Co‐evolving supportive networks and perceived community resilience across disaster‐damaged areas after the Great East Japan Earthquake: Selection,influence, or both?

After the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in March 2011, the new community currency experiment for supporting disaster recovery, Fukkou Ouen Chiiki Tsuka, was introduced by community‐based organizations in these earthquake‐damaged areas. However, little is known about how perceived community resilience coevolves with interactions in the disaster recovery process. Using Simultaneous Investigation for Empirical Network Analysis techniques, this study shows the coevolutionary dynamics between perceptions of community resilience and the formation of supportive links among residents through a community currency (“Domo”) in Kamaishi. This study also provides policy implications for how mutual reinforcement between community residents’ engagement in network establishments and building a sense of community resilience among those affected functions as a potential mechanism for facilitating disaster recovery.     

Does social capital pay off? The case of small business resilience after Hurricane Katrina

This article uses objective and subjective measures of small business resilience and multiple categories of social capital pay‐offs to answer two main questions. Does social capital pay off after a natural disaster; and if it does, what type of social capital has the greatest impact on small business resilience? The pay‐off from bridging social capital—receiving support from the community—is what drives both objective and subjective resilience post‐Katrina. The results also show linking capital—support from institutions—can improve economic resilience. Our results provide evidence social capital is a key asset for long‐term resilience for small businesses. Business owners with links to the community and institutions—with more social capital—will be better off when facing a natural disaster.     

Development and validation of a crisis self‐efficacy index

This study develops a crisis self‐efficacy index to provide a tool for crisis communication researchers and practitioners to understand behavioural aspects of crisis response better. Evaluations of public's crisis self‐efficacy using this index inform strategic message development to protect the public and minimize crisis damages by identifying the public/s most in need of self‐efficacy enhancing interventions. The index also provides practitioners a useful longitudinal index to evaluate progress in crisis preparedness programs and track changes in efficacy. A four‐stage survey index development process using structural equation modelling identifies four underlying constructs of crisis self‐efficacy: action, preventive, achievement and uncertainty management.     

Resilient employees are creative employees,when the workplace forces them to be

With a basis in conservation of resources theory, this article considers the connection between employees' resilience and disruptive creative behaviour—conceptualized herein as the extent to which they generate radically new ideas for organizational improvement—as well as how this connection might be invigorated by resource‐draining work conditions that stem from excessive workloads and unfavourable decision‐making processes. Data collected through a survey administered to employees in an organization that operates in the distribution sector reveal that employees' resilience levels spur their disruptive creative behaviour, and this process is more prominent among employees who believe they have insufficient time to complete their work tasks (i.e., suffer from high work overload) and operate in organizational climates marked by high rigidity or dysfunctional politics. The findings accordingly inform organizational practitioners that the allocation of employees' personal resource bases to disruptive creative behaviours might be particularly useful among employees who face substantial adversity in their organizational functioning.     

'The perfect is the enemy of the good' - ergonomics research and practice. Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors Annual Lecture 2010

The relationship between research and practice in ergonomics and human factors has rarely been addressed in the literature. This presents specific problems for researchers when seeking to relate their work to the research community. Equally, practitioners are often frustrated by the lack of appropriate research to meet their needs. This paper seeks to identify current drivers for ergonomics research along with an analysis of how these are changing. Specifically, the use of bibliometric data to assess research output and its impact on a multi-disciplinary subject such as ergonomics is examined. Areas where action may be required to stimulate better research and improved practice are proposed. These include a greater role for the practitioner in completing the circle of knowledge and improving the evidence base for practice with, in particular, practitioners becoming more active in determining research priorities. It is concluded that combined effort is needed by researcher and practitioner communities to enable and promote a more effective understanding of the true impact of ergonomics across industry and society. STATEMENT OF RELEVANCE: The relationship between ergonomics research and practice is examined. Research 'drivers' are identified, including the influence of bibliometric data. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed. The role of practitioners in completing the circle of knowledge and improving the ergonomics evidence base is stressed, as is the need to promote the impact of ergonomics across society.     

Two sides of the same coin: Business resilience and community resilience

The resilience of small businesses and how that relates to community resilience, especially in rural communities has remained an under‐researched aspect of community resilience. This exploratory study aims to understand the relationship between business resilience and community resilience in rural communities. Firstly, the research seeks to understand the role that small businesses play in contributing to community resilience activities. The paper then sheds light on enabling and challenging factors that shape how small businesses prepare for and respond to weather‐related emergencies through the lens of flooding. Data were collected through in‐depth semi‐structured interviews and surveys with rural small businesses in Scotland. The analysis of the data suggests that businesses play an advisory and advocacy roles, make financial and material contributions to local community resilience activities and contribute to quick community recovery through various dimensions of corporate social responsibility activities. However, small businesses face formidable barriers and challenges in preparing for and responding to weather‐related emergencies that undermine their resilience to natural hazards. The paper suggests ways in which small businesses can enhance their resilience to natural hazards, while at the same time contributing to community resilience.     

Analyzing of research patterns based on a temporal tracking and assessing model

Scientific research works conducted by researchers spread all over the world in every research field, which are hard to be tracked and quantified. Although there are many research works focused on scientific community discovery and researcher profiling, it is still a big challenge to track the research patterns and assess the research development for an individual researcher or a research group over time. In this study, we seek to model researchers’ scientific activities and quantify their outcome during their research career. A temporal tracking and assessing model is introduced to represent the research development and quantify the scientific outcome for both an individual and a group along the time. Based on our model, a research topic analyzing approach is developed to extract the topics covered by a research group for the research pattern analysis. Furthermore, a latent research pattern discovering approach is proposed to depict how a research group’s research works contributed by its members are discovered and visualized. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated based on a real academic dataset.     

Community resilience and flooding in UK guidance: A critical review of concepts,definitions, and their implications

Community resilience is one of the main strategies that UK governments employ to deal with the impact of floods. In this paper, we analyse how community resilience is used in 28 UK guidance documents that refer to floods and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of different conceptualizations. We show that some documents represent community resilience as the absence of illness, as the opposite of vulnerability, as a static and unchanging element, or in a circular way as both a cause and an outcome. By contrast, some documents avoid generalizations and focus more specifically on the concept's behavioural, relational, cognitive, and psychological aspects. We discuss the implications of different conceptualizations of community resilience for its operationalization by policymakers and practitioners.     

Patterns as a paradigm for theory in community-based learning

Learning about information technology is typically not a first-order goal for community-based volunteer organizations. Nonetheless, information technology is vital to such groups for member recruiting and management, communication and visibility to the community, and for primary group activities. During the past 12 years, we have worked with community groups in Centre County, Pennsylvania, and Montgomery County, Virginia. We have built partnerships with these groups to better understand and address their learning challenges with respect to information technology. In this paper, we suggest that patterns, standard solution schemata for recurring problems (as used in architecture and software engineering, among other design domains), can be a paradigm for codifying and developing an understanding of learning in and by community organizations. Patterns are middle-level abstractions; they capture regularities of practices in ways that are potentially intelligible, verifiable, and perhaps useful to the practitioners themselves. We present two example patterns and discuss issues and directions for developing patterns as a theoretical foundation for community-based learning.     

Are we ready for cyberterrorist attacks?—Examining the role of individual resilience

This study measures individual resilience to cyberterrorist attacks on financial systems and explores the antecedents of resilience. The research model integrates the resilience literature with the fear appraisal literature to address individuals’ fears of cyberterrorist attacks on financial systems. The model is tested using data collected through an online survey. The results show that (1) community support and family financial management significantly increase resilience toward cyberterrorist attacks, and (2) resilience to and fear of cyberterrorist attacks significantly influence individuals’ behaviors in handling their finances. This research helps IT practitioners to develop strategies to build cyber resilience capacities among individuals and communities.     

ResearchGate: An effective altmetric indicator for active researchers?

As research performance becomes increasingly important for academic institutions in competition for rankings, student recruitment, and funding, many performance indicators have been developed to measure various aspects of research performance. ResearchGate combines bibliometrics and altmetrics to create a more comprehensive performance measure for researchers and institutions. The ResearchGate score, the flagship indicator calculated by an undisclosed algorithm, is a metric that measure scientific reputation. In this research, ResearchGate metrics are firstly compared with those that Research Excellence Framework (REF) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings to assess the quality of UK universities and global universities respectively. This study then utilizes correlation analysis to examine whether ResearchGate metrics demonstrate effectiveness on the researcher level in comparison with SciVal metrics. For this research, 300 ResearchGate members from the supply chain management field were selected. The results provide empirical evidence that demonstrate that the ResearchGate score can be an effective indicator for measuring individual researcher performance.     

Individual perceptions of community resilience following the 2011 Joplin tornado

Approximately 6–7 months after the deadliest tornado in the United States since 1947, we conducted a RDD telephone survey of Joplin residents (N = 380) to examine perceptions of community resilience (CR). We found that participants had positive perceptions of the resilience of their community after this major disaster. Older participants were more likely to perceive the community to be resilient than younger participants. More tornado experience was related to lower perceptions of CR. More use of traditional media (television and newspapers) for tornado information and more conversation with friends, family and neighbours about the tornado was associated with higher CR perceptions. Overall, mediated and interpersonal communication processes appear important for fostering CR following a major disaster.     

Conceptualising the link between information systems and resilience: A developing country field study

Resilience—the ability of systems to cope with external shocks and trends—is a topic of increasing interest to research and practice. That growing interest is reflected within information systems (IS), but a structured review of IS literature shows a number of knowledge gaps around the conceptual and empirical application of resilience. This paper investigates what the subdiscipline of information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) can contribute; finding that it offers the IS discipline fresh insights that can be built into a new framework of resilience, and an arena within which this new framework can appropriately be field tested. Application of the resilience framework was undertaken through interviews and a survey in an urban community in Costa Rica; benchmarking both community resilience and “e‐resilience” (understood here as the contribution of ICTs to community resilience), and developing from these a set of action priorities. The paper reflects on what can be learned generally from this conceptualisation and operationalisation of resilience. It also reflects on what ICTs contribute to resilience in developing countries and on what this ICT4D‐based research specifically contributes to the identified IS knowledge gaps. This includes identification of a future research agenda on information systems and resilience.     

交通网络弹复度与易碎度的测算与分析

弹复性是系统在失效或被破坏之后能够恢复正常工作的能力.弹复性工程是当今国际上研究的热点.本文提出了基于节点对间的独立路径可靠度和交通网络的弹复度的定量测算方法,提出了反映节点和路段对交通网络影响大小的易碎性的概念和测算方法.论文还就弹复度和易碎度的几个相关性质提出了几个重要定理.针对我国的铁路网络,计算了所有节点城市和路段的弹复度和易碎度,并对弹复度和易碎度高的节点的分布规律进行了探讨,得出了一些有益的结论.     

User Needs Analysis and requirements engineering: Theory and practice

Several comprehensive User Centred Design methodologies have been published in the last decade, but while they all focus on users, they disagree on exactly what activities should take place during the User Needs Analysis, what the end products of a User Needs Analysis should cover, how User Needs Analysis findings should be presented, and how these should be documented and communicated. This paper highlights issues in different stages of the User Needs Analysis that appear to cause considerable confusion among researchers and practitioners. It is our hope that the User-Centred Design community may begin to address these issues systematically. A case study is presented reporting a User Needs Analysis methodology and process as well as the user interface design of an application supporting communication among first responders in a major disaster. It illustrates some of the differences between the User-Centred Design and the Requirements Engineering communities and shows how and where User-Centred Design and Requirements Engineering methodologies should be integrated, or at least aligned, to avoid some of the problems practitioners face during the User Needs Analysis.     

Characterizing multi-event disaster resilience

This paper presents an approach for providing a quantitative measure of resilience in the presence of multiple related disaster events. It extends the concepts of the resilience triangle and predicted disaster resilience by considering the tradeoffs between multiple criteria for each individual sub-event, as well as for an entire multi-event situation. The focus of the research is on sudden-onset disasters, and on the initial impact of each sub-event as well as the amount of time available to work towards recovery of the system before the next sub-event occurs. A mathematical model is developed for the new resilience measure, along with an approach for graphically representing the relationships between the different criteria. An example is then provided of using the new approach to compare the relative resilience of different scenarios under a representative multi-event disaster situation. The results demonstrate that characterizing multi-event resilience analytically can ultimately provide a great depth of information and thus support better disaster planning and mitigation.     

Strategies to enhance employee well‐being and organisational performance in a postcrisis environment: A case study

Business Continuity Management processes aim at getting businesses backup and running after a crisis or disaster, but do not necessarily have a focus on the longer‐term, people‐related challenges that can follow. This study, based on a longitudinal, action‐research case study, demonstrates how employee well‐being and organisational performance of an organisation were affected over 2 years after the Canterbury earthquakes (2010–2011), in New Zealand. It details the organisational actions taken to improve staff resilience and well‐being, and their performance, including: acknowledgement, increased autonomy, process flexibility, and focus on well‐being. These lessons are presented to guide organisational strategies for crisis recovery. The strategies can strengthen organisations’ adaptive capacity and increase performance in the long‐term aftermath of a disaster.     

Measuring Resilience Potential: An Adaptive Strategy for Organizational Crisis Planning

There are questions as to whether a causal relationship exists between crisis planning and effective adaptive behaviors in crisis. Traditional planning has viewed the crisis plan as an outcome of a process to be utilized in a step‐by‐step fashion during a crisis. This article challenges this orthodox view and suggests a new paradigm, one that focuses on creating organizational structures and processes that build organizational resilience potential. The objective is to develop a scale to measure latent resilience in organizations. This exploratory research begins to build a critical foundation of knowledge with which to consider whether a move towards a new paradigm in disaster planning – one based on building organizational resilience potential – should be the focus of future research.     

Public–Private Partnerships for the Development of Disaster Resilient Communities

Increasingly, countries around the world are adopting policies that emphasize the importance of partnerships for disaster resilience. The overarching questions that this paper investigates are how to form and sustain (1) effective collaborative arrangements involving governments, businesses, non‐governmental organizations and communities to ensure development of disaster resilient communities, and (2) governance institutions that can effectively mobilize geographically dispersed disaster response resources with fragmented ownership. We have reviewed case studies of alternative inter‐sectoral collaborative arrangements that were formed to (1) promote the development of resilient communities and critical physical and social systems; (2) mitigate or respond to emerging crises; or (3) facilitate post‐disaster recovery and learning. We have developed grounded propositions articulating the antecedents of performance of inter‐sectoral collaborative arrangements.