Disaster and Crisis Management

Public Management Perspectives

Naim Kapucu, Arjen Boin, Naim Kapucu, Arjen Boin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138098909
• eBook ISBN: 9781317388487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

A wide range of natural hazards pose major risks to the lives and livelihoods of large populations around the world. Man-made disasters caused by technological failures, industrial accidents, spillages, explosions, and fires, compound this threat. Since 9/11, security threats based on violence (terrorism, insurgency, and civil strife) have attracted much governmental attention and a great deal of public resources. As the scale, frequency, and intensity of disasters and crises have dramatically increased over the last decade, the failures in responding to these crises have prompted a critical need to evaluate the way in which the public sector responds to disaster.

What have we learned? What has changed in the management of disasters and crises? What do we know about the causes, patterns, and consequences of these events? This book looks at some of the approaches that can be taken to empirically examine disaster and crisis management practices. It contributes to the literature on crisis and disaster management, as well as social policy and planning. Introducing approaches that are applicable to a variety of circumstances in the U.S. and in other countries, it offers ways to think through policy interventions and governance mechanisms that may enhance societal resilience. This book was originally published as a special issue of Public Management Review.

TIME AND CRISIS

Julia Fleischer

Julia Fleischer
German Research Institute for Public Administration
Speyer
Germany

Abstract

This article presents a theoretical argument that the study of time provides crucial explanatory perspectives to the analysis of governmental crisis responses. The article claims that time is an external condition and an internalized feature of organizational behaviour. It follows that time influences governmental crisis responses but can also be exploited by actors during such critical episodes. The article discusses the properties of time and its consequences during crises along these two notions, reviewing existing scholarly work on time and crises. It concludes with a plea for a more explicit and systematic time-centred study of governmental crisis responses.

I think that the people are rightly impatient, similar to all of us involved in the crisis management. (…) However, we have to fight an epidemic and this is no time for abstract discussions of responsibility. (Ilse Aigner, German Minister for Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection, Frankfurter Rundschau, 17 June 2011)

INTRODUCTION¹

The statement of the German Minister for Agriculture, Food, and Consumer Protection during the recent ‘enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) crisis’ refers to at least two crucial characteristics of critical events: they require timely decisions, often based on incomplete information, and they threaten the organizations and politicians responsible for (handling) it.² In addition, the statement points to a typical problem that policy-makers face during a crisis: the accelerating conflict between the time rationally necessary to cope with the crisis and the appropriate time to do so, which is also defined by stakeholders and citizens endangered by the critical episode.

The notion of crisis is fundamentally related to the idea of time. First, crisis limits reaction time. Hermann (1963: 64) defined a crisis as an event that ‘(1) threatens high-priority values of the organization, (2) presents a restricted amount of time in which a response can be made, and (3) is unexpected or unanticipated by the organization’ (emphasis added).

Second, there appears to be a sense of order. Most authors may agree that crises are exceptional situations that arise from multiple causes accumulating into a critical event (Fink, 1986; Turner, 1976; Van Eeten et al., 2011); they also assume that a crisis unfolds in distinguishable sequences between the onset of a critical event and its aftermath (Boin et al., 2005; Boin and ’t Hart, 2006). Yet, we lack explicit conceptualizations of time during crisis and its consequences – although such a time-centred perspective adds explanatory value to the comparative study of governmental crisis responses.

Crises have arguably been a battlefield for different theoretical approaches (Boin and ’t Hart, 2006: 44–6). This article adds a complementary perspective by theorizing the explanatory relevance of time during crisis and its effects on governmental crisis responses. The article is not confined to governmental crisis management as the reactive activities of executive actors facing a threatening event (Van Wart and Kapucu, 2011: 491–2). It also considers activities by these actors in exploiting a crisis in order to achieve other objectives than dealing with the critical episode.

The article starts by outlining the key assumptions in organizational research about time and organizational behaviour. To advance its theoretical argument, the article illustrates the explanatory relevance of time during the crises along two conceptualizations, perceiving time primarily as a constraint and a resource. The article concludes by discussing the added value of a more explicit and systematic time-centred study of governmental responses to crises and disasters.

TIME AND ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

Broadly speaking, organizational research assumes that organizations are designed to persist over time.³ As a consequence, most scholars think about time in their theoretical thinking in a rather implicit way (Roe et al., 2009). The dominant notions of time in organizational research can be differentiated along the two Greek terms for time (Hall, 1983; Jaques 1982; Orlikowski and Yates, 2002: 686): many authors refer to chronos, i.e. to the objective time as a linear condition of organizational behaviour that is divisible and measurable by the clock, and others refer to kairos, i.e. to the subjective time that is socially constructed and expressed in perceptions and expectations.

Both the notions address different analytical foci in organizational research: whereas the objective notion of time is often applied in studies at the macro-level of organizational behaviour, the subjective notion of time is mostly examined for the micro-level of organizational behaviour (Bluedorn and Denhardt, 1988). More importantly, they formulate different assumptions about the influence of time on organizational behaviour.

Contingency theorists advance their key argument as ‘time-free’, i.e. they claim that organizations adjust their structure and behaviour corresponding to their environment regardless of the time in which these contingent requirements occur (e.g. Pugh and Hickson 1976). They also stress the relevance of different ‘ways in which effects emerge at some time after the initial intervention’ (Bowers and Taylor 1972; Clark, 1985: 39). Thus, they refer implicitly to objective time by studying the ‘time lag’ between an environmental stimulus and organizational responses (Likert, 1961). In a similar vein, the configurational approach emphasizes that organizational configurations may change over time in order to secure an organization’s competitiveness under changing environmental conditions (Miller, 1987).

The debate about ‘organizational life cycles’ also applies a chronological notion of time, albeit more explicitly, and argues that organizations are dynamic systems developing through various evolutionary stages (Child and Kieser, 1981; Kimberly and Miles 1980; Whetten, 1980). In contrast to contingency theorists, these authors stress that organizational structures reflect the times in which they were created (Stinchcombe, 1965: 148–50). More importantly, they assume that each evolutionary stage of an organization ends in a predictable crisis requiring adjustments if the organization is to survive and proceed to the next stage (Greiner, 1972; Mintzberg, 1979; see also Selznick, 1957). Path dependency theorists argue that ‘critical junctures’ occur as periods of significant change, forcing organizations to move onto a particular path, which they follow due to the increasing returns to change direction (Arthur, 1994; Collier and Collier, 1991; Pierson, 2000; Schreyögg and Sydow, 2011; Thelen, 1999). Various studies on governmental responses in crisis management apply a similar albeit less cyclical approach, arguing that the growing complexity and coupling of organizations over time increases their vulnerability to disruptions and crises (Perrow, 1984; Turner, 1976).

In contrast, other organization scholars stress explicitly the importance of subjective time for organizational behaviour. Following seminal writings about time as a social construct (Durkheim 1915/1965; Gurvitch, 1964; see also Adam, 1990, 1998; Nowotny 1994; Rosa, 2005), they analyse the explanatory relevance of temporal orientations among organizational participants for organizational behaviour, i.e. their time horizons and time senses (Albert, 1995; Berger and Luckmann 1966; Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967: 34; Lewis and Weigert 1981; McGrath and Rotchford, 1983).

Despite Clark’s plea for more theoretical attention to such ‘organizational times’ (1985: 37–8), most organization theorists have widely neglected subjective time (see, for an exception, Butler, 1995). The most comprehensive conceptualization of subjective time and organizational behaviour is provided by sociologist writings on ‘timescapes’, acknowledging the spatiality, materiality and contextuality of time and analysing different elements such as time frames, temporality, timing, tempo, duration, sequence and temporal modalities (Adam, 2008). Although this timescape approach has been applied in studies of environmental hazards (Adam, 1998), it has been mostly neglected in the crisis management literature.

Political scientists studying organizational behaviour stress that both objective and subjective time matter. Various studies on legislative actors discuss the constraints of chronological time in legislative periods and the importance of individually constructed time horizons of legislative actors (e.g. Döring, 1995, 2004; Riescher, 1994; Schedler and Santiso, 1998). Similar studies have been conducted on the executive branch: research on the US presidency shows that presidential behaviour is related to temporal dynamics caused not only by the electoral cycle but also by subjective time senses (Lewis and Strine, 1996; Skowronek, 1993, 2008). Recently, scholars have begun to analyse the emerging temporal order of objective and subjective time at the EU level (Goetz, 2009; Meyer-Sahling, 2007; Meyer-Sahling and Goetz, 2009). Although these authors ignore explicitly ‘how unforeseen and unforeseeable events, crises and “bolts from the blue” may play havoc with well-laid plans and timetables’ (Goetz and Meyer-Sahling, 2009: 181), their discussion of time properties can contribute to a theoretical conceptualization of time during crisis.

A TWO-FOLD PERSPECTIVE ON TIME DURING CRISIS

Building on the insights outlined above, this article conceptualizes time for organizational behaviour during crisis along the notions of objective and subjective time. Whereas the former refers primarily to time as a constraint, the latter recognizes the malleability of time during critical events. Such a dual understanding of time may result in circularity problems: the analytical status of time as an independent variable and a dependent variable is not confined to either of the two notions (Butler, 1995: 926). This pitfall is to be avoided through asking proper research questions and selecting appropriate methods (Abbott, 1990; Meyer-Sahling and Goetz, 2009: 327; Pollitt, 2008). To advance its theoretical claim, the article discusses the distinct properties of objective and subjective time during crisis and explores its consequences for governmental crisis responses.⁴

The relevance of objective time during crisis

This article distinguishes three concepts of objective time that likely matter during crisis. Each time concept imposes different consequences on governmental crisis responses, but they also interact.

First, the most prominent conceptualization of objective time is political time, understood as an external condition that unfolds in linear fashion or in cycles: actors ‘may not always know the precise duration of any particular sequence, but [they] know for sure that once it passes it will come again when the cycle repeats itself’ (’t Hart, 2011: 4). Many authors take the electoral cycle as key example of how political time influences decision-making (Martin, 2004; Pollitt, 2008: 53–4). In what has been termed the ‘political business cycle’, incumbent governments use expansionary policy to improve their economic performance before general elections (Nordhaus, 1975; Schultz, 1995). Other public administration scholars recognize the effects of political time by stressing the conflicts arising from politicians’ short time horizons oriented towards re-election and bureaucrats’ comparatively longer time horizons (Jacobsen, 2011; March and Olsen, 1989). Multiple political times exist, as illustrated in studies on policy-making in multi-level systems with more or less synchronized electoral cycles at different levels (Andrews et al., 2012; Goetz, 2009). The key argument in these debates is that political time influences actors’ behaviour because it sets irreversible temporal conditions for action.

This article argues that political time exists also in times of crisis, although these critical events have often a ‘time compressing’ effect – especially for political actors facing the threat of dismissal (Browne et al., 1984; Dewan and Myatt, 2007; Diermeier and Stevenson, 2000). In contrast, bureaucrats are more likely to maintain their long time horizons, expressed in their attempts to apply standard operation procedures – also revealing the difficulties to synchronize different time horizons within and across bureaucratic organizations (McGrath and Rotchford 1983: 71–3). However, crisis responses often require coordinated efforts by various organizations and thus bureaucrats may also defend their areas of responsibility, which increases their perceptions of critical events as threats to their organization’s survival (Peters et al., 2011: 20). Consequently, a critical episode may also result in ‘time integration’ of previous rather divergent time horizons inside the bureaucracy (Schneider, 1995: 38–9).

Empirical studies on crisis management provide evidence for the impact of political time, mostly for critical events occurring at the end of an electoral cycle: think of governmental responses to the 100-year flood in Germany, which occurred a few weeks before the general election in 2002, or the 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid 3 days before the election day. Incumbent governments aim to respond quickly – but consider also the effects of crisis management on the el...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Studying Disaster and Crisis Management
• 1. Time and Crisis
• 2. The Vulnerability of Public Spaces: Challenges for UK hospitals under the ‘new’ terrorist threat
• 3. The Core and Periphery of Emergency Management Networks: A multi-modal assessment of two evacuation-hosting networks from 2000 to 2009
• 4. Managing Disaster Networks in India: A study of structure and effectiveness
• 5. Managing the Impact of Disaster: Patterns of post-tsunami sheltering and duration of stay in South India
• 6. Solidarity as Political Strategy: Post-crisis reform following the French heatwave
• 7. Making Groceries: Leadership, free spaces and narratives of meaning in post-Katrina New Orleans
• 8. The Resilient Organization: A critical appraisal
• 9. Economic Considerations in Designing Emergency Management Institutions and Policies for Transboundary Disasters
• Index