James L. Garnett

Coping with Katrina: Assessing Crisis Management Behaviours in the Big One

Hurricane Katrina continues to capture attention and influence scholarship including official reports that focus more on event chronologies than on conceptual patterns. Our paper explores conceptual patterns crisis management behaviour, drawing upon Lalondes (2004) archetypes of crisis managers as collectivists, integrators, and reactives. We add a paralytics archetype for our analysis. Key findings include an imbalance between counterproductive and constructive archetypes. Reactive and paralytic crisis manager behaviours were over-represented, significantly contributing to conflict, communication failures, and the systemic failure of governments. Collectivist and integrator archetypes were badly under-represented, limiting intergovernmental relations, cooperation, and communication embedded in these behaviour types. Crisis management performance with future crises would benefit from a systematic assessment of crisis management styles and behaviours.

Strategic change in organizational communication: emerging trends for wealth formation in the new millennium

This article reviews macro-related changes currently taking place within, and across, organizations and agencies. It surveys a wide-ranging literature examined against the background of projected important trends and strategic changes in organizational communication. Copyright

Reaching the Hard to Reach: Drawing Lessons From Research and Practice

Communicating with citizens, stakeholders, or service clients is challenging under normal circumstances. Reaching government audiences who are hard to reach because of language or culture differences, lifestyle unpredictability, mistrust, isolation, or other reasons compounds the difficulty. This article examines who the hard to reach are, addresses reasons why it is important for governments to reach them, explores research and experience, suggests effective approaches for reaching these audiences—drawing upon a social constructionist approach—and proposes lessons and guidelines for public sector communicators. Communication practice and research indicate that more effective strategies include: utilizing knowledge about target audiences; forming partnerships with agencies and individuals that interact with targeted populations; utilizing children to reach parents and older relatives; using ethnic media that effectively reach immigrant and ethnic minority households; and simplifying communication and using feedback techniques.

Using a Trust Inference Model for Flexible and Controlled Information Sharing During Crises

This article is dedicated to Alan Jarman, a founding influence in the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management who died in Canberra 15 July 2010. Alans quantitative, engineering background and his long standing commitment to improving crisis decision making prompted him to encourage our applying fuzzy logic to crisis information sharing. We are grateful for Alans encouragement and advice. The fluid, urgent nature of crises requires flexible, responsive information sharing. Recent studies show, however, that in business catastrophes and other kinds of crises conventional access control mechanisms favor security over flexibility. Our work addresses these seemingly contradictory needs for security and flexibility and designs a trust inference model based on fuzzy logic, a model that can be used with pervasive computing technologies using sensors and mobile devices. Drawing upon research on trust, we design a trust inference model using attributes of affiliation, task performance, and urgency; apply the model to a known crisis; discuss implementation issues; and explore issues for further research. This article is dedicated to Alan Jarman, a founding influence in the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management who died in Canberra 15 July 2010. Alans quantitative, engineering background and his long standing commitment to improving crisis decision making prompted him to encourage our applying fuzzy logic to crisis information sharing. We are grateful for Alans encouragement and advice.

Internships and the State Government Human Resources Crisis

Abstract State governments face massive retirements over the next few years. Since internships have been a significant source of bright new blood, we examine what all fifty states are doing with internships. Some exemplary programs were found, but the typical state intern program serves only a few unpaid students, supervisors receive no special training, and no tracking is done to see whether interns stay in state service or what their contributions are. While many states blame stringencies, the budgets involved are comparatively modest and potential benefits significant. We propose an action agenda for state governments and the public administration community.

Health care reform content and process:propositions from the states

Health care reform and cost containment have become central campaign and policy issues in the United States. Although focus now centers on federal health care reform policy, state governments have been actively introducing health care reform legislation. Some of the health care reform initiatives on the state level have influenced deliberations on the federal level and President Clintons health care reform initiatives will spur further state experimentation regardless of legislative success in Congress, In 1992 nearly all 50 states had either legislation introduced, or special task forces assigned that addressed health care reform issues. This exploratory research compares the content and process of health reform in four states that attempted major reform in 1992—Florida, Washington, Michigan, and Wisconsin—and draws propositions for state reform based on comparisons of content and process. The four states chosen represent geographic diversity and a balance between legislation seeking partial change and ...