Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management最新文献

Driven by the academia-industry co-identified need to discover new keystones for optimizing organizational crisis communication and management decision-making, this concept paper proposes a new “READINESS” model. Grounded in the organizational preparedness and resilience literature and drawing predominantly from crisis communication and strategic conflict management elements, READINESS is examined as a multidimensional construct with multilevel efficacy, mental adaptability, and emotional leadership-focused mindset, with a dynamic process-driven agility at its core. Another tenet is that READINESS is not just for crises but also essential to manage threats, risks, conflicts, and crises across the board, constantly shaped by complex informational environments and polarizing sociopolitical issues. We begin by articulating READINESS and then illustrate its application in sticky crisis situations, followed by directions for future research, practice, and training innovation and optimization.

The Russia–Ukraine conflict is a common concern and hot-debated topic of the international community. This study aims to assess the influence of the war and refugee crisis's holistic repercussions on the Polish tour operators/travel agencies; and elaborate on the response capability of managers/concerned authorities. Findings revealed that the war and refugee crisis negatively impacted the travel agencies, and managers were put under severe pressure—decreased number of tourists, plummeted total revenue and surged total costs. The findings further contribute to the advancement and strengthening of understanding of the differential impacts of the factors on tour operators/travel agencies by their grouping criteria (license, main market and IATA certification). The travel agencies' performance metrics and operational statistics deteriorated. The managers' responses about predicting the impact of the ongoing crisis also revealed that the effects of the war and refugee crisis would continue in the near future. The contribution and novelty of the research are the advancement of understanding by evaluating refugees and war's holistic repercussions; how the forced migrations have influenced the performance metrics and elaboration of managers' response capability; and unearthing the methods for the forced migrations.

The outside of normality and normal politics is commonly referred to as emergencies, crises and disasters. The paper describes and analyses this normality/emergency imaginary by relating it to questions about order, necessity and contingency. The paper draws upon Sergei Prozorov's work on order and its excess to examine the shift in the United Kingdom pandemic response from recommendations to mandates and regulations in late March 2020. It is argued that the normality/emergency imaginary transposes the more general problem of necessity and contingency into a less complex one, thus providing a solution to questions of order, but that this displaces and eludes the important questions of contingency as a precondition for politics. Specifically, it reduces questions of order and contingency to a choice between normality or emergency where normality is rendered just and emergency measures come to be seen as necessary and un-political. Indeed, the normality/emergency imaginary, and in particular the assumption that it is analogous to the order/contingency problem, makes it difficult to mount a political critique of emergency measures that does not reproduce and reaffirm the problem that motivates it.

Risk communication is a keystone in crisis prevention and mitigation. For that purpose, many institutions worldwide have the task of translating scientific risk information into actionable messages for public safety. As a collaboration among international risk and crisis communication scholars and practitioners, we sought to identify what risk communication practitioners at higher education organizations in the Global South and North identify as essential elements of effective risk communication, based on 32 interviews in 16 countries during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (June–August, 2020). Results exemplify a shared vision for addressing the stickiest, most wicked challenges to effective risk communication globally. The interviews revealed globally shared best practices related to form, function, and process leading directly to what we consider the keystone of effective risk communication: saving lives (outcome).

Governments grapple with the challenges of uncertainty and complexity in disasters due to interconnected actors. This research explores how government organizations can effectively operate during disasters. Two aspects of network effectiveness—structural and procedural approaches—are considered. The structural approach emphasizes the network stability, while the procedural approach focuses on the process of network evolution. Analysing and comparing response networks from two earthquakes in Korea, a crucial environmental change—government reorganization—between them was identified. This allowed to assess how environmental changes impact network effectiveness. The findings suggest that effective disaster management requires complementing centralized authority with actual power distribution, empowering subnetwork groups as centres of common knowledge base, and emphasizing coordination among organizations with diverse expertise.

In his Physics, Aristotle acknowledges the role of Tyche, the Greek equivalent of contingency. His home, the Greek peninsula, was, and is today, regularly struck by natural hazards. Ancient records document that they wrought substantial damage to the infrastructure and political integrity of communities. Lacking reliable forecasting systems, for the ancient Greeks any of these hazards was contingent, even though there existed accepted interpretations of what (or who) caused these phenomena. Roughly 2.500 years later, future studies call sudden, unpredictable events like these ‘wild cards’. Occurring with a low probability but a substantial impact, wild cards pose challenges to social, political, and economic stability. Just as natural hazards unexpectedly interrupted and transformed social, political, and economical life in ancient communities, wild cards have the potential to disrupt current and future societies and economies. With the modern world increasingly complex and interconnected, wild cards will increase in frequency, likelihood, and impact. More than ever, local calamities will show global effects. To mitigate these effects and enable a fast recovery, creative approaches are needed. A gaze into how the societies of the distant past successfully coped with the wild cards that hit them, may thus yield inspiration for disaster risk reduction in the Anthropocene.

The idea of contingency emphasizes uncertainty, the consequences of choice as well as our dependence on persons and events outside our control and ability to comprehend. The concept is thus integral to how we define and understand disasters and crises. Yet the way in which contingency informs research agendas is often restricted to a dialectic reaction to uncertainty, the unknown, and the uncontrollable. There is a tendency to explain or prescribe solutions based on an underlying impetus that champions certainty over chaos, knowledge over ignorance, and control over disorder. This type of thinking has been influential in shaping normative and epistemological research trajectories in crises and disaster disciplines, but it has also restricted the contours of what counts as acceptable research on disasters and crises. In this article, I demonstrate how alternative modes of inquiry can transcend this dialectic by producing knowledge in reception to – rather than in contention from—contingency. In an effort to find a middle road between overemphasizing contingency or necessity, critical realism is used to illustrate how uncertainty, the unknown and the uncontrollable can be recast as an accepted part of a stratified reality leading towards alternative ways of knowing and researching disasters and crises.

External funding is an important yet understudied area of inquiry in crisis communication research. With external funding being a keystone of assessing and broadening research impact in both academia and industry, it is important for scholarship to examine effective practices for funding proposals. This study explores the best and worst practices for funded research through an expert consultation survey of 36 global communication scholars with track records of funding success. Findings reveal motivating factors for seeking, securing and managing funding, as well as institutional factors. Findings also inform best and worst practices for securing external funding, including bridging theory and practice and establishing strong research partnerships.

In an era characterized by vast data streams and complex socioeconomic dynamics, the fusion and precise analysis of multi-sourced intelligence has emerged as a pivotal challenge. To address this, the study constructs a sophisticated intelligence fusion network (IFN) architecture leveraging the potential of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and the security tenets of blockchain technology. Drawing from diverse fields including informatics, computer science, data analytics, and network security, the research adopts an integrative methodology comprising both a comprehensive literature review and systems analysis. Key findings highlight the prowess of AGI-driven IFNs in enhancing governmental early warning systems for crisis management. These networks underscore a paradigm shift from reactive postevent measures to proactive pre-event forecasting, thus bolstering the efficacy of governmental responses. Moreover, the decentralized nature of blockchain technology ensures data integrity, fostering trust in interdepartmental data sharing—an essential for efficient crisis management in hierarchical administrative structures. This study accentuates the need for redefining crisis management strategies, emphasizing data-driven decision-making and seamless intelligence sharing to ensure optimal outcomes.

The academic discussion on the role of experts in crisis decision making subject is scattered and diverged. The debate has foremost been connected to the discussion of centralized versus decentralized responses. Inspired by the notion of contingency and Karl Weick, this article explores the role of the Swedish Public Health Agency in coping with the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the key findings from the study is that even if experts might have a better technical understanding, at the same time, they risk getting stuck in identity concerns and previous experiences which result in rigid responses. The study also underlines that it is risky for decision-makers to rely upon one single body of expertise at times when uncertainty is high and there is a lack of solid evidence and knowledge, given the likelihood of fixation and rigidity. Rather, policy makers should encourage a deliberative debate, involving a diversity of experts and expertise.