Managing Crises in the EU: Some Reflections of a Non‐EU Scholar

In recent years the EU has been increasingly involved in development and implementation of crisis policy as a component of its development and security policy. This process is seriously complicated by the EU architects, who had never conceived it as a crisis management institute. Therefore they failed to design built‐in organisational capacities into the Union to mitigate and respond to crises. In addition, the EU‐agreed overarching concept of crisis as such and EU crisis in particular is missing. Both issues remain a primary question on research and policy agendas. Provided below are some of the author's considerations and comments on these issues. It is argued that, despite the existing divergence in crisis interpretations in the EU, coherent conceptualisation is possible and approaches to this are introduced. Practical implications of generic crisis conceptualisation for EU crisis management policy are analysed. Within this context three major lessons from international experience, including that from the USA and Russia, are emphasised. These concern the issues of organisational flexibility, learning from earlier major crises and comprehensive training of crisis decision units critical for efficient crisis management policy.     

Learning from crisis: The role of enquiry commissions

The literature on crisis learning has thus far paid little attention to the institutional channels through which governments draw lessons from crisis events. This paper examines theoretically and empirically a key institutional site for crisis learning: enquiry commissions. The theoretical argument is illustrated by analysing the enquiry commission that examined the 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway. The paper argues that the work of enquiry commissions exhibits tensions that condition the subsequent opportunities of government to learn from crisis. The paper shows how the lessons drawn by the commission investigating the attacks were shaped by the commission's dual function, by the dominant professional perspectives within the group, and by the specific models of decision‐making and assessment standards that the commission adopted.     

Dynamics of Change in the Aftermath of the 2001 UK Foot and Mouth Crisis: Were Lessons Learned?

This article investigates the UK animal health sector in the aftermath of the 2001 foot and mouth crisis. The article draws together perspectives from crisis management, policy and institutional change literatures in order to assess the extent of reforms since the epidemic. Interviews with government officials and parliamentarians and the analyses of official documentation indicate that lessons have been learned and there are successes in many areas; yet, there remains key aspects of crisis management that have yet to change, which leave the government vulnerable in the event of more wide‐scale foot and mouth outbreaks. The results of the study serve to suggest that post‐crisis change research should consider making more explicit links with the institutional literature on change dynamics.     

No Magic Bullets: Privatization's Threat to Urban Public Administration

The privatization movement poses a serious crisis for American urban public administration. It seeks to over-turn the century-old Progressive expansive vision of urban government and to revert many goods and services, now produced publicly, to the private sector. For its precepts and normative policy proposals, privatization relies on Public Choice Theory, a formal, deductive enterprise, itself founded in Adam Smith's 18th century economics. It is this deductive method, not the substance of privatization's proposals, which is so troubling. Public policy and institutional reform must rest on a firm empirical foundation, not on deduction from abstract first principles. In this, the privatizers ought to turn to the pragmatic method of the Progressives that treats public policies and institutional forms as hypotheses to be validated by empirical experminentation and to abandon deductive approaches.     

Fictional institutions and institutional frictions: creative approaches to open GLAMs

Abstract

The shifting participation paradigm for libraries, archives and museums (LAMs) has caused some frictions within institutional contexts. In particular, this article looks at institutional reluctance to the increasing focus on openness and open data in the context of the large-scale portal Europeana as well as wider EU policy. We look at the case study of the fictional archive IICADOM, constructed by the artist and filmmaker Jasper Rigole, as a potential source of inspiration for traditional institutional contexts. We argue that lessons can be learned from the fictional example's digital engagement practice for creative approaches to open (G)LAMs (including galleries), with a focus on the level of openness in terms of licence, attitudes to risk, the strategic choice of interacting with external platforms and fostering creative reuse.     

Codifying a crisis: Progressing from information sharing to distributed decision‐making

A key challenge in crisis management is maintaining an adequate information position to support coherent decision‐making between a range of actors. Such distributed decision‐making is often supported by a common operational picture that not only conveys factual information but also attempts to codify a dynamic and vibrant crisis management process. In this paper, we explain why it is so difficult to move from information sharing towards support for distributed decision‐making. We argue that two key processes need to be considered: supporting both the translation of meaning and the transformation of interests between those on the front line and those in the remote response network. Our analysis compares the information‐sharing processes in three large‐scale emergency response operations in the Netherlands. Results indicate that on several occasions the collaborative decision‐making process was hampered because actors limited themselves to factual information exchange. The decision‐making process only succeeds when actors take steps to resolve their varying interpretations and interests. This insight offers important lessons for improving information management doctrines and for supporting distributed decision‐making processes.     

Privacy calculus model in e-commerce – a study of Italy and the United States

This study examines cross-cultural differences beliefs related to e-commerce use for Italy and the United States. We argue that for both cultures, the user's decision to make an online purchase is simultaneously influenced by a set of contrary factors. These include decision facilitators such as propensity to trust and institutional trust, and decision inhibitors such as perceived risk and privacy concerns. We argue that substantial cultural differences exist that affect the above factors and the relationships among them. We use Hofstede's cultural theory and Fukuyama's theory of trust and social capital, along with emic factors important for the Italian society, to develop the study's propositions. The hypotheses were empirically tested using LISREL structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis. The results revealed that the Italian society exhibited lower propensity to trust, institutional trust, privacy concerns, and higher perceived risk. The relationships between institutional trust and e-commerce use, privacy concerns and e-commerce use, and perceived risk and institutional trust are all weaker for Italy. The relationship between perceived risk and privacy concerns is stronger for Italy. The paper's major contribution is in validating an important model of e-commerce use across two cultures and showing the moderating effects of culture.     

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.     

Economics in integrated water management

Integrated basin scale analysis that accurately accounts for the impacts of proposed policies on the environment and society's economic welfare can comprehensively and consistently inform water resource policies. Cost benefit analysis (CBA) has considerable potential to support water decisions by consistently appraising proposals in terms of society's total environmental and economic impact in monetary terms. However, the difficulty of correctly applying CBA to environmental programs with complex physical and economic interactions weakens policymakers’ confidence in comprehensive economic assessments at the basin scale. This paper describes and illustrates a method by which costs and benefits can be systematically integrated into an integrated physical, institutional and economic analysis for a river basin. A simple hydroeconomic model is presented. Its size is small enough to build, understand, and interpret with paper and pencil. But its structure is sufficiently flexible to permit expansion for comprehensive policy design that rests on a foundation of a basin's hydrology, institutional constraints, and economic relations. The use of cost benefit analysis to support environmental policy will always be limited by ethical questions on the distribution of benefits and costs among sectors, income groups, locations, and generations. Nevertheless, hydroeconomic models offer a potential resource to efficiently and consistently integrate hydrologic, economic, and institutional impacts of policy proposals to support basin scale cost-benefit environmental assessments.     

Crises as Learning Triggers: Exploring a Conceptual Framework of Crisis‐Induced Learning

This article contributes to the debate on organizational learning from crisis by shedding light on the phenomenon of crises as learning triggers. To unveil theoretical patterns of how organizational crisis‐induced learning may appear and develop, I suggest a conceptual framework based on concept categories and answers to four fundamental questions: what lessons are learned (single‐ or double‐loop)?; what is the focus of the lessons (prevention or response)?; when are lessons learned (intra‐ or intercrisis)?; is learning blocked from implementation or carried out (distilled or implemented)? The framework's applicability is explored in a study of how a Swedish utility and the city of Stockholm responded to two large‐scale blackouts in Stockholm. The final sections suggest four propositions for further research.     

A neo-institutional perspective on the establishment of information security knowledge sharing practices

Information security knowledge sharing (ISKS) among an organization's employees is vital to the organization's ability to protect itself from any number of prevalent threats, yet for many organizations, their ability to establish ISKS practices is hampered by a lack of understanding of where and how the key drivers of these practices will emerge. Based on neoinstitutional theory and a multi-study field survey of 834 professional managers in the USA, we develop and test a model that explains the establishment of ISKS practices in an organization as a product of the institutional forces abut to the organization providing normative, mimetic, and coercive influences on top management beliefs and participations in ISKS. Our findings also emphasize the importance of establishing ISKS practices for ensuring employee compliance with information security policies and an effective culture of security. Prior research has shown the importance of institutional forces on organizational processes as well as the importance of ISKS to organizational security efforts. However, this study is one of the early studies to provide insight into the manner, in which institutional forces hold sway over the people responsible for establishing the ISKS practices of a firm; insight that it is essential for firms that have yet to establish such practices or have struggled in their attempts to do so.     

Crisis Crowdsourcing Framework: Designing Strategic Configurations of Crowdsourcing for the Emergency Management Domain

Crowdsourcing is not a new practice but it is a concept that has gained substantial attention during recent disasters. Drawing from previous work in the crisis informatics, disaster sociology, and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) literature, this paper first explains recent conceptualizations of crowdsourcing and how crowdsourcing is a way of leveraging disaster convergence. The CSCW concept of “articulation work” is introduced as an interpretive frame for extracting the salient dimensions of “crisis crowdsourcing.” Then, a series of vignettes are presented to illustrate the evolution of crisis crowdsourcing that spontaneously emerged after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and evolved to more established forms of public engagement during crises. The best practices extracted from the vignettes clarified the efforts to formalize crisis crowdsourcing through the development of innovative interfaces designed to support the articulation work needed to facilitate spontaneous volunteer efforts. Extracting these best practices led to the development of a conceptual framework that unpacks the key dimensions of crisis crowdsourcing. The Crisis Crowdsourcing Framework is a systematic, problem-driven approach to determining the why, who, what, when, where, and how aspects of a crowdsourcing system. The framework also draws attention to the social, technological, organizational, and policy (STOP) interfaces that need to be designed to manage the articulation work involved with reducing the complexity of coordinating across these key dimensions. An example of how to apply the framework to design a crowdsourcing system is offered with a discussion on the implications for applying this framework as well as the limitations of this framework. Innovation is occurring at the social, technological, organizational, and policy interfaces enabling crowdsourcing to be operationalized and integrated into official products and services.     

Understanding the French 2003 Heat Wave Experience: Beyond the heat,a Multi‐Layered Challenge

The 2003 heat wave killed nearly 15,000 people in France. It was a stealth killer. “We did not notice anything”, as the Minister of Health declared to the Parliamentary Commission. It is of crucial importance to understand the keys to this collective failure, which has much in common with the Chicago experience in 1995 –the lessons of which had not been grasped nor learned. A four‐layered challenge explains the fiasco. The emergency challenge, which is not the realm of bureaucracies outside the “9/11” bodies. The crisis management challenge, largely documented since the 80s and the 90s, but still poorly known by most organisations, in France and elsewhere. The unconventional crisis challenge, emerging more and more today with “outside‐of‐the‐box” scenarios – and for which very few are ready to prepare, in any country in the world. The “texture” challenge, when the whole fabric of our complex systems (rather than just some specific segment) is suddenly deeply affected — an entirely new front‐line in the crisis world, which urges to switch from a mechanical or an architectural to a more “biological” approach to read, seize, and handle emerging csrises. The 2003 heat fiasco compels us to prepare for far more than climate‐related crises. It calls for a fresh and bold look at our crisis paradigms. As General Foch said: “Gunfire kills, but so do outdated visions”.     

Understanding the social construction of crises: Comparing the crisis‐as‐claim model with securitization theory

Spector (2019) introduced the crisis‐as‐claim model to analyze the social construction of crises. Securitization theory offers insights that can complement this crisis‐as‐claim model. Both approaches share an interest in the crisis declarations of actors, the motivations behind such claims, and the public's evaluations of crisis claims. In addition, securitization theory helps us to understand how various actors negotiate crisis declarations, how certain practices can constitute a crisis reality, and how crisis perceptions enable the use of exceptional crisis response measures.     

How job satisfaction can influence air traffic controllers' backup‐providing behavior in parallel runway operation

Team members can request and provide backup from one to other members, which can help teams with high workload achieve dynamic workload optimization at the group level. However, studies on this issue are limited, especially on real‐world high‐risk operations. This study explored how to approach air traffic controllers make backup decisions in the dependent parallel approach operation. In this study, we focused on how individual difference factors can influence the controller's backup willingness and decision. Forty licensed controllers performed 32 simulated scenarios varied in their own task load, the backup recipients' task load, and shorter taxing possibility. We also measured their job satisfaction and work experience. Multilevel regression analyses showed that controllers with a higher level of job satisfaction were more likely to provide help to their colleagues. Moreover, when their job satisfaction was high, they were less sensitive to the seemingly inappropriate request, but they only used their additional resources to help others. The findings were discussed in the literature of teamwork and aviation safety.     

Unrecognized crisis management—Normalizing everyday work

The aim of this study was to examine the practices of crisis management adopted by operative staff when facing a crisis situation in their workplace. This research is based on interviews with personnel from social services and staff from homes for unaccompanied youth. The interviewees asked respondents about their actions in caring for young refugees during the refugee situation. The results are structured around three themes: everyday practices, crisis work, and the process of normalization. Three practices for handling the situation—improvisation, prioritization, and creating alternatives—served as crisis management‐as‐practice. The staff members' everyday practice for solving problems became the basic method employed during the crisis to normalize everyday work.     

Defendant Firms and Response to Legal Crises: Effect on Shareholder Value

This paper examines links between institutional responses to legal crises and shareholder valuation. It explores whether the defendant firm's market performance upon the announcement of a filing varies according to the crisis response strategies applied. It also investigates the relationship between the legal issue and the type of crisis response strategy. It examines whether the type of legal issue affects the relationship between the use of crisis response strategies and the firm's performance upon the announcement of a filing. The findings indicate that using nonexistence and distance strategies instead of no response may mitigate negative market response. However, when firms face corporate governance suits, whether or not they implemented crisis response strategies has a significantly negative impact on firm value.     

Citizens' Response Patterns to Warning Messages

This paper elaborates the concept of citizens' crisis‐coping strategies, using data from a qualitative study of people who have experienced a real crisis plus discussions of simulated warning messages. The analysis results suggest that, to emotionally cope with a crisis, citizens may need more than institutionally framed warnings. They may either seek information from informal information networks or simply take their own response action. The paper concludes that the use of alternative sources and channels of warning messages would help people to cope, emotionally and cognitively, with crises. These alternatives would increase the efficacy of institutional crisis communication plans and consequently the public's response to crisis messages.     

The supplier's optimal guarantee policy in newsvendor finance

The retailer is a capital‐constrained newsvendor and can borrow money from the bank if necessary. To help the retailer get a bank loan at a lower interest rate, the supplier provides guarantee for the retailer's loan up to a prespecified amount. In a Stackelberg game, the supplier decides the wholesale price and the guarantee amount as a leader, and then the retailer determines the order quantity and the amount of the loan as a follower. The supplier is risk‐neutral while the retailer's risk preference is reflected by a spectral risk measure (risk‐neutral, risk‐averse, or risk‐seeking). For a given wholesale price and guarantee amount, the retailer's objective function is quasi‐concave in the order quantity. The optimal solutions for the supplier and the retailer are derived. The supplier's expected profit with optimized wholesale price increases with the guarantee amount, and thus the supplier's optimal policy is to provide a full guarantee for the retailer's loan. When the supplier can limit his guarantee responsibility by a proportion of the outstanding loan obligation, the supplier's optimal policy is also to provide a full guarantee. Even if the retailer incurs bankruptcy costs in the event of repayment default, the supplier's optimal guarantee policy remains the same in these two different forms of limited guarantee. However, when the wholesale price is exogenous, that is, not a decision variable, the full guarantee is not necessarily optimal for supplier.