Bureau‐political tensions and competition are an often neglected, yet crucial element in crisis management. Bureau‐politics in crisis management runs counter to pervasive notions that portray centralization and concentration of power as the dominant mode of administrative response to crisis. This article presents empirical evidence suggesting the importance of bureau‐politics in the planning, response and post‐crisis stages of crisis management at both strategic and operational levels of action. Again contrary to conventional wisdom, it is argued that such interagency tensions may fulfill various positive functions: they put crisis agencies to the test; they serve to counteract ‘groupthink tendencies; they foster a certain degree of openness; and they may facilitate democratic control of far‐reaching crisis management policies.

Academic and practitioner interpretations of knowledge management are captured through a comprehensive taxonomy of knowledge models. How knowledge is absorbed raises the question as to whether focus should be placed on knowledge transfer or knowledge management. It is concluded that the contextual demands for knowledge application dictate which pathway to pursue.

Industrial Society is susceptibile to catastrophic events, including technological disasters and social and political crises. Risk, uncertainty, crisis, collective stress, and "normal accidents" now need to be incorporated into a broader understanding of how governments and decision makers respond to the un-ness of crisis situations: unpleasantness in unexpected circumstances, representing unscheduled events, unprecedented in their implications and, by normal routine standards, almost unmanageable. Current horizons in disaster and related studies need to be broadened to incorporate a political-administrative perspective on crises and crisis management. Prevailing insights within disaster studies are reviewed, and a broader crisis typology is presented. In addition, a five-step heuristic is outlined that helps to identify perceived administrative challenges posed by specific crisis events. Finally, some general patterns of governmental crisis intervention are outlined in a second typology in order to stimulate more generic future research into crisis episodes. With organizational structures more complex (Wilson 1975, 288-92) and technological systems becoming even more interdependent, vulnerable, and problematic in their intended and unintended consequences (Perrow 1984, 330; Sagan 1993), industrial societies are confronted with an increasing susceptibility to numerous and diverse catastrophic events. All too often, unfortunately, the impact of man-made or natural disasters is compounded because policy makers have prepared neither themselves nor the public for appropriate responses once tragedy strikes. Devastating events include natural disasters (Comfort 1989

Given the prevailing emphasis on agency performance, customer focus, stakeholder’s interests and other methods of assessment under new public administration and prevailing managerialism in many public sectors around the world, administrative practitioners have taken to benchmarking as an instrument for assessing organizational performance and for facilitating management transfer and learning from other benchmarked organizations. The introduction of benchmarking into the public sector is still in its early stages. Technical problems, scepticism about usefulness and the appropriateness of transferring putative private sector competencies into public administration and the resistance in accepting organizational change as a necessary consequence of benchmarking exercises in the public sector, prevent the widespread acceptance and use of benchmarking in public sectors, arguably “punch‐drunk” with systemic change. Nevertheless, there are some encouraging examples of benchmarking within the public sector. This paper critically analyzes these examples in order to establish the vulnerability points of such measurement instruments which, possibly, need more research in order to establish the specific learning dimensions to benchmarking and to illustrate the importance of such benchmarking and learning within the highly risky, information technology (IT)‐driven experiences of systems development and failure.