A literature review and analysis of the incident command system

Since the establishment of the incident command system (ICS), the debates of the effectiveness of using this system have never stopped. The majority of ICS debates can be related to the discussions of using a mechanistic system or an organic system in organisational theories. Consequently, I utilise the lens of organisational theory to review the ICS research and discussions over the past decades. After conducting an extensive literature review, I find three factors contributing to different evaluations of the ICS, they are: 1) disagreement on the nature of the ICS; 2) scale of disaster; 3) the implementation of the ICS. At the end of this research, I provide three future ICS research directions: 1) focusing on the nature of this system; 2) controlling the scale of disasters that are discussed; 3) further exploring how people really implement this system on the ground.