I am one of them: Examining crisis communication from an intergroup communication approach

This study took an intergroup communication approach and examined how two types of social identities, namely organizational identity and shared ethnic identity with the victim, affect publics’ reactions to a crisis. Data collected via a quasi‐experiment showed that organizational identity affects publics’ reactions, such that internal publics perceive the organization more positively and have less negative word‐of‐mouth intention. Internal publics feel guilty even if they are not personally responsible for the crisis. Publics do not react more negatively when their ethnic ingroup members are accidentally victimized. Organizations should mitigate the internal publics’ anger and guilt and also clarify that the crisis is nonethnicity‐related when the victims happen to be ethnic minorities to avoid any misunderstanding of victims’ ethnic ingroup members.     

Mission Impossible? Planning and Preparing for Crisis1

Crisis management logic suggests that planning and preparing for crisis should be a vital part of institutional and policy toolkits. This paper explores the difficulties in translating this ideal into practice. It focuses on four key difficulties. First, crises and disasters are low probability events but they place large demands on resources and have to compete against front‐line service provision. Second, contingency planning requires ordering and coherence of possible threats, yet crisis is not amenable to being packaged in such a predictable way. Third, planning for crisis requires integration and synergy across institutional networks, yet the modern world is characterised by fragmentation across public, private and voluntary sectors. Fourth, robust planning requires active preparation through training and exercises, but such costly activities often produced a level of symbolic readiness which does not reflect operational realities. Finally the paper reflects on whether crisis preparedness is a ‘mission impossible’, even in the post‐9/11 period when contingency planning seems to be an issue of high political salience.     

The Early Bird Gets the Worm,But the Second Mouse Gets the Cheese: Non‐Technological Innovation in Creative Industries

In the context of economic turmoil, firms in the creative industries (CIs) must make fast decisions as to when to break through with innovations. This paper discusses non‐technological, organizational innovation of early‐adopters, first movers and early followers in order to overcome persistent economic decline, and the implication of different strategies for innovation success. The strategic principle of the pioneer's advantage rests on pre‐emption – the premise that ‘the early bird gets the worm’ and this often applies to business model innovation (BMI). ‘But the second mouse gets the cheese’ points at early followers who may have a more systematic, strategic approach towards innovation. Greater understanding of the advantages of each strategic approach and their significance for innovation performance is critical for CIs where unpredictability and the accelerating pace of change pervade the decisions concerning innovation. Drawing on five exemplary cases of archaeological firms in Spain, this paper explores different innovation process dynamics. The study develops a contingency model where pioneers who challenge their current business model, may be outperformed by early followers who incorporate complementary management innovation (MI) initiatives into the BMI.     

Painful Steps of Progress from Crisis Planning to Contingency Planning: Changes for Disaster Preparedness in Turkey

Excessive losses in natural disasters in Turkey are, to a large extent, a consequence of omissions and deficiencies in the structuring of ‘disasters’ and ‘development’ laws, as well as negligent land‐use practices and avoidance of control in building processes. Two extreme forms of legal and organizational structures in disasters policy could be formulated as the ‘fatalist’ and ‘self‐reliance‘ models. Their contrasts can be investigated in terms of (a) the use of information concerning natural phenomena in formal planning procedures; (b) pre‐ or post‐disaster emphasis in preparations; (c) the political or technical basis of decisions; (d) the extraordinary or routine nature of responses; (e) the general or specialized nature of financial sources used; (f) and their compatibility with the order of priorities in risk management. An evaluation of the conventional policy in Turkey clarifies a position closer to the ‘fatalist’ model and indicates the lines of action for improvements. However, after the 1999 earthquakes, the conventional approach in disaster policy has been restructured. With the newly introduced ‘Obligatory Building Insurance’, ‘Building Control’, and ‘Professional Proficiency’ systems, greater emphasis is now given to mitigation efforts, and the introduction of contingency planning practices is more likely to happen.     

Bordering on Reality: Findings on the Bonfire Crisis Management Simulation

On 6 April 2005 a national crisis management simulation, code named Bonfire, was held at various locations in the Netherlands. The Bonfire scenario was built around a terrorist threat followed by an actual attack in the Amsterdam ArenA and a hostage‐taking. Bonfire's scale and realism made it unique for the Netherlands. Its complexity led to unplanned incidents that actually made it even more realistic, because this is something that occurs in every crisis situation. This evaluation shows that the co‐ordination, internal provision of information and crisis communication – the three core elements of crisis management discussed in this report –were mainly in the hands of the decision‐makers themselves. This put so much pressure on them that they were rarely able to make strategic decisions for the medium or long term. Support staff had been expected to ease pressure on the leadership by preparing their meetings and working out the results. This did not go as planned, however. Since they did not always have access to the latest information, they could not provide optimum support. As a result, they were by‐passed, so that they had even less access to information. The vicious circle was thus complete. It was observed that new counter‐terrorism structures installed in the Netherlands after ‘9–11’ functioned as foreseen, but that decision‐making required the input of far more parties than had been envisaged. In the course of the operations, therefore, the various levels established a more or less spontaneous link with the standard crisis management structures.     

Whistleblowers and informants — Part 1

Senior managers rely on accurate and complete information to assess the state of the organization, to make decisions, to allocate resources, and to control. Similarly, security and audit professionals need accurate and complete information. Too often, neither managers nor security and audit professionals get the information they need, or, they are fed half-truths and outright lies. Employees know about violations that YOU do not. These people could be surrogate auditors throughout the organization, IF they felt comfortable reporting coworkers. The truth is, most employees will NOT report others. This is the first part of two articles exploring some nonlegal aspects of whislteblowing and informing. What motivates people to blow the whistle? Why don't people tattle more often? What goes through the minds of informants, and how does ‘informing’ change their lives? What should you do when you get a tip? You can encourage informants but you may NOT want to do so.     

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.     

What were we thinking? A scoping review of crisis management pandemic literature (1984–2019)

Pandemics are now the focus of research attention in the fields of preparedness and crisis management. As pandemics are some of the largest crises to occur, an important question becomes ‘what were the field of crisis management thinking about pandemic management’. This paper investigates how the field of crisis management have incorporated the body of knowledge arising from pandemics into its science (from 1984 to 2019). We performed a scoping review of 4 journals on crisis management and what they have written about pandemics (230 papers). The findings are summarized in eight different categories. The main result is that the field of crisis management have shown sparse interest in pandemics. We attribute this to factors such as fragmentation of academic sciences when the problem-solving needs integration, perceived incommensurability and the organization of attention. We argue that the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic can provide a basis for posing new questions in research on, and the political debate around, societal vulnerability at large and not only restricted to recent experiences of particular crises. Finally, we argue that this will need a stronger integration of research strands and communities, which in turn require the ability to ‘connect the dots’ between different sources of knowledge.     

Two-Thousand-N: An IT Odyssey

Over the past few years, incidents and accidents that resulted directly from information technology failures have been noticed only by a small circle of analysts. Whatever the outcome when the clock strikes the first second of the year 2000, the Y2K ‘crisis’ has brought to general attention the vulnerabilities and dependencies of large, complex technical systems that depend largely, or in some cases entirely, on computers and networks for their operation. Moreover, the transition has only just begun. Over the next few years, many other industries, markets, bureaus, and regulatory and safety systems will transform their mode of operation to large, integrated systemic dependencies on IT; others will become increasingly dependent upon the reliable performance of other IT systems such as global positioning satellites or the Internet over which they have at best limited control. Where such operations are safety critical, as they are for air traffic control, economically critical, as they are for international financial transactions, individually critical, as they are for hospital and biomedical systems, or, finally, critical for those agencies and institutions whose primary goal is intervention, mitigation, or crisis management, surprises can be rapid, extensive, and interconnected to a degree that will in itself be surprising. This article uses some historical cases to explore the possible range of future crises and contingencies that might ensue.     

Detection of Errors by Skilled Typists

Abstract

Skilled typists are able to detect and correct many errors which they make in copy text, even when they cannot see their copy; (Long 1976. West, 1967). The present investigation shows that they can also do this when they see neither their copy nor the keyboard they use; and that when they detect that they have made errors they arc usually also able to specify precisely what these have been. Typists sometimes make one, or even two additional correct keystrokes before pausing to signal that they have committed an error. They are nevertheless sometimes still able to report precisely what these errors were

When copy obtained from a typewriter using mechanical linkages is examined, the density of impressions of different characters may be taken to indicate how hard particular keys have been struck. A second experiment shows that errors, more frequently than correct responses, are executed with light keystrokes. This, in line with previous work by Megaw (1972). suggests that typists sometimes become aware that they are about to make an error before they complete the keystroke implementing it. They may then attempt to ‘pull back’ incorrect keystrokes, producing fainter impressions on copy

The probability that typists will subsequently signal detection of such ‘ faint’ (or‘ pulled’) errors was found to be significantly greater than the probability that they will subsequently signal their detection of other errors, made with ‘firm’ (i.e. ‘unpulled’) keystrokes

These data, related to earlier findings by Diehl and Seibel (1962), Klemmer (1971). Long (1975, 1976a,b) and Seibel (1972) offer little support for the assumption that skilled typists may monitor their emitted responses in ‘units’ of greater than one keystroke. They rather suggest that, even al very high response rates (e.g. 172ms or faster), typists read copy, programme and emit responses and evaluate each of their responses for accuracy as concurrent, or partially overlapping activities.     

Crisis Awareness and Organizational Response Capabilities in Present Japanese Local Governments: Crisis Awareness Survey Findings

The crises facing today’s public administration are numerous and varied. It is now, more than ever, a necessity that municipal, prefectural and national governments deal with those crisis management issues. The major premise in being able to advance crisis management is the awareness of potential crises. If a certain situation is not considered or realized to be a potential hazard, no specific crisis management countermeasures will have been prepared, nor will any administrative measures have been taken. With that in mind, the author, created a survey focused on the ‘risk awareness framework’ for prefectures and cabinet ordinance‐designated cities in Japan. The researchers attempted to examine the characteristics of, and problems related to, current crisis management administration by examining several factors, including organizational crisis management responses, training and education of crisis management personnel and problems in the crisis management determination system.     

Optimal initial conditions for full-order observers

Full-order observers have n integrators (or n delayors in the discrete-time case) that must be assigned ‘initial-condition values’ prior to the beginning of operation. However, the issue of how best to choose (design) those initial-condition values has apparently been completely ignored in control engineering textbooks. As a consequence, observer initial conditions in industrial applications are usually set to zero, by default. In this paper it is shown that there exists a welldefined, easily computed, physically realizable optimum choice for observer initial-condition values. When these optimum initial conditions are used, rather than ‘zero’ initial conditions, a significant improvement in the observer's ‘start-up error transients’ may result. A numerical example is worked out to illustrate this performance improvement.     

Bibliography

Stress management programmes have become a feature of workplace training programmes and health-related activities. What they expect to achieve, or how, is not always clear. Positivistic science and medicine has difficulty with the complexities of involved human experiences. The value systems of the individual, the organization, and the society interact in complex and powerful ways, forming an inner reality which demands new ways of study and understanding.

Stress management intervention has to be seen not only as an attack on disease but also as a vehicle for promoting organizational and individual well-being. Doctors going into these areas must realize they are entering a higher-order system and thereby changing their tracitional professional role, and that their results will be measured against different criteria. Competition for scarce resources, and perhaps hostility from management, will be new experiences. Management will have a different world view and this has to be recognized and respected. Mutual interests must be identified. A formula might be: ‘health in the individual is health in the organization and vice versa’.

The theoretical models of stress and the approaches currently used in stress management programmes will be reviewed critically in an attempt to break the constraints of illness-dominated thinking and to envisage their potential for positive health and personal development. The case of ‘the healthy back’ will be taken as an example of this wider health-promoting model.     

Managing Transboundary Crises: Identifying the Building Blocks of an Effective Response System

In recent years, crises have become increasingly transboundary in nature. This exploratory paper investigates whether and how the transboundary dimensions of crises such as pandemics, cyber attacks and prolonged critical infrastructure failure accentuate the challenges that public and private authorities confront in the face of urgent threats. We explore the transboundary dimensions of crises and disasters, discuss how an increase in ‘transboundedness’ affects traditional crisis management challenges and investigate what administrative mechanisms are needed to deal with these compounded challenges. Building on lessons learned from past crises and disasters, our goal is to stimulate a discussion among crisis management scholars about the political‐administrative capabilities required to deal with ‘transboundary’ crises.     

Innovation as Improvisation ‘In The Shadow’

In this article, we explore processes of innovation – which are inherently uncertain – from a complexity perspective, in which they are understood as new patterns of experiences as they emerge in human conversational interaction. We reflect on local interactions between people involved in emerging processes of innovation, with a particular emphasis on the improvisational nature of interaction. Through an abductive approach, by iterating actual experiences and our understanding of them, we show that such processes are collective efforts that take place as informal, highly improvised conversations — happening ‘below the radar’ — which may unpredictably offer windows of opportunity to enable change. We show that innovation often emerges as ‘shadow themes’, experienced as subversive by those involved in the moments of interaction. While these themes are embedded in informal conversations and processes, they can be induced by invitations – conscious or unconscious moves that encourage those involved to make spontaneous moves together in a mutually improvised context. Our experience shows that the emergence of shadow themes can have a long‐term impact on the organization and the people involved, and that managers may be ‘in charge but not in control’ of such innovation processes.     

Optimal decision-oriented Bayesian design of experiments

Traditional ‘Design of Experiment’ (DOE) approaches focus on minimization of parameter error variance. In this work, we propose a new “decision-oriented” DOE approach that takes into account how the generated data, and subsequently, the model developed based on them will be used in decision making. By doing so, the parameter variances get distributed in a manner such that its adverse impact on the targeted decision making is minimal. Our results show that the new decision-oriented DPE approach significantly outperforms the standard D-optimal design approach. The new design method should be a valuable tool when experiments are conducted for the purpose of making R&D decisions.     

Global Problem: National Accountability: Framing Accountability in the Australian Context of Climate Change

Climate change has been seen as a crisis looming in the future, and has therefore not reached the top of the political agenda. This no longer holds true when looking at Australia, where climate change has become high politics. In this paper we examine the Australian electoral debate in terms of accountability framing, where the Government and Opposition were involved in a ‘framing contest’. We argue that theories on accountability framing in crisis need to be modified in order to capture the complex dynamics of climate change due to its inherent scientific uncertainty and global nature. After conducting an inductive analysis of Australian Broadcasting Corporation‐reporting we found three themes to be of importance for accountability framing in the ‘risk society’: labeling, linking and coping.     

Crisis and Learning: A Conceptual Balance Sheet

Can governments learn? The title of an influential monograph by a leading political psychologist (Etheredge, 1985) posed this seemingly simplistic question. At first glance, the obvious answer to such a blunt question would appear to be ‘of course’. Governments (and government agencies) persist in spite of, or in some cases because of, dynamic and often hostile political environments. This would seem to indicate that a significant degree of learning is taking place. Yet many scholars, including Etheredge 1985 himself, are markedly skeptical about the learning capacity of policy-makers and governmental organizations and argue that governments learn poorly or slowly at best (Sabatier, 1987; Lebovic, 1995: 835). How can this be? Is this apparent paradox an artefact of the ways in which scholars define and operationalize the concept of learning? Part one of the article will present a brief and selective survey of the diverse inter-disciplinary literature on policy and political learning. This preliminary conceptual analysis identifies several difficult issues. Among the most serious is the ontological question (who or what learns?) and the problem of distinguishing learning from other types of political change, which raises thorny normative and methodological questions. The second part of the article brings the concept of crisis into the learning equation. It has been hypothesized by a number of scholars (George, 1980; Goldmann, 1988; Young, 1989; Olsen, 1992) that conditions associated with policy crises, and their aftermath, may facilitate learning and change and contribute to overcoming the governmental inertia and political dynamics which often inhibit learning under ‘normal’ conditions. For example, it is argued that the experience of crises may contribute to a posture of cognitive openness conducive to individual and collective learning. Crisis experiences tend to re-order the political agenda, stimulate an appetite for change and reform on the part of the electorate and the mass media and, thus, create moments of political possibility, ‘policy windows’ (Kingdon, 1984), which create opportunities for agile reformers before they close. A ‘balance-sheet’ approach is used in order to examine the plausibility of the crisis-learning hypothesis. This entails posing twin questions. First, what are the characteristics of crisis situations (or political systems which have experienced crises) likely to promote governmental learning? Secondly, what are the characteristics of crisis situations (or political systems which have experienced crises) likely to create obstacles to learning? Some preliminary thoughts on how to go about conducting empirical research in this area, and some reflections upon the results of the conceptual analysis, are presented in the last two sections of the article.     

ON THE ACCURACY OF INSPECTORS

Reasons for inspector inaccuracy have been examined in three main groups: reasons of basic individual abilities; of formal organization (training, instructions, physical conditions, the lay-out of the job); and of interpersonal relations and social relations. Without denying the importance of the basic individual abilities of inspectors, which must set the ultimate limits of accuracy, it seems that the actual limits in a working situation are set by the other two groups of reasons. These practical limits may be well inside the limits set by basic psychological and physiological functions. For example, given an inspector who is well equipped with the basic abilities and aptitudes for the actual inspection task itself, he cannot operate more accurately than his instructions, for instance, allow him to. Moreover, even if well selected, well trained and well briefed, he still can be no more accurate than the pressures of interpersonal and other social relations permit. These interpersonal relations do not necessarily make him pass work that should be failed; they may also make him fail work that should be passed. Conversely, the production man will be more eager to ‘ get products past ’, to trick the inspector, when he does not‘ sanction ’ the inspector. This may in turn make the inspector reject more of the work of the man who tries to trick him than is actually bad. These interpersonal and social relations become all the more important when the inspection task is the more ‘ socio-technical ’—involving direct interaction with production.

It seems that when relations between production and inspection are poor. when production feel they can not sanction the inspectors and/or their standards, and when inspection chooses to play its role in a dominant, authoritative, and essentially invidious way. rather than as finding neutral facts, then not only will inspector accuracy be adversely affected, but there will also be strong pressures against inspection supervisors testing their inspector's accuracy.

Although the obvious man to check inspector accuracy is the inspector's own supervisor, there are powerful pressures against his doing this,Not only are there practical difficulties, but also there is the fact that inspection supervisors, and others, tend to become ‘ product-bound ’, even to the neglect of their true supervisory duties. Moreover, the pressures of interdepartmental relations encourage inspection supervisors to see themselves first as inspectors, and only secondarily as supervisors.

The general conclusion is that inspector accuracy, in a working situation, is determined by a wide range of factors. Problems of inaccuracy must then be studied in a wider context than is given by any single approach.