“Damned if you do,damned if you don’t”: Media frames of responsibility and accountability in handling a wildfire

Previous research on media framing of wildfire has chiefly been concerned with the nature of wildfire in the context of climate change and with framing effects on policy and public opinion. Empirical studies on media content, hence what is mediated to crisis managers and the public concerning authorities’ and the public's response, seem to be largely missing. This is remarkable, given that the media represent main sources of information that may influence crisis management and shape public opinion. Thus, the aim of this study was to identify key media frames relating to portrayals of public and authority responses during and after a wildfire crisis. The study is based on media articles from two time periods: immediately after the fire and 1 year later. We used a thematic method of analysis (TA), thus an inductive, “bottom‐up” approach. A core frame, Responsibility/accountability is identified, underpinned by two sub‐themes. One sub‐theme relates to the causes of the fire and its escalation, revealing a number of different interrelated blame frames. The second sub‐theme refers to management of the crisis, reflecting both authorities’ and citizens’ responses. The deficiencies of the former are implicitly suggested to have forced citizens to act to compensate for their inadequacy. The main theoretical contribution is the identification of an interrelationship between frames in relation to different groups of individuals responding to a crisis, pointing to a more complex view of framing effects. In addition, results show how media tend to assess crisis management based on idealistic criteria, inevitably making the evaluation negative. This contributes to an understanding of how media blame frames, thus “blame games,” may unfold. Practical implications of these results are discussed.     

Postpandemic Nightmare: A Framing Analysis of Authorities and Narcolepsy Victims in Swedish Press

The aim of this study was to explore the framing of victims and authorities in Swedish press during the narcolepsy crisis, occurring in the aftermath of the A(H1N1) vaccination campaign. Reporting from five major newspapers was analysed using an inductive and a deductive frame of analysis. The inductive analysis showed that the focus in the reporting on victims was their struggles in everyday life, coping with the disease, while the focus regarding authorities was on criticism and accountability. The deductive analysis revealed the use of a number of framing devices that reinforced the view of victims as vulnerable and authorities as deserving criticism. The underlying significance of the media portrayal and the implications from a crisis communication perspective are discussed.     

Accountability and Control Over Autonomous Weapon Systems: A Framework for Comprehensive Human Oversight

Accountability and responsibility are key concepts in the academic and societal debate on Autonomous Weapon Systems, but these notions are often used as high-level overarching constructs and are not operationalised to be useful in practice. “Meaningful Human Control” is often mentioned as a requirement for the deployment of Autonomous Weapon Systems, but a common definition of what this notion means in practice, and a clear understanding of its relation with responsibility and accountability is also lacking. In this paper, we present a definition of these concepts and describe the relations between accountability, responsibility, control and oversight in order to show how these notions are distinct but also connected. We focus on accountability as a particular form of responsibility—the obligation to explain one’s action to a forum—and we present three ways in which the introduction of Autonomous Weapon Systems may create “accountability gaps”. We propose a Framework for Comprehensive Human Oversight based on an engineering, socio-technical and governance perspective on control. Our main claim is that combining the control mechanisms at technical, socio-technical and governance levels will lead to comprehensive human oversight over Autonomous Weapon Systems which may ensure solid controllability and accountability for the behaviour of Autonomous Weapon Systems. Finally, we give an overview of the military control instruments that are currently used in the Netherlands and show the applicability of the comprehensive human oversight Framework to Autonomous Weapon Systems. Our analysis reveals two main gaps in the current control mechanisms as applied to Autonomous Weapon Systems. We have identified three first options as future work for the design of a control mechanism, one in the technological layer, one in the socio-technical layer and one the governance layer, in order to achieve comprehensive human oversight and ensure accountability over Autonomous Weapon Systems.

     

Corruption,Culture and Transferability: What Can Be Learned From Australia?

The Asian financial crisis is often blamed on ‘corruption’. International banks and aid donors now promote technical assistance and training in corruption prevention, referring to the international best practice of Independent Commissions Against Corruption in Hong Kong or Sydney. However, it is often also argued that what counts as corruption is culturally specific, and that the incidence of petty corruption is related to low salaries. So lessons drawn from corruption prevention in Australia, for example, may not be transferable to other countries with different cultures and levels of income. This paper reflects on the experience of designing and teaching a course on corruption prevention for officials from developing countries in the Asia‐Pacific region. It considers what counts as ‘corruption’, identifies different approaches towards prevention, and draws some conclusions about the transferability of Australian expertise.     

Symbols,Rituals and Power: The Lost Dimensions of Crisis Management

There is a systematic deflation in governmental rhetoric of the developments that call attention to the unequal distribution of goods and services and a systematic inflation of the forms of threat that legitimize and expand authority. The latter are defined as crises, the former as problems. As crises recur and problems persist, so does a governmental dramaturgy of coping. (Edelman, 1977: 49) This article proposes a more power-critical approach to the analysis of crisis management and, in this respect, explores the possible contribution of research on political and organizational symbolism. Viewed in terms of symbolic action, attention is drawn to the opportunity spaces that crises entail for policy makers and other crisis actors. To exploit these, it is important for decision elites to influence collective definitions of the situation in such a way as to highlight preferred courses of action and to selectively obscure alternative interpretations. Three types of symbolic ‘crisis handling devices’ (framing, ritualization and masking) are presented and illustrated. In conclusion, the need for a broader perspective on the nature of the politics of crisis management is emphasised.     

A Schematic View of Crisis Threat Assessment

Given the short time available for decision‐making during a crisis, a schema is considered useful to organizations both for making sense of crisis situations and for developing an effective crisis plan. As an effort to bridge the existing ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ approaches in crisis classification, a schematic view of assessing crisis threats is elaborated in this study and a new instrument for empirical measurement is further developed. The study is based on a triangulated research design. Based on inductive research and a questionnaire survey, we developed a schematic framework using a measuring instrument for assessing crisis threats that has four dimensions: command incompetence, environmental pressure, information ambiguity, and coordination difficulties. Then, a comparative case study was used to justify the schematic framework.     

Accountability in electronic commerce protocols

In most commercial and legal transactions, the ability to hold individuals or organizations accountable for transactions is important. Hence, electronic protocols that implement commercial transactions must be designed to provide adequate accountability assurances for transacting parties. A framework is proposed for the analysis of communication protocols that require accountability, such as those for electronic commerce. This framework can be used to analyze protocol designs to detect accountability (or lack thereof). Arguments are presented to show that a heretofore unexplored property “provability” is pertinent to examining the potential use of communication protocols in the context of litigation, and in the context of audit. A set of postulates which are applicable to the analysis of proofs in general and the proofs of accountability in particular, are proposed. The proposed approach is more natural for the analysis of accountability than the existing belief logics (e.g., M. Burrows et al., 1990) that have been used in the past for the analysis of key distribution protocols. Some recently proposed protocols for electronic commerce and public key delegation are analyzed to illustrate the use of the new analysis framework in detecting (and suggesting remedies for eliminating) their lack of accountability, and in detecting and eliminating redundancies     

一种基于责任域的安全路由体系

为了解决前缀劫持、路由伪造和源地址欺骗问题,设计了一种路由体系——基于责任域的安全路由体系(accountability realm based secure routing architecture,简称Arbra)。首先,提出了自治系统到责任域的映射方法和基于责任域的两级路由结构,责任域是具有独立管理主体的网络,也是 Arbra 网络拓扑的基本元素,因为它为内部用户的网络行为负责,所以称做责任域;其次,建立了基于责任域的路由体系设计框架,主要包括混合寻址方案、核心路由协议、标签映射协议、分组转发流程和公钥管理机制等研究内容;最后,比较了 Arbra 和其他著名路由结构(IPv4/v6,LISP,AIP)的异同,分析了Arbra的安全性、可扩展性、通信性能和部署代价。研究结果表明：(1) Arbra具有的分布式信任模型,不仅有利于抵御前缀劫持、路由伪造和源地址欺骗攻击,而且还给许多其他网络安全问题的解决奠定了基础;(2) Arbra具有优良的可扩展性,路由表的规模较小;(3) Arbra具有合理的通信性能和部署代价。该研究成果可以看做是以网络安全为视角对未来信息网络体系结构的有益探索。     

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.     

Knowledge is Power: Public Attitudes and the Stalling of Pension Reform in Greece

Pension reform delays were a crucial part of the mechanism leading to the Greek crisis of 2009. The reason for these delays was frequently cited as the hostile stance of public opinion to any change in pensions. It is thus important to examine what lay behind these attitudes, and the reasons why these public objections had not been overcome. The international bibliography stresses that attitudes to pensions may be affected by the extent of understanding of pensions and that public opinion may in this way be open to persuasion. However, where there exists cross-subsidisation between occupational groups, selective knowledge may also operate defensively as a means of protecting the status quo. Thus there could be two dimensions of understanding, one helping and the other hindering change. A nation-wide sample undertaken in Greece by the authors in May 2009 attempts to disentangle the two influences, by drawing a distinction between general understanding, and particular awareness of one’s occupational pension situation. An ‘intransigence index’ is subjected to multivariate analysis isolating, inter alia, the two dimensions. As in other countries, greater understanding makes for a more conciliatory attitude. However, in sharp contrast, in Greece particular knowledge encourages more confrontational views, as part of a strategy defending pension privileges. This finding can be used to explain the role pension attitudes and path dependence played in generating the reform impasse which was ultimately responsible for the Greek crisis after 2009.     

Organisational Structure,Culture and Attitudes to Risk in the British Stadia Safety Industry

The history of ‘regulation by crisis’ in the British stadia safety industry has failed to prevent successive disasters and continued near misses. To reduce the risks, there is a need to better understand why the mistakes and misunderstandings leading to such incidents actually occur. Such understanding can be informed by applying cultural theory, a method of cultural classification using ‘grid/group’ analysis and derived from social anthropology. This paper uses cultural theory to analyze ethnography from, and literature relating to, public safety risk management and British stadia disasters. The analysis reveals the conflicting risk perceptions of individualist/entrepreneurial clubs, hierarchical regulators, long-suffering fatalist spectators and their more egalitarian colleagues in supporter and local resident pressure groups. These perceptions are narrow and biased. At a strategic level, there is a need for each constituency to acknowledge the validity of the others' points of view. Increased awareness is a key to disaster prevention. The conclusions drawn should be applicable to wider crisis scenarios where a multiplicity of organisations are involved.     

Fragile halos: Comparing organisational reputation across sectors

Non-profit organisations operate with the advantage of a generally positive social image. Workers and managerial employees of nonprofits are commonly thought of as altruistic, trustworthy and respectable actors who assist their communities. However, the non-profit sector has faced several notable scandals and crises that have tested this positive social image. This paper reports on an analysis of the positive social image, which we call a sector ‘halo’ and its durability in the face of organisational crisis. Based on a sample from Amazon's Mechanical Turk, the analysis confirms the general positive social image of non-profit organisations when compared to their private for-profit and government sector peers, who possess lower levels of trust. However, a survey experiment reveals that given a crisis scenario regarding a data breach incident, the ‘halo’ entirely disappears. Our study improves on the literature regarding trust and organisational reputation and highlights the importance of sector ownership and perceived differences pre- and postcrisis.     

Quantitative analysis of investment allocation over various resources of health care systems by using views of product lines

Hospitals can be viewed as service enterprises, of which the primary function is to provide specific sets of diagnostic and therapeutic medical services to individual patients. Each patient has certain diagnosis and therapeutic attributes in common with some other patients. Thus, patients with similar medical attributes could be ‘processed’ in one ‘product line’ of medical services, and individual treatments for patients within one ‘product line’ can be regarded as incurring identical consumption of health care resources. This article presents a theoretical framing for resource planning and investment allocation of various resources from a macro perspective of costs that demonstrates the need to plan capacity at the disaggregated resource level. The result of a balanced line (‘optimal’) is compared with an alternative scheme of ‘the same ratio composing of resources’ under the same monetary constraints. Thus, it is demonstrated that planning at the disaggregated level affords much better use of resources than achieved in common practice of budget control by simple percentage increase/decrease in distributing a financial vote.     

IA-SDSS: A GIS-based land use decision support system with consideration of carbon sequestration

Land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) can play a positive role in mitigating global warming by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere into vegetation and soils. Local entities (e.g. local government, community, stockholders) have been making great efforts in enhancing carbon sequestration (CS) of local forests for mitigating global climate change and participating in international carbon-trade promoted by the Kyoto Protocol. Approaches and tools are needed to assess the enhancement of CS through land use changes and proper policy decisions. This paper presents an integrated assessment framework and a spatial decision support system (IA-SDSS) as a tool to support land-use planning and local forestry development with consideration of CS. The IA-SDSS integrates two process-based carbon models, a spatial decision (EMDS) module, a spatial cost-benefit analysis (CBA) module, and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) module. It can provide spatially explicit CS information as well as CS-induced economic benefits under various scenarios of the carbon credit market. A case study conducted in Liping County, Guizhou Province, China demonstrated that the IA-SDSS developed in this study is applicable in supporting decision-making on ‘where’ and ‘how’ to adopt forestry land use options in favor of CS.     

Accountability and automation bias

Although generally introduced to guard against human error, automated devices can fundamentally change how people approach their work, which in turn can lead to new and different kinds of error. The present study explored the extent to which errors of omission (failures to respond to system irregularities or events because automated devices fail to detect or indicate them) and commission (when people follow an automated directive despite contradictory information from other more reliable sources of information because they either fail to check or discount that information) can be reduced under conditions of social accountability. Results indicated that making participants accountable for either their overall performance or their decision accuracy led to lower rates of “automation bias”. Errors of omission proved to be the result of cognitive vigilance decrements, whereas errors of commission proved to be the result of a combination of a failure to take into account information and a belief in the superior judgement of automated aids.     

The Collective Framing of Crisis Management: A Ventriloqual Analysis of Emergency Operations Centres

Crises are omnipresent in the organizational world. To face these situations, organizations rely on their crisis management teams to better manage these situations. How do members of these teams succeed or fail to succeed in understanding each other and in collectively framing the crisis situation, when everyone's background differs? Based on an interactional perspective, the current study proposes to respond to this question by analysing a selection of audiovisual excerpts taken from three crisis management exercises conducted in Ontario, Canada. These analyses help describe the role certain figures play in the framing of crisis management. It was found that only when these different preoccupations are articulated, taken into account and negotiated can the framing of the crisis situation evolve collectively.     

A Brief Survey of the Work Being Performed by Crisis Organisations in European Union Member States on Climate Change Effects

The negative effects of climate change are calling for action to mitigate and adapt to future challenges. National crisis management authorities need to prepare to handle crisis caused by direct or indirect effects. In this study, we investigate how crisis management authorities within the European Union prepare for the effects of climate change by conducting a small questionnaire study. The questionnaire used consisted of 12 questions and was answered by 17 counties. Results indicate that most crisis management agencies focus on weather‐related incidents, such as floods, heatwaves and forest fires. Indirect effects are not prepared for to the same extent. The gulf between crisis management and climate adaptation is discussed.     

Repertoires of collaboration: incorporation of social media help requests into the common operating picture

ABSTRACT

Disasters present us with dynamic and emergent multi-stakeholder scenarios. Complex decision-making is supported by Emergency Management Organisation (EMO) ‘command and control’ disaster response systems that if pushed to failure, present problems in the development and monitoring of situational awareness. Nowhere is this more evident than when the general public use social media platforms to report crisis incidents when the official emergency management hotline (e.g. Triple Zero (000) in Australia) is overwhelmed or not available. This causes a number of issues for EMO as it is difficult to verify and determine the accuracy and veracity of social media posts and how to best incorporate the information within them into situational awareness for the assessment of and response to, an emergency incident. This paper analyses interview data from five Australian EMO that outlines and discusses these issues in detail. As a result of this analysis, we suggest that developing a supplementary ‘repertoires of collaboration’ approach to incorporating social media posts into the development of situational awareness during a disaster event, would help improve disaster response outcomes. We then recommend a way forward through the application of the Negotiated Arrangements for the Common Operating Picture (COP) in Extreme Events framework.     

Fostering trust in virtual project teams: Towards a design framework grounded in a TrustWorthiness ANtecedents (TWAN) schema

Several collaboration problems in virtual project teams that work in knowledge-intensive contexts can be attributed to a hampered process of interpersonal trust formation. Solutions to trust formation problems need to be based on an understanding of how interpersonal trust forms in face-to-face project teams as well as on insight into how this process differs in virtual teams. Synthesizing literature from various disciplines, we propose a model for the formation of interpersonal trust between project team members. Taking this model as a starting point, we analyse how virtual settings may alter or even obstruct the process of trust formation. One method to improve the formation of interpersonal trust in virtual settings is to facilitate the assessment of trustworthiness. This can be done by making information available about individual virtual project team members. Previous research in virtual project teams focussed principally on the medium by which information is spread, for example, by phone, mail, or videoconferencing. Most researchers failed to take the specific content of the information into account, although there is general agreement that personal, non-task-related information is important to foster trust. For this, we propose to use the antecedents of trustworthiness, which until now have mainly been used as a framework to measure trust, as a design framework instead. This framework of antecedents can also be used to determine which type of information is relevant to assess each other’s trustworthiness. We review existing literature on the antecedents of trustworthiness and extend the well-accepted antecedents of ‘ability’, ‘benevolence’ and ‘integrity’ with several other antecedents, such as ‘communality’ and ‘accountability’. Together, these form the TrustWorthiness ANtecedents (TWAN) schema. We describe how these antecedents can be used to determine which information is relevant for team members assessing others’ trustworthiness. In future research we will first verify this extended cognitive schema of trustworthiness (TWAN) empirically and then apply it to the design of artefacts or guidelines, such as a personal identity profile to support the assessment of trustworthiness in virtual project teams.