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From floods to fires, tornadoes to terrorist attacks, governments must respond to a variety of crises and meet reasonable standards of performance. What accounts for governments’ effective responses to unfolding disasters? How should they organize and plan for significant emergencies? With fifteen adapted Kennedy School cases, students experience first-hand a series of large-scale emergencies and come away with a clear sense of the different types of disaster situations governments confront, with each type requiring different planning, resourcing, skill-building, leadership, and execution. Grappling with the details of flawed responses to the LA Riots or Hurricane Katrina, or with the success of the Incident Management System during the Pentagon fire on 9/11, students start to see the ways in which responders can improve capabilities and more adeptly navigate between technical or operational needs and political considerations.
The Asia-Pacific region is one of the most vulnerable to a variety of natural and manmade hazards. This edited book productively brings together scholars and senior public officials having direct experience in dealing with or researching on recent major natural disasters in the Asia-Pacific. The chapters focus on disaster preparedness and management, including pre-event planning and mitigation, crisis leadership and emergency response, and disaster recovery. Specific events discussed in this book include a broad spectrum of disasters such as tropical storms and typhoons in the Philippines; earthquakes in China; tsunamis in Indonesia, Japan, and Maldives; and bushfires in Australia. The book aims to generate discussions about improved risk reduction strategies throughout the region. It seeks to provide a comparative perspective across countries to draw lessons from three perspectives: public policy, humanitarian systems, and community engagement.
This book studies the variety of organizational strategies selected to cope with critical uncertainties during crises. This research formulates and applies an institutional sense-making model to explain the selection of strategies for coping with uncertainties during crises to answer the question why some organizations select a rule-based strategy to cope with uncertainties, whereas others pursue a more ad hoc-based strategy. It finds that the level of institutionalization does not affect strategy selection in the initial phase of responding to crises; that three rigidity effects can be identified in the selection of sense-making strategies once organizations have faced the failure of their ...
Ways in which federal, state, and local institutions should integrate their efforts to prepare for future terrorist threats.
This comprehensive survey of transportation economic policy pays homage to a classic work, Techniques of Transportation Planning, by renowned transportation scholar John R. Meyer. With contributions from leading economists in the field, it includes added emphasis on policy developments and analysis. The book covers the basic analytic methods used in transportation economics and policy analysis; focuses on the automobile, as both the mainstay of American transportation and the source of some of its most serious difficulties; covers key issues of urban public transportation; and analyzes the impact of regulation and deregulation on the U.S. airline, railroad, and trucking industries. In additi...
Discusses the way the mass media treats social problems, its contribution to causing and curing social problems, and its use by concerned organisations and groups wishing to act to reduce social problems. It brings together a wide range of topics including racism, sexism, poverty, violence, pornography, the educational disadvantaged, and crime and justice.
Events ranging from Hurricane Katrina to the global economic crisis have taught businesspeople an unforgettable lesson: if you don’t plan for “extreme risk,” you endanger your organization’s very survival. But how can you plan for events that go far beyond anything that occurs in normal day-to-day business? In Learning from Catastrophes, two renowned experts present the first comprehensive strategic framework for assessing, responding to, and managing extreme risk. Howard Kunreuther and Michael Useem build on their own breakthrough work on mitigating natural disasters, extending it to the challenges faced by real-world enterprises. Along with the contributions of leading experts in r...
This volume makes a significant contribution to the crisis management literature. It also adds to our inchoate understanding of network governance: temporary teams and task forces, communities of practice, alliances, and virtual organizations. It hints that the distinction between networks and organizations may be somewhat spurious, a matter of degree rather than kind. Indeed, it seems that this distinction may derive more from mental models in which we consistently reify organizations than anything else. Finally, the volume emphasizes the functional importance of leadership in network governance and puzzles over its provision in the absence of hierarchy. As such, it adds to the contributions made by Marc Granovetter (1973), John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid (1991), Bart Nooteboom (2000), Paul J. DiMaggio (2001), John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt (2001), Laurence O’Toole and Ken Meier (2004), and others, as well as Nancy Roberts’ seminal work on wicked problems and hastily formed teams. The result is a product the editor and the contributors can be proud of. Overall, it is one that will edify, surprise, and delight its readers.
In Counterterror Offensives for the Ghost War World: The Rudiments of Counterterrorism Policy, Richard J. Chasdi has written a groundbreaking quantitative analysis that provides new insight into which types of counterterror practices work best and which types perform poorly in particular operational environments and circumstances. For Chasdi, "effectiveness" is defined as the capacity of counterterror practices to work with "stealth"-namely, without eliciting high amounts of related follow-up terrorist assaults. He moves beyond individual country analyses to tackle an analysis of counterterror practice effectiveness based on the type of political system of the country carrying out counterterror offensives and the power level of that country within the international political system. Chasdi furthermore provides essential qualitative descriptions of national security institutions, stakeholders, and processes to frame his quantitative results in ways that tie those findings to historical and contemporary political developments.