Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management最新文献

This article seeks to explore the way in which key, specifically situated actors within the UK water rescue community understand and perceive challenges relating to navigating policy and practical challenges inherent to their role. Utilizing Lipsky's notion of the ‘street level bureaucrat’, focus groups and interviews were undertaken with water rescue practitioners who bridge the gap between high-level strategy implementers and ground-level operational personnel. Utilizing a grounded theory approach, the research uncovered how these operators conceptualize the boundaries in relation to their work, the role of knowledge and knowledge exchange, the nature of the obligation, especially with regard to differences between statutory and voluntary agencies, and in relation to ever-changing public attitudes towards risk and expectations of a right to be rescued. This was underscored by consistent reference to challenges posed by funding, resourcing and the contingent nature of both political will and public interest in their work. The findings, drawing on these uniquely situated actors, emphasized the importance of practitioners interacting with and knowing one another, in addition to having a shared understanding of the water environment on the coast and inland, as being a key means to navigate the ‘bureaucracy’ of water rescue. The ways in which Lipsky's model can complement contemporary discussions regarding social identity within the emergency response to promote both vertical and horizontal cohesion and clarity are examined.

Crisis response involves extensive planning and coordination within and across a multitude of agencies and organisations. This study explores how on-the-ground crisis response efforts align with crisis response guidelines. These guidelines are key to the effectiveness of crisis response. To this end, we construct, analyse and compare emergency response networks by using network analysis and natural language processing methods. Differences between plans and practice, that is, false positives (actions delivered but not prescribed) and false negatives (actions prescribed but not delivered), can impact response evaluation and policy revisions. We investigate collaboration networks at the federal, state and local level extracted from official documents (prescribed networks) and empirical data (observed networks) in the form of situational reports (n = 109) and tweets (n = 28,050) from responses to major hurricanes that made landfall in the United States. Our analyses reveal meaningful differences between prescribed and observed collaboration networks (mean node overlap ~9.94%, edge overlap ~3.94%). The observed networks most closely resemble federal-level networks in terms of node and edge overlap, highlighting the prioritisation of federal response guidelines. We also observed a high ratio of false positives, that is, nongovernmental, nonprofit and volunteer organizations, that play a critical role in crisis response and are not mentioned in response plans. These findings enable us to evaluate the current best practices for response and inform emergency response policy planning.

This study examines the impact of various stakeholders on the social amplification of risk perceptions regarding new energy vehicle technologies, focusing on Tesla-related discussions on Weibo. By applying natural language processing and machine learning to extract topics and conducting econometric analysis, we explored the emotional and cognitive dimensions of public discourse. Granger causality and impulse response analyses revealed that commercial media and celebrities initially intensified public negative emotions, while government communications mitigated them. Conversely, information from peer firms and the government positively influenced public risk perceptions on the cognitive dimension. Variance decomposition highlighted the rapid spread of emotionally driven content versus the deeper engagement elicited by cognitively driven content. These findings suggest that crisis communication strategies should consider the distinct dynamics of emotional and cognitive transmission on social media, providing valuable insights for managing public risk perceptions in crises.

The oil and gas extraction industry, with its inherent complexities and high-risk environment, demands robust emergency management (EM) strategies to minimize losses of life and protect both tangible and intangible organizational assets. Despite the critical importance of these strategies, the evolution of EM processes within such a dynamic setting remains poorly understood. This paper seeks to address this gap by employing the Strategy-as-Practice (SAP) perspective, which offers valuable insights into noncompetitive strategizing. The SAP lens is particularly suited to examining EM's strategic role in safeguarding lives and assets. Through an in-depth case study, we unravel the intricate complexities of the strategizing process, often considered a black box. Additionally, we introduce a novel framework that delineates the micro-dynamics of interactions among the three core SAP elements—praxis, practitioners and practices. This framework provides a comprehensive understanding of how EM strategies evolve over time, emphasizing the pivotal role of emergency actors in such a multifaceted context.

Crisis learning is essential for improving crisis management. Looking back at how public health crises were managed, crisis scholars and practitioners can garner important future crisis readiness insight in managing critical risks and crises threatening public health and safety. Among existing crisis research examining infectious disease risks (IDRs) and IDR-triggered health crises, few studies have examined how co-existing particular infectious diseases influence individuals' risk perception and crisis responses. To address this gap, the current study provides lessons learned from an online survey, using a nationally representative US adult sample (N = 517), conducted during the early stages of the Coronavirus [COVID-19] outbreak, before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 global pandemic. The unique timing of the online survey allows us to examine: (1) how US adults perceived individual health risks associated with COVID-19 and influenza [the flu], two infectious diseases concurrently discussed and compared by the news media and health experts; and (2) how perceived IDR influences their subsequent behavioral response. Key findings include, first, that the less novel IDR (i.e., the flu) led to higher perceived susceptibility, while the more novel IDR (i.e., COVID-19), at the point of data collection, led to higher perceived severity. Second, IDR susceptibility and severity predicted intention to preventive action when confronted by the flu or COVID-19. Third, individuals' trust in the government moderated risk response by IDR type. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for effective IDR communication in the process of ongoing public crisis management.

The occurrence of ‘black swan’ and ‘grey rhino’ events is creating new risks for communities, and building resilient communities has become a global consensus. Using the Bibliometrix tool, we collected 3146 articles published from 2000 to 2022 to explore research hotspots, change trends and future directions in community resilience. The results show that community resilience study exhibited an exponential development pattern, with periods of sluggish rise (2000–2009) and rapid growth (2010–2019). From 2020 to 2022, the average annual number of articles spiked to 484 due to the outbreak of COVID-19. Scholars from the United States, China and the United Kingdom are the main contributors in this field, but the research locations are gradually shifting from the United States to the European and Asian countries. Hot topics related to community resilience include conceptual discernment, assessment frameworks, influencing factors and enhancement strategies. In the future, more attention should be given to the localization of theories, soft power elements and special groups. We developed a community resilience cycle framework that integrates the latest conceptual statement of community resilience and the evolution of trajectories of system disturbance stages.

Although crisis planning (including both prevention and preparation) is well-established as the 'alpha' of crisis management, businesses often find themselves caught off-guard in the face of crises. What impedes business organizations from heeding scholarly advice to engage in crisis planning? Interviews with corporate communication professionals suggest that in a fast-evolving digital landscape characterized by the ambiguity of what ‘qualifies’ as a crisis, the need for an organizational culture of preparedness and balancing structure with agility are the hallmarks of crisis planning. Even when interviewees acknowledge the importance of crisis planning, cultivating a culture of preparedness is contingent on an engaged leadership that recognizes and provides communication professionals a seat at the table, fosters internal coordination, and understands the importance of peacetime relationships with stakeholders. Our paper addresses the complexities and implications of crisis planning that is typically hidden from view.

Public warning failure is an undertheorized concept. A shared definition of public warning failure is needed to help stakeholders assess responsibility in the aftermath of government nonuse, misuse, or misunderstanding of public warning systems, especially mobile device-based systems that have become a critical element of the public warning ecosystem. Although some uncertainty in the disaster information environment is inevitable, a shared definition of public warning failure could help clarify the roles and responsibilities of government officials and agencies across the arc of disaster communication: public preparation, hazard detection, warning message creation, message dissemination, and public response monitoring. In the context of earthquake early warning system performance, warning failure has been defined as false alert, missed alert, inaccurate alert, no alert, and late alert. Building upon this typology, in this essay, we propose an all-hazards definition of public warning failure, illustrate it using a conceptual model, and assess the conceptual model using examples drawn from media reporting.

This study aims to suggest visual strategies for social media response in corporate crisis communication. Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) and Associative Network Theory of Memory (ANT) are applied to investigate the types of visuals (photos) that companies may utilize in Facebook messages. A 3 (message: excuse vs. attack accuser vs. apology) × 4 (photo: no-image vs. product vs. stereotypical CEO vs. CEO reflecting corporate character) between-subject design online experiment was conducted in the United States (N = 296). The results confirmed the effect of message strategies on crisis communication outcomes such as perceived responsibility, anger, and reputation. Preliminary interaction effects showed that the stereotypical CEO image (e.g., wearing a suit at a podium in a conference setting) was effective on reputation in two message strategies: an excuse in an accidental cluster crisis and an apology in a preventable cluster crisis. Based on these findings, the current study offers theoretical and practical implications for corporate crisis communication. Details are discussed in the study.

Persons with disabilities (PwDs) face a disproportionately high risk due to their physical or mental limitations and socioeconomic barriers during emergencies. To better understand and empower PwDs for disaster preparedness, this study used an updated national representative survey (2021 Federal Emergency Management Agency National Household Survey) from the United States to examine the differences between PwDs and their counterparts concerning disaster preparedness with the guidance of the protection motivation theory. The results of the Tobit regression models indicated that being disabled was negatively correlated with the level of preparedness. Furthermore, disability status significantly and negatively modified the relationship between risk perception and disaster preparedness. Likewise, self-efficacy was less strongly correlated with preparedness activities if people self-reported themselves as having a disability. Moreover, for people with disabilities, their beliefs about the effectiveness of preventive behaviours (response efficacy) predicted decreased adoption of preparedness measures. Promoting disaster risk reduction education, strengthening self-efficacy and developing more inclusive and targeted intervention strategies for PwDs can be used to improve their preparedness degree and capacity for disaster prevention.