Transboundary crisis management under the volcano: The case of the Icelandic ash cloud

This paper discusses the intricacies of external transboundary crises, namely those cross‐border threats whose management requires coordination among EU and non‐EU countries. Specifically, it explores the extent to which European integration theories shed light on the coordination of external transboundary crisis responses by assessing the weight and role of the actor constellations involved in the civil aviation response to the 2010 Icelandic ash cloud crisis. The use of social network analysis as a methodological tool generates novel empirical evidence on the configuration of crisis management structures. The analysis shows that many EU Member States led decision‐making, whereas supranational organizations were instrumental in the coordination of the ash cloud crisis response. The centrality of these bodies contrasts with the peripheral position of most interest groups. This paper also suggests that external transboundary crises present complex management dynamics that distinguish them from generic transboundary threats. For example, the response to the ash cloud crisis was not commanded by the European Economic Area/European Free Trade Association countries where its epicentre was located. The empirical analysis was based on information extracted from a survey to experts involved in the management of this episode, as well as from ten semi‐structured elite interviews.     

The Transboundary Crisis: Why we are unprepared and the road ahead

Modern societies rely on complex technological systems that are deeply intertwined with other complex systems that stretch across geographical, judicial and administrative borders. When threats emanate from this transboundary space, national governments are often surprised and discover that existing crisis management arrangements do not suffice. This article describes the political and administrative challenges that accompany transboundary crises. It argues that arrangements and processes that work reasonably well for “bounded” crises are unlikely to work in the case of transboundary crises. It formulates an agenda for political debate and academic research. The bottom line is that we need to rethink traditional crisis management arrangements in order to prepare for these increasingly common type of threats.     

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.     

Lessons from the MH17 transboundary disaster investigation

Transboundary crises, incidents and disasters, such as chemical spills, airplane crashes and critical infrastructure breakdowns, involving multiple levels and domains of governance pose a particular set of challenges. These challenges also pertain to the investigation and learning phase of a crisis. We study a typical transboundary case: the crash of a Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17), with 298 people on board from a variety of nationalities but the majority from the Netherlands, that crashed in Ukraine in a conflict zone near the Russian border. The MH17 case contains valuable lessons on transboundary disaster investigations. The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) took the lead of the international independent investigation into the causes of the crash. With an international group of stakeholders, the DSB investigated a crash that resulted from a bilateral conflict, requiring the support from Ukraine's powerful neighbour Russia that meanwhile stood accused of withholding evidence and supporting Ukrainian separatists. Retrieving evidence and researching the causality of the crash was no easy task. If countries wish to follow their ambition to learn from accidents in order to “prevent the past repeated,” they may more often need to investigate such transboundary cases. This case study probes into how challenges that are typical to transboundary crises affected the accident investigation into the MH17 disaster. We search for lessons on transboundary accident investigation that transcend the boundaries of this single case. Such lessons may prove invaluable for learning from future accidents.     

On the concept of decentralization/centralization and its consequences for the design of production management systems

Decentralization and centralization are fundamental principles of organizational structuring. Work distribution and coordination can only be balanced by simultaneous centralization and decentralization. A distinct relation exists between decentralization and integration, the latter being the result of differentiation of integrational fields as part of a data processing subsystem.     

Contingent coordination in crisis: Experiences of Qingdao control command in governing COVID-19 in China

Coordination is one of the most challenging crisis management issues governments face worldwide. In this contribution, we examine the coordination mechanism applied by Qingdao control command in China to fight against COVID-19. Its coordination is implemented contingently via five different approaches: achieving compromises through a centralized tiered meeting system, developing standard operating procedures through issuing documents, encouraging pragmatic problem-solving through improvisation, establishing routines through finding shortcuts, and following commands and suggestions from higher-up. Two perspectives, the structural-institutional and cultural perspectives, have been applied to explain the choice of the contingent coordination mechanism. Our study contributes to the existing crisis coordination literature through substantiating the approaches underlying contingent coordination and providing a preliminary explanation of it.     

The role of IT in crisis response: Lessons from the SARS and Asian Tsunami disasters

Research on crisis management recognizes the important role of information although few studies of crisis response deal explicitly with information systems. In this paper, we present a case study of Singapore’s response to the SARS and Asian Tsunami disasters. Using the resource-based view of the firm as our theoretical lens, we examine three research questions: what IS resources are needed in crisis response, how are these IS resources bundled with other non-IS resources, and how are they effectively coordinated? Our analysis of the case suggests that existing assets such as information technology infrastructure, leadership, and collaborative networks and existing capabilities such as the ability to build and apply IT, the ability to recognize signals and the ability to see the big picture are critical during crisis response. The actions taken using these assets and capabilities include informing resolutely, gaining stakeholder commitment and agile mobilizing of people and IT. Our analysis further suggests that coordination mechanisms, namely the crisis response organizational, informational, and IT structures, are important facilitators of the response actions. The resulting framework of resource deployment during crisis response extends the resource based view of the firm into a cooperative setting, aiming to understand the nature of IS resource value in a cooperative context, and considers not just the resources per se, but the means of coordination the resources.     

一个软件服务协同中的信任管理框架设计

Internet-based Web application systems are gradually built as software service coordination systems. In an open, dynamic and collaborative application environment, traditional methods assumed with closeness, centralization and independence are not able to cope with these security problems efficiently. Trust management is a new method for dealing with security issues of open, distributed network application system. However, the traditional policy-based trust management systems have some shortcomings, i.e. complex in policy making, unable to deal with negative se-curity credentials, etc. So, we design a trust management framework in combination with subjective trust model for software service coordination and security decision in Internet environment. This trust management framework has characteristics of operability, reasonability, and flexibility in policy setting.     

Beyond the Crisis Window for Reform: Some Ramifications for Implementation

In the policy literature, crises are often presented as opportunities for reform initiation. Little is known, however, about the effects that crises may have on the implementation of such reform initiatives. This article explores how a crisis may affect the administrative relations between central authorities and field administrations. The crisis impact on central-field relations appears to be twofold. First, a crisis may facilitate, if not induce, the centralization of decision-making processes. Secondly, a crisis may affect the degree of consensus between central authorities and field administrations with regard to problem definitions and preferred solutions. This paper uses a case study of the Dutch prison system to explore the crisis impact on these two dimensions of central-field relations. In this particular case, crisis circumstances did not facilitate a successful implementation of a major policy overhaul. We suggest that crises may offer opportunities for reform implementation, but only under highly restricted conditions. When these conditions are not met, crises may have perverse effects on central-field relations which limit the prospects for the effective implementation of reform.     

Introducing Performativity to Crisis Management Theory: An Illustration from the 2003 French Heat Wave Crisis Response

While current crisis management literature focuses on the necessity of consistent data and shared interpretation to coordinate effectively, contrastingly, this paper highlights the predominating influence of crisis responders' performances on information transmission. Based on an exploratory interpretive analysis of the 2003 French heat wave crisis response, our findings reveal that performances can support immediate reaction and involvement, but can also generate conflicts or misunderstandings that may burden coordination. This work's contribution to the crisis management literature is in threefold. First, we enrich the crisis management literature by proposing performativity as a potential analytical lens for collective action during crisis response. Second, we propose some practical recommendations to improve crisis management training through the application of the concept of performativity. Finally, we propose a critical perspective on tacitly held assumptions in crisis management.     

Software agents for knowledge management: coordination in multi-agent supply chains and auctions

A fundamental question that must be addressed in software agents for knowledge management is coordination in multi-agent systems. The coordination problem is ubiquitous in knowledge management, such as in manufacturing, supply chains, negotiation, and agent-mediated auctions. This paper summarizes several multi-agent systems for knowledge management that have been developed recently by the author and his collaborators to highlight new research directions for multi-agent knowledge management systems. In particular, the paper focuses on three areas of research:

• •Coordination mechanisms in agent-based supply chains. How do we design mechanisms for coordination, information and knowledge sharing in supply chains with self-interested agents? What would be a good coordination mechanism when we have a non-linear structure of the supply chain, such as a pyramid structure? What are the desirable properties for the optimal structure of efficient supply chains in terms of information and knowledge sharing? Will DNA computing be a viable tool for the analysis of agent-based supply chains?
• •Coordination mechanisms in agent-mediated auctions. How do we induce cooperation and coordination among various self-interested agents in agent-mediated auctions? What are the fundamental principles to promote agent cooperation behavior? How do we train agents to learn to cooperate rather than program agents to cooperate? What are the principles of trust building in agent systems?
• •Multi-agent enterprise knowledge management, performance impact and human aspects. Will people use agent-based systems? If so, how do we coordinate agent-based systems with human beings? What would be the impact of agent systems in knowledge management in an information economy?

     

Corporate Governance in the Context of Crises: Towards a Stakeholder Theory of Crisis Management

In this paper, we take a step towards developing a stakeholder theory of crisis management. We argue that, in the context of crises, adopting the principles of a stakeholder model of corporate governance will lead companies to engage more frequently in proactive and/or accommodating crisis management behaviour even if these crisis management behaviours are not perceived to maximize shareholder value. We also propose a mechanism that may explain why the stakeholder model may be associated with more successful crisis management outcomes. We conclude by challenging the efficacy of the shareholder view in crisis and crisis‐like situations, and call for further theoretical and empirical research.     

Open Innovation – The Dutch Treat: Challenges in Thinking in Business Models

This article covers the subject of the practical application of the principles of open innovation in Dutch industry. Open innovation is considered to be the third stage in evolving systems for innovation management. The results of the study showed that innovative Dutch companies have successfully adopted the principles of open innovation regarding open innovation culture and importing mechanisms. Some challenges are found in the use of exporting mechanisms; but the biggest challenges for innovative Dutch companies lie in the flexible and open way of handling their business models.     

Interacting with VDL-based structured icons on crisis map for emergency coordination: Interactive design and experimental demonstration

Accurate and timely information sharing among multiple participants is one of the crucial factors for collaboration in crisis management. The icon-based map was frequently applied as an effective means for crisis interaction and collaboration. However, former studies only regarded the icons as supplementary visualization components during the whole crisis collaboration process. In this paper, the concept of a structured-icon-relied interactive method was proposed to directly integrate all kinds of crisis and coordination information through icons on the crisis map. Moreover, structured icons are supposed to explicitly show the correlation among crisis information and to improve the interactive experience of information search. The effectiveness of this interactive method was verified by a controlled experiment with three sub-tasks for simulated crisis rescue. The results of the experiment showed that the design of the crisis map based on structured icons had a positive impact on collaborative decision-making and crisis interaction. The dynamic characteristics of the structured icon could represent the temporal and spatial attributes of crisis information and enhance users’ crisis coordination ability. The study aims to enrich the theory of crisis information visualization and interaction based on structured iconic representation. In practice, this research could optimize the design of a crisis collaboration system based on the icon as well as the interaction between people, crisis information, and collaborative system, which in turn provides accurate and timely rescue decisions.     

Cultivating a longitudinal learning process through recurring crisis management training exercises in twelve Swedish municipalities

This study illustrates how crisis management capability is developed in series of recurring exercises, rather than in one single exercise. Over one hundred table‐top and role‐playing exercises were performed and evaluated in a longitudinal cross‐case action research study in 12 Swedish municipalities. By consciously adapting training formats, municipalities were lead through three learning phases: obtaining role understanding (phase 1: knowing what to do), developing information management skills (phase 2: knowing how to do it), and mastering self‐reflection in regular time‐outs (phase 3: knowing when and why to do something). This final learning outcome, being able to concurrently execute, evaluate, and reorganize an ongoing crisis management performance, may be the most valuable capability of a crisis management organization when crisis strikes.     

Crisis Management and Corporate Strategy in African Firms: Towards a Contingency Approach

Crisis management logic suggests that preparing for a crisis should be a critical part of organizational strategy. This article aims to explore the difficulties in translating this logic into business practices in the African context. By comparing the application of the three most popular theoretical perspectives used in the field of strategy with the context of African firms, we come to the conclusion that another approach, the contingency perspective, must be integrated in order for African companies to manage small business crises successfully. This study is based on four case studies. It ends with two proposals for future research and practice in crisis management in African firms: (1) introducing a logic of solidarity; and (2) introducing the idea of the ‘palabre’. 1     

POSTMODULAR SYSTEMS: ARCHITECTURAL PRINCIPLES FOR COGNITIVE ROBOTICS

Modular-functional decomposition is a fundamental tenet of computer science. Cognitive robotics, with strong roots in cognitive science and biology,replaces modular-functional decomposition with a more opportunistic approach. Nonetheless, we can extract heuristics with both analytic and synthetic power: architectural principles for postmodular systems. This paper describes three postmodular principles: imagination, shared grounding, and incremental adaptation. It briefly discusses examples of each drawn from existing systems. The paper concludes with an illustration of these three principles used in concert to build a system that progresses first to hand-eye coordination, then to planned complex reaching, and finally to shared attention.     

What Factors Drive Organizational Learning From Crisis? Insights From the Dutch Food Safety Services’ Response to Four Veterinary Crises

Although organizational learning has been studied extensively, empirical studies in relation to crises and theory building have remained scarce. This study explored what factors affect the learning process from crises of a public sector organization. We studied the responses of the Dutch food safety services (NVWA) to the veterinary crises classical swine fever (1997–1998), foot‐and‐mouth disease (2001), avian influenza (2003) and Q fever (2007–2010). Data from in‐depth interviews with key experts in the organization and from crisis management documents pointed to political–economic context, social–emotional understanding, organizational structure, organizational culture, crisis management stage and organizational forgetting as key factors. Remarkably, postcrisis evaluation reports, leadership and a shared sense‐making of what lessons to learn were not found to play a central role.     

An open-book watershed model for prototyping space-borne flood monitoring systems in International River Basins

A new era involving both simple and complex hydrologic modeling of un-gauged river basins may now emerge with the anticipated global availability of high resolution satellite rainfall data from the proposed Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission. This era of application pertains to rapid prototyping of GPM-based flood monitoring systems for downstream nations in International River Basins (IRBs) where basin-wide in-situ rainfall data is unavailable due to lack of either an infrastructure or a treaty for real-time data sharing with upstream riparian nations. In this paper, we develop, verify and apply an open-book watershed model for demonstrating the value of a parsimonious modeling scheme in quick prototyping of satellite rainfall-based flood monitoring systems for lowermost nations in flood-prone IRBs. The open-book watershed modeling concept was first formulated by Yen and Chow [1969. A laboratory study of surface runoff due to moving rainstorms. Water Resources Research 5(5), 989–1006] more than 30 years ago as a convenient and pragmatic framework to understand the underlying physics behind surface hydrologic phenomena. Our developed model is based on first principles of conservation of mass and momentum that parsimoniously represents the static geophysical features of a basin with minimum calibration. Such a generic and parsimonious representation has the added potential to supplement complex hydrologic models for stakeholder involvement and conflict management in transboundary river basins, among many additional applications. We first demonstrate the physical consistency of our model through sensitivity analysis of some geophysical basin parameters pertinent to the rainfall-runoff transformation. Next, we simulate the stream-flow hydrograph for a 4-month long period using basin-wide radar (WSR-88D) rainfall data over Oklahoma assuming an open-book river basin configuration. Finally, using the radar-simulated hydrograph as the benchmark, and assuming a two-nation hypothetical IRB over Oklahoma, we explored the impact of assimilating NASA's real-time satellite rainfall data (IR-3B41RT) over the upstream nation on the flow monitoring accuracy for the downstream nation. We developed a relationship defining the improvement in flow monitoring that can be expected from assimilating IR-3B41RT over transboundary regions as a function of the relative area occupied by the downstream nation for a semi-arid region. The relative improvement in flow monitoring accuracy for the downstream nation was found to be clearly high (over 35% reduction in root mean squared error) when more than 90% of the basin is transboundary. However, flow monitoring accuracy reduces considerably and even becomes negative when 60% or less of the basin area is transboundary to the downstream nation. Our findings, although hypothetical and very regime-specific, illustrate very clearly the feasibility of utilizing anticipated GPM data to alleviate the current flood monitoring limitations experienced by many nations in IRBs through the application of a generic and parsimonious model.