Gary A. Kreps

Disaster, Organizing, and Role Enactment: A Structural Approach

Descriptions of organizing and role enactment during the emergency periods of disasters are developed from archival materials on 257 key participants in 106 organized responses. Organizing is measured as a continuum of formal organizing to collective behavior. Three unique dimensions of role enactment are isolated empirically: status-role nexus, role links, and role performance. The three dimensions are modeled in terms if the structural form and type of organizing within which role enactment occurs as well as a series of other structural and individual correlates. Findings from the modeling codify the disaster research legacy as it contributes to sociological theory.

Organizing, Role Enactment, and Disaster: A Structural Theory.

The authors construct a formal theory of organizing and role enactment during the emergency period of disaster. Three core social processes are derived from Ralph Turners theorizing about role systems: role allocation, role complementarity, and role differentiation.

Living conditions, disasters, and development : an approach to cross-cultural comparisons

Because most environmental problems result from human intervention in the ecosystem, ecological research in the social sciences is now joining research in the biological and physical sciences as a means of addressing long-range problems. Within this type of social science research, this book claims, no problem is more important than the investigation of disaster. To assess the impact of sudden cataclysms on the living conditions of families or communities, scientists need a set of pretested, standardised measures that can be used cross-culturally. Once a disaster strikes, investigators are often faced with insufficient tools for assessing its impact and for evaluating whether aid programmes have enabled households to recover or improve their conditions. In this book, the authors introduce and describe a measure - the Domestic Assets Scale - that they have developed to deal with these research problems. They first present theoretical arguments that relate conditions to the concepts of disaster and development; they then show how the measure was constructed with the use of data collected in sample communities in Italy, Mexico, Peru, Turkey, the United States and Yugoslavia. Throughout these discussions, they emphasise the practical application of their theoretical arguments and address the research problems and constraints faced by investigators using the procedure. Finally, they assess the validity and reliability of the Domestic Assets Scale and show how it can be used to measure long-term change, especially in the wake of catastrophic events.

Organizational Adaptation to Disaster

The major focus of this chapter is twofold. We first consider what has been learned about organizational adaptation to disasters from original field studies by the Disaster Research Center (DRC) during the initial 20 years of its existence (1963–1983). We then examine a series of secondary data analyses (1982–2001) that we, along with our graduate and undergraduate students, completed using data archives produced primarily from these studies and maintained by the DRC. The groundwork established by what amounts to several decades of original field studies and follow-up archival analyses has continued to inform DRC field research on preparedness for and response to natural, technological, and willful disasters by organizations in both the public (e.g., Tierney, 1985, 1993) and private sectors (e.g., Webb, Tierney, & Dahlhammer, 2000). Arguably the most compelling example of continuity from the earliest to the most recent work within the DRC tradition is the Center’s major study of organizational adaptation following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center (Kendra & Wachtendorf, 2003; Kendra et al., 2003; Wachtendorf, 2004).

Structure as Process: Organization and Role

The paradox of action and order is the foundation of a developmental theory of organization and role. Organization is interpreted as a structural code composed of four elements: domains (D), tasks (T), resources (R), and activities (A). The four elements are individually necessary and collectively sufficient for organization to exist. Their emergence in time and space depicts four stages of organizing (1-4 elements present). A derived taxonomy offorms of association includes 64 possible combinations and permutations of elements culminating in 24 organizational forms. A structural dialectic is captured in a normally distributed metric of these 24 types of organizing. Six midpoint forms imply balance or tension between the forces of action and order. Detailed analyses of role-making and role-playing for these midpoint forms follow (38 cases of an original sample of 423 instances of organization from 15 disaster events). Four criteria are developed to distinguish between role-making and role-playing. Marginal distributions of role variables point to an increase in role-playing as each additional element of organization is enacted. However, the progressive character of role-playing is conditioned by emergent improvisations. These improvisations are indicative of role-making. Role dynamics are analyzed on their own terms and also as they relate to properties of organizational elements, enacting units, and disaster events.

The Life History of the Emergent Organization in Times of Disaster

This article offers a conceptualization and measurement of the emergence of organizations to cope with disasters. The authors define an organization as the simultaneous presence of four individually necessary elements: domains, tasks, resources, and activities. Combinations of these elements in various configurations yield a taxonomy of 24 different ways of organizing to meet the demands of emergencies. Using this taxonomy-and organization variables of timing, duration, restructuring, and survival-a model was developed for the life histories of 52 ephemeral organizations that responded to 12 natural disasters throughout the U.S., based on data from the archives of the Disaster Research Center. The models exogenous variables include characteristics of disaster events, enacting organizations, and affected communities. The authors found that theories offormal organization and collective behavior have mutual relevance for studies of organizing, and discuss the implications of their research for emergency management.

Change in Crisis-Relevant Organizations

The Watts riot and those that followed have had an important impact upon the contemporary American city. Between 1965 and 1969, civil disturbances became defined as an urban crisis. Though the causal roots of the phenomenon represent much more than the ecological and social aspects of urban living, a civil disturbance event is a distinct community emergency-an altered and uncertain state in the urban milieu. For certain community organizations such as police departments, the problems emanating from civil disturbance fall directly within their organizational domain. For example, the protection of life and property and the maintenance of public order are formal mandates of police departments, and it is these charter objectives which often become problematic during an emergency of this nature. Because of this, police departments are clearly identified as crisis-relevant organizations; they become involved in these emergencies because they are expected to do so. Civil

The Police-Community Relations Movement Conciliatory Responses to Violence

All necessary qualifications aside, police departments are agencies of social control. They control by coercion. Civil disturbances presented a massive and violent challenge to the supremacy of their social control capabilities. It was not surprising that police met the challenge with new measures for implementing coercive control. Thus, police departments adopted a number of changes in emergency procedures, training, and equipment designed to improve the effectiveness of their control of civil disturbance participants. However, changes have not been limited to more guns and communications equipment. Faced with the political sensitivity of applying stringent control measures to large numbers of a disaffected minority and the sheer tactical difficulty of meeting the immense demands of civil disturbances, police also developed