Fiscal Policy Design in Greece in the Aftermath of the Crisis: An Algorithmic Approach

We present a computational approach to the design of fiscal policy that is based on algorithmic, linear feedback control methods. In particular, in the context of a linear, deterministic macro-model, we develop an algorithmic procedure which allows us to design fiscal policy rules for government expenditures so that desired target-levels for GDP are exactly met (that is, complete tracking is achieved). In order to examine the effectiveness of our method we estimate the model for the Greek economy and run some counterfactual policy experiments. These experiments indicate that, for the Greek economy in the beginning of the crisis in early 2010, expansionary fiscal policy would have been able to stimulate growth and reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio.     

Organizational Networks in Times of Crisis: Lessons from Katrina

The purpose of this study was to examine how well organizations that could have potentially aided in the response to Hurricane Katrina were integrated into the relief effort following the disaster using a social network analysis framework. It was hypothesized that a number of organizations were kept isolated from or peripheral to mitigation efforts. Quantitative content analysis of media reports and government documents was performed to test this hypothesis, which was confirmed. The results of this study suggest that if relief efforts are to be more successful in the future, organizations with valuable resources must be included in the interorganizational networks of responders before and immediately after disasters take place.     

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.     

Social Aftermath and Organizational Response to a Major Disaster: The Case of the 1995 Sakhalin Earthquake in Russia

This paper explores the social consequences, and the main characteristics, of organizational response to one of the worst earthquake disasters in world history that struck Sakhalin Island, in the Far East of Russia, in Spring 1995, completely destroying one of its communities. The paper explores and uses the generic response model as an analytical framework. This model is applied to a concrete case study and the specific social environment of Russia.     

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.     

Organizational Adaptation in Multi‐Stakeholder Crisis Response: An Experimental Study

Modern day crises demand organizations to collaborate and adapt to new roles, functions and structures. In such situations, lack of collaborative behaviour and openness between organizations can result in reduced adaptive ability. Therefore, it is important to facilitate collaboration between organizations. We have studied the extent to which crisis managers are prepared to work with personnel and resources from organizations other than their own when responding to crises. An experiment was designed with four different organizations in Sweden, which involved decision making concerning whether the participants systematically favoured their own organization over others. Findings indicate that increasing familiarity and expectation of future cooperation with other organizations increased the likelihood that decision makers would be prepared to work with other organizations in joint crisis management.     

The Potential Contribution of the Field of Organizational Development to Crisis Management

This paper explores the possibilities of cross‐disciplinarity between organization development and crisis management. The departure point of our reflection is that crisis management as a field currently faces two limitations. First, two major trends have characterized this field to date: the sociological analysis of organizational contingencies which focus on disasters as social events and the crisis management planning which emphasizes the development of techniques to master hazards. Despite what we have learned from these approaches, neither seems to lead to a crisis management learning model that fosters organizational resilience in coping with crises. Second, researchers have studied a number of events as single case studies but have not synthesized these case studies. Consequently, each crisis seems idiosyncratic and administrators tend to repeat the same inefficient patterns when a crisis occurs. The research proposal presented in this paper aims to remove these limitations by bringing together two apparently opposing fields of study, that of crisis management, characterized by what are perceived as specific events, and that of organizational development, characterized by the strengthening of organizations' capacities to cope with lasting changes. This paper proposes to explore their potential to work together theoretically and empirically through a research design. We conclude on how this proposal meets the challenges of a new research agenda in the 21st century.     

Small Business in the Face of Crisis: Identifying Barriers to Recovery from a Natural Disaster1

The crisis management literature has not dealt in depth with small business response to disasters. This study takes a qualitative approach to consider how small businesses respond to and recover from a large disaster, by interviewing stakeholders in five different communities in the Gulf Coast of the United States. Events that are considered to be crises in nature are usually characterized by high consequence, low probability, ambiguity, and decision making time pressure. Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath caused small business owners in the U.S. Gulf region to experience each of these. Findings include lack of planning by small business; vulnerability to cash flow interruption; lack of access to capital for recovery; problems caused by federal assistance; and serious infrastructure problems impeding recovery.     

In Face on Facebook: Brooklyn's Drag Community and Sociotechnical Practices of Online Communication

Recently, Brooklyn has seen an explosion of drag culture, with dozens of performers taking the stage in any given week. Social media plays a vital role for members of this community, simultaneously allowing self‐promotion and community solidarity. Drawing on focus group interviews, we analyze the communication practices of Brooklyn's drag performers, examining both the advantages and drawbacks of social media platforms. Using conceptual frameworks of faceted identity and relational labor, our discussion focuses on affordances and constraints of multifaceted identity in online contexts and theories of seamful design. We contend that by analyzing online communication practices of drag performers, it becomes possible to identify gaps between embedded ideologies of mainstream social media technologies and the localized values of outsider communities.     

Crisis Communication in Public Organisations: Dimensions of Crisis Communication Revisited

Research on crisis communication has traditionally focused on private organisations' reputation and blame avoidance strategies. As a result, there is limited knowledge on crisis communication from the perspective of public organisations. This is troublesome as public organisations have substantial responsibilities for preparing, communicating and managing large‐scale crisis events. In order to be able to better conceptualise public organisations' crisis communication, a typology based on communication aims and orientations is introduced. According to the typology, public organisations engage in two dimensions of crisis communication: reputation‐oriented vs. resilience‐oriented and strategic vs. operational. These dimensions are illustrated and discussed by empirical examples from the Queensland floods of 2010/2011. The paper ends with a discussion on how to understand these dimensions of crisis communication in relation to public organisations' priorities, processes and practices.     

Expressing checkable properties of dynamic systems: the Bandera Specification Language

Research on how to reason about correctness properties of software systems using model checking is advancing rapidly. Work on extracting finite-state models from program source code and on abstracting those models is focused on enabling the tractable checking of program properties such as freedom from deadlock and assertion violations. For the most part, the problem of specifying more general program properties has not been considered. In this paper, we report on the support for specifying properties of dynamic multi-threaded Java programs that we have built into the Bandera system. Bandera extracts finite-state models, in the input format of several existing model checkers, from Java code based on the property to be checked. The Bandera Specification Language (BSL) provides a language for defining general assertions and pre/post conditions on methods. It also supports the definition of observations that can be made of the state of program objects and the incorporation of those observations as predicates that can be instantiated in the scope of object quantifiers and used in describing common forms of state/event sequencing properties. We illustrate how BSL can be used to formulate a variety of system correctness properties for several multi-threaded Java applications. Published online: 2 October 2002     

Organizational Memory as Objects, Processes, and Trajectories: An Examination of Organizational Memory in Use

For proper knowledge management, organizations must consider how knowledge is kept and reused. The term organizational memory is due for an overhaul. Memory appears to be everywhere in organizations; yet, the term has been limited to only a few uses. Based on an ethnographic study of a telephone hotline group, this paper presents a micro-level, distributed cognition analysis of two hotline calls, the work activity surrounding the calls, and the memory used in the work activity. Drawing on the work of Star, Hutchins, and Strauss, the paper focuses on issues of applying past information for current use. Our work extends Strauss' and Hutchins' trajectories to get at the understanding of potential future use by participants and its role in current information storage. We also note the simultaneously shared provenance and governance of multiple memories – human and technical. This analysis and the theoretical framework we construct should be to be useful in further efforts in describing and analyzing organizational memory within the context of knowledge management efforts.     

Expressing aspectual interactions in design: evaluating three AOM approaches in the slot machine domain

In the context of an industrial project, we evaluated the implementation of the software of a casino slot machine. This software has a significant amount of crosscutting concerns that depend on and interact with each other as well as with the modular concerns. We therefore wished to express our design using an appropriate aspect-oriented modeling approach. We therefore evaluated three candidate methodologies: Theme/UML, WEAVR, and RAM to establish their suitability. Remarkably, only the last of the three has shown to allow an adequate expression of the interactions, albeit not fully explicit. The first two fall short because half of the interaction types cannot be expressed at all while the other half need to be expressed using a work-around that hides the intention of the design. Neither does RAM allow a fully explicit expression of interactions, but it would be the most adequate approach for the slot machine case.     

Don't hang up: Organizational diffusion of the intelligent telephone

This paper analyzes an effort to introduce an “intelligent” or “enhanced” PBS telephone system at two separate office complexes within the same Fortune 500 firm. The effort to diffuse this communication technology officially succeeded at the one site and failed at the other site.This paradox presented an opportunity to study both successful and unsuccessful implementation of a new communications technology within a single organization. It also provided an opportunity to test the adequacy of traditional diffusion theory for explaining the rejection of an innovation. In particular, diffusion theory does not emphasize political or symbolic forces in organizations, or the disjuncture between the organization and the end user as adopters.Results from case study interviews and multivariate analyses suggest the following:

• 1.1.The attributes of the innovation did not discriminate between the success and failure building, or among the number of system functions used.
• 2.2.The number of enhanced telephone functions used (as a measure of level of adoption) is very slightly associated in the success building with increased phone traffic and usefulness, but is not associated in the failure building with any perceived impacts.
• 3.3.Technical factors interacted with political factors in preventing a successful adoption.
• 4.4.The relationships of attitudes and use of the telephone to perceive impacts and number of functions used differed by organizational role - management, technical staff, and administrative personnel.
• 5.5.Criteria for success and failure may differ at the organizational level and at the user level.We would like to acknowledge the assistance, support and information provided by the organization and respondents who made this study possible. We also thank Dr. Robert W. Hodge and Dr. Bob Meadow and anonymous reviewers for their comments.