outlined.     

Preparing Policy Makers for Crisis Management: The Role of Simulations

This article describes and reflects upon practical experiences in using simulations to increase the crisis preparedness of policy makers and government agencies in the Netherlands. Basic issues in crisis simulation design are discussed in view of the various functions that simulations may perform in crisis management planning. A concrete example of simulation is provided to explain its design and modus operandi. The article concludes with a number of practical recommendations.     

基于软件完整性级别的软件可靠性度量选取框架

选取合适的软件可靠性度量,对于软件质量保证及项目管理有着重要意义。现有的软件可靠性度量选取方法没有考虑软件完整性级别这个重要的设计属性。完整性级别表示软件特性的取值范围,该范围对将系统风险保持在可容忍的限度内是必需的,其对软件可靠性水平有显著影响。提出了一种基于完整性级别的可靠性度量选取框架:首先给出基于完整性级别的度量选取体系;然后在选取体系的基础上,给出相应的度量选取方法;最后,将提出的度量选取框架应用于ISO/IEC 9126质量模型中的外部软件可靠性度量,根据度量的特点将每种度量不同程度(基本、条件及参考)地推荐给不同的完整性级别。实例表明,基于完整性级别的度量选取技术是系统且有效的,所推荐的度量可以满足软件尤其是安全关键软件在不同完整性级别上的需求。     

Developing land use/land cover parameterization for climate–land modelling in East Africa

Regional climate modeling studies now have numerous choices in selecting land use/land cover (LULC) products to provide land surface parameter information. The various LULC products were developed with different objectives, methods and data sources. Not all new LULC products have land classes that match the land class types defined in climate models. More importantly, when used in regional climate models, simulation results can vary significantly depending on the LULC products. Thus, developing appropriate LULC parameterization for climate models becomes critical depending on objectives and efforts. The objective of this paper is to develop the most accurate LULC scheme possible for East Africa for implementation in the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS). A crosswalk procedure, based on assessments of various LULC products, was performed connecting land class types in RAMS and the newly created LULC scheme. No simulations are discussed here; rather, we present an outline of the procedures that were carried out to take advantage of the strengths of currently available LULC products, Africover and Global Land Cover 2000, for the purpose of conducting regional climate simulations.     

Analysis of the resilience of team performance during a nuclear emergency response exercise

The current work presents results from a cognitive task analysis (CTA) of a nuclear disaster simulation. Audio-visual records were collected from an emergency room team composed of individuals from 26 different agencies as they responded to multiple scenarios in a simulated nuclear disaster. This simulation was part of a national emergency response training activity for a nuclear power plant located in a developing country. The objectives of this paper are to describe sources of resilience and brittleness in these activities, identify cues of potential improvements for future emergency simulations, and leveraging the resilience of the emergency response system in case of a real disaster. Multiple CTA techniques were used to gain a better understanding of the cognitive dimensions of the activity and to identify team coordination and crisis management patterns that emerged from the simulation exercises.     

The dynamics of inter-organizational ties during crises: empirical evidence and computational analysis

Organizations often rely on social networks in order to garner resources for survival, in particular when faced with a crisis. From a resource dependence perspective, this paper addresses two issues regarding the dynamics of inter-organizational ties during crisis situations: (a) what is the usual process organizations use, and (b) how efficient is such a process? Two real world crisis cases show that, in a crisis situation, organizations tend to follow a cascade process in which they rely on stronger ties first until there is additional resource needs before activating weaker ties. This process can go on until all the resource needs are met and the stable stage is reached. Results from a computational model simulating such a cascade process and a contrast process, the sequential/random process, show that organizations following the cascade process can exhibit much higher efficiency, though there is a decreasing effect as the severity of the crisis increases. This study has not only illustrated the real world process of organizational ties during crises empirically but also provided theoretical rationales for such inter-organizational dynamics.     

Training and learning for crisis management using a virtual simulation/gaming environment

Recent advances in computers, networking, and telecommunications offer new opportunities for using simulation and gaming as methodological tools for improving crisis management. It has become easy to develop virtual environments to support games, to have players at distributed workstations interacting with each other, to have automated controllers supply exogenous events to the players, to enable players to query online data files during the game, and to prepare presentation graphics for use during the game and for post-game debriefings. Videos can be used to present scenario updates to players in “newscast” format and to present pre-taped briefings by experts to players. Organizations responsible for crisis management are already using such technologies in constructing crisis management systems (CMSs) to coordinate response to a crisis, provide decision support during a crisis, and support activities prior to the crisis and after the crisis. If designed with gaming in mind, those same CMSs could be easily used in a simulation mode to play a crisis management game. Such a use of the system would also provide personnel with opportunities to rehearse for real crises using the same tools they would have available to them in a real crisis. In this paper, we provide some background for the use of simulation and gaming in crisis management training, describe an architecture for simulation and gaming, and present a case study to illustrate how virtual environments can be used for crisis management training.     

Trusted autonomic service cooperation model and application development framework

To achieve the dynamical on-requirement self-organization and self-evolution of virtual organizations(VOs) by autonomic service cooperation is an excellent approach for developing assembled serviceoriented application software systems in the Internet computing environment. However,this approach,due to the fact that the autonomic individual behaviors are difficult to be predicted and controlled,encounters the "trust" crisis of cooperation effect. In order to solve the above crisis,this paper proposes a model...     

Modeling and Stack Simulation of CMP Cache Capacity and Accessibility

Performance trade-offs between fast data access by local data replication and cache capacity maximization by global data sharing have been extensively studied for many-core Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs). Costly simulations over a wide spectrum of the design space are generally required to gain insight for a sound design. To lower the cost, we develop an abstract model for understanding the performance impact of data replication on CMP caches. To overcome the lack of real-time interactions among multiple cores in the model, we further develop an efficient single-pass stack simulation to study the performance of CMP cache organizations with various degrees of data replication. The global stack logically incorporates a shared stack and per-core private stacks; shared/private reuse (stack) distances can be collected in a single-pass simulation. With the reuse distances, one can calculate the performance of CMP cache organizations with various degrees of data replication. We verify both the model and the stack simulation against execution-driven simulations with commercial multithreaded workloads. The results show that the abstract model provides accurate information about performance trade-offs of data replication. The stack simulation accurately predicts the performance of various cache organizations with 2-9 percent error margins using only about 8 percent of the simulation time.     

Multicultural Crisis Communication: Towards a Social Constructionist Perspective

Crisis communication is a field dominated by case studies and is lacking of systematic knowledge and theoretical framework analysis. Functionalist and objectivist perspectives have dominated the field even though there are exceptions. This may be one reason why multicultural approaches to crisis communication, increasingly relevant in contemporary society, are very few and undeveloped. The aim in the article is to give a critical analysis of research that has been done on crisis communication as well as intercultural public relations and develop a different theoretical framework. We propose the use of ethnicity, focusing collective cultural identity as dynamic, relational and situational in crisis theory and practice. Ethnic differences seem to escalate during crises. Media use and access are also discussed. A Swedish survey shows, among other things, that people with a foreign background read mainstream newspapers more seldom than average Swedes, but that the access to Internet and mobile phones is very high. Based on a social constructionist epistemology, the article ends with four proposals for future research and practice in multicultural crisis communication: (1) audience‐orientation – focusing sense‐making, (2) a proactive and interactive approach – focusing dialogue, (3) a community‐focused approach – focusing a long‐range pre‐crisis perspective and, (4) an ethnicity‐approach towards intercultural communication.