Designing Emergency Management

China’s Post-SARS Experience, 2003-2012

Wee-Kiat Lim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429515835
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book looks at the then-nascent emergency management sector in China, specifically the 2003–2012 period, that arose from the 2003 SARS crisis and subsequently set the stage for its responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Covering not only the amended and new laws and regulations at the national level, the book also includes the rearrangement and creation of the organizational structures, as well as the response plans for individual emergencies that were either recrafted or created during this period. Beyond chronicling the milestones and products of this transformation, this book highlights the key ideas and ideals that guided the various stakeholders, from the governing elites to the policy experts during this process.

The book demonstrates how definitions of emergency management and emergency categories, as well as other ideational objects, were initially either absent or weakly developed, but were refined to the extent that they helped corral disparate actors into China's new organizational field of emergency management.

1
Assembling the theoretical toolkit

Conceptualizing the field and its formation

How did the 2003 SARS epidemic turn out to be such a catalyzing event? Based on any objective criteria of losses, the crisis did not kill or injure nearly as many people as several more prominent disasters in China, such as the 1976 Tangshan earthquake (at least 240,000 versus 349 during SARS), which never triggered institutional reforms in disaster management. The outbreak was also different from natural disasters, protests, or industrial accidents, categories of emergencies the governing elites were able to recognize and manage. Unlike natural disasters, SARS did not announce its arrival with rapid death and mayhem. Unlike public security emergencies, there were no physical sites of protests where the government could direct its security forces. Unlike industrial accidents, no sophisticated technologies and heroic efforts could be mounted, for example to access flooded mines. SARS came silently and namelessly, not even recognized as a distinctive virus when it struck its first victims in southern China.

This chapter assembles the theoretical tools that will enable me to show how I have analyzed the genesis of China’s emergency management following the 2003 SARS crisis, especially the ideational basis that led to its genesis and early development. The organizational field drawn from sociological institutional theory is the centerpiece construct from my toolkit as it arranges the newly formed emergency management into an intelligible entity. As I will explain and discuss further in this chapter, apart from institutional theory, Foucauldian studies of governmentality and sociological disaster research are the other two broad theoretical bases from which I assemble my toolkit. When used together, the toolkit allows me to perform a social autopsy of this phenomenon (Klinenberg 2002), highlighting the network of organized actors, as well as the ideas and arguments they draw upon to build emergency management as a new and discernible entity to respond to crises swiftly and conspicuously.

This chapter proceeds as follows. First, I provide a brief overview of institutional theory, especially the premises and contributions that I find useful for my project. Besides the concept of organizational field, I also highlight the role of ideas and the processes invoked in institutional theory (e.g., institutional vocabulary and theorization), as well as the importance of legitimacy to such organizing efforts.

Next, I introduce Foucault’s concept of governmentality as a means to fill in institutional theory’s relative silence on power relations. By taking into account power relations as espoused in Foucault’s idea of governmentality, institutional theory can better explain the ideational genesis and growth of an organizational field, especially by governing elites. Following that, I discuss social science disaster studies, particularly from sociological research, and highlighting social constructionism as the shared ontological root with institutional theory. In the same section, I elaborate on Stallings’s concept of establishment, which I reference on several occasions because it is a central concept in my theoretical toolkit. I also tie Foucauldian studies and institutional theory to disaster research in my discussion.

Simply put, the concepts of organizational field, legitimacy, institutional vocabulary, and theorization in institutional theory expand and deepen the understanding of how the institutional context in which disasters are constructed and managed. In turn, the concepts of establishment, claims-making, and putative problems from disaster studies clarify the role of organized actors and institutional processes associated with field-building. Finally, by bringing in Foucault’s concept of governmentality, I offer a corrective to the neglect of power relations in institutional theory, showing how institutionalization can be read as governmentalization when we account for the exercise of power.

Sociological institutional theory

I draw several critical pieces of my conceptual tools from institutional (also neo-institutional) theory, so it makes sense to briefly introduce the theoretical base. It is one of the most significant research programs in contemporary sociology, especially in organizational studies (Jepperson 2002). The theory began as a project that deliberately shifted away from the atomistic and realist philosophical commitments that were entrenched in the intellectual culture of American sociology in past decades. This intellectual movement recognizes that collective action is not simply the sum of individual actions and inter-relationships among social collectivities, and thus reinstates society as a distinct and meaningful level of analysis (Friedland and Alford 1991).

This perspective is also a refutation of the tabula rasa claim in which social aggregates not only exist but function in a vacuum (Jepperson and Meyer 1991; Perrow 1986). Instead, the social aggregates are conceived as entities well-embedded in their cultural environments (Meyer 2008; Powell and DiMaggio 1991); consequently, their conduct is organized by the scripts and schemas that are available to them in those environments. In particular, organizations sharing the same organizational field (e.g., the U.S. radio industry in Leblebici et al. 1991) become institutionalized and look increasingly similar in response to three environmental pressures: (1) political or regulatory pressures (coercive isomorphism), (2) an uncertain or ambiguous environment (mimetic isomorphism), and (3) professionalization efforts (normative isomorphism) (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Research has also shown that organizations exhibit various degrees of institutional isomorphism; they are hardly “imitative dopes” that are uniformly incapable of resisting and therefore readily succumb to isomorphic pressures (Lounsbury 2008; Oliver 1991; Scott 2008; Suddaby 2010).

The ontological core of institutional theory is social constructionist, meaning that it emphasizes the shared knowledge and meanings that emerge through social interactions (Berger and Luckmann [1966] 1991). It takes social collectivities – communities, organizations, and nations alike – seriously as interpretive systems (Daft and Weick 1984), noting how they purposefully tap into wider worlds of meaning and leverage their power (Mohr and Friedland 2008; Oliver 1991; Scott 2014). This perspective emphasizes the cultural-cognitive elements of the institutional order, the most deeply rooted conceptions of social reality that have become taken for granted (Scott 2014). In other words, cultural-cognitive elements formulate the meaning, rationality, and the categories and classification systems of the scripts and schemas available in the institutional environments. Scott (1991) provides a lucid description of how organized actors import and improvise such scripts and schemas from their environments, rather than reinvent the wheel from within: “All of us to some degree design or tailor our worlds, but we never do this from raw cloth; indeed, for the most part we get our worlds ready to wear” (p. 170).

It is this “ready-to-wear” quality in organized action that is useful as a first principle and thus the utility of institutional theory in assembling my conceptual toolkit. Organized actors strive to configure their structures and practices, and develop products that demonstrate alignment with the goals espoused and values expected of them within their institutional environment, such as the need to be efficient or productive in their performance (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977). Consequently, actors that appropriately adapt to these expectations gain social acceptance from other actors sharing the same institutional environment. In other words, the means as expressed through such necessary adaptations (e.g., appearing to be compliant or efficient) serve the ultimate ends of attaining legitimacy within the field.

Organizational field: “mutual awareness of common enterprise”

An organizational field is a collection of “sets of institutions and networks of organizations that together constitute a recognizable area of life” (DiMaggio and Powell 1983:148). As a foundational conception of an organizational field that remains highly influential even today (Scott 2014), this definition can also be more concretely expressed using a plethora of organizational types: from other organizations that produce identical products and services (in which the effects of isomorphic pressures are likely most salient), to key suppliers, to resource and product consumers, as well as to regulatory bodies. In terms of properties or characteristics, a field is seen to manifest itself when it demonstrates an increase in the interaction and information load among a set of organizations to the extent that “interorganizational structures of domination and patterns of coalition” become obvious and “mutual awareness of a common enterprise” emerges among participants in that organization set (DiMaggio and Powell 1983:148).

While an organizational field can also be established a priori according to readily available administrative categories (e.g., Standard Industrial Classifications, or SIC codes), commonly recognizable organization populations (such as banks), well-defined geopolitical boundaries, or function, I use a more recent definition that corrals a field according to issues. This maneuver not only returns to and emphasizes the “common enterprise” undertaken by entities in the same field, as in earlier foundational definitions (see for example, DiMaggio and Powell 1983), but also introduces a more deliberative and dynamic quality to what an organizational field entails and engenders in institutional terms: the persistent quest for legitimacy. An issue-centered organizational field also offers a more sophisticated reading of the varying degrees of influence each constituent exerts and a more dynamic view of field membership (Wooten and Hoffman 2017). It also carries theoretical significance in this study for two reasons. First, this definition conspicuously references the power inequality of constituents embedded in organizational fields, a rare observation that is either absent or at best implied in other definitions. As I highlighted earlier, the issue of power relations in institutional theory is an area I seek to address in my research. Second, in addition to emphasizing the processes of field formation and evolution, an issue-based conceptualization of an organizational field also necessitates a closer examination of how ideas (and their appending arguments) are implicated in shaping field-level debates around the central issue, especially during the genesis of the field.

The emerging or formative phase of China’s emergency management organizational field provides an occasion to generate insights on the dynamics of early field formation, a knowledge gap that has been recently acknowledged and highlighted (Wooten and Hoffman 2017). Until a few years ago, most institutional analyses focused on organizational fields that were already well-established or mature (Greenwood and Suddaby 2006). More recently, however, a growing number of studies have examined early field formation or emerging fields (Lawrence and Phillips 2004; Maguire, Hardy and Lawrence 2004; Purdy and Gray 2009).

However, apart from studies that attend to founding institutional or structural conditions, to date few studies on emerging fields or founding conditions in institutional contexts contribute to a better understanding of the ideational basis and legitimacy issues associated with that specific phase of field formation; this is perhaps not surprising given that there is broad tacit acknowledgement in the literature that institutional change comes partially through ideas, albeit embedded in logics, discourses, and structures (Czarniawska and Joerges 1996; Meyer et al. 2009; Zilber 2008). Nonetheless, this literature gap is puzzling, because the genesis of any organizational field should logically be regarded as an intensive, and, therefore, a productive period for opportunistic incursions and institutional entrepreneurship by organized actors (DiMaggio 1988; Hardy and Maguire 2017). In the next section, I elaborate on the tools from institutional theory that allow closer examination of the role of ideas in early field formation.

The role of ideas in institutional theory

Working with and on ideas is a vexing task, given their often elusive and amorphous character. To illustrate, the web version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) shows that there are 13 definitions of the word “idea.” I highlight the one that seems most germane to my study: “Any product of mental apprehension or activity, existing in the mind as an object of knowledge or thought; an item of knowledge or belief; a thought, a theory; a way of thinking” (italics mine).¹ Linking to institutional theory, I see ideas as sites to understand how organized actors attribute meaning and rationality (i.e., legitimization or de-legitimization) to some events, activities, and objectives, but not others (Suddaby 2010; Zilber 2008).

The emphasis on ideas in institutional studies dwindled when researchers turned to intermediate and more observable objects such as actions, practices, and structures (Christensen et al. 1997; Suddaby 2010; Zilber 2008). As Zilber (2008) notes, the focus on practices and structures, while attending to their institutionalization process, suffers the following pitfall: “Researchers studied structural and practical dimensions of institutions, assuming – rather than directly studying – their symbolic, meaningful character” (p. 154).

One notable stream of work on ideas in institutional studies focuses on the “travel of ideas,” a notion th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: designing through distress: creating a new organizational field of emergency management in post-SARS China
• 1 Assembling the theoretical toolkit: conceptualizing the field and its formation
• 2 Intensive institutionalization (2002–2007)
• 3 Consolidation and stabilization (2008–2012)
• 4 Risk governance as a framework for emergency management
• 5 Taming rivers, saving sheep, and using science: legitimizing claims using cultural knowledge and party-state ideologies
• 6 Governmentalization of emergency management
• 7 “Field” work: building a new emergency management in China
• Epilogue: going forward
• Appendix: research methods
• Index