Interorganizational Communications in Disaster Management

Abstract

In response to the lessons and criticisms over the recent large-scale disasters and relief activities during the disasters, many government organizations around the world have recently launched initiatives to improve their disaster management capabilities. While a revision of disaster management capability may entail transformation of organizational structures, business processes, and technical infrastructure across multiple organizations, the field of disaster management suffers from lack of theoretical foundation. With a special emphasis on information and communication technologies (ICTs), the chapter provides a review on various issues examined in the recent disaster management literature and develops a conceptual framework of the relationships between technological properties of ICTs and multiagency collaboration in disaster management. This chapter contributes to the theoretical foundation of the field by identifying major research issues in the disaster management communications and their relationships with relevant entities and environmental factors. Discussions on future research directions are also presented.

Advances in multi-agency disaster management: Key elements in disaster research

“…Unfortunately, all too often, technology is considered in isolation, which ultimately results in the lack of adoption and the waste or resources. The systems are inseparable from the organizational and institutional context within which they are situated and used, as well as being the product of path-dependent histories (Yang et al 2009). The basic idea of socio-technical design is to ensure that both technical and human factors are given equal weight in the design process (Mumford 2006).…”

A Dispatch-Mediated Communication Model for Emergency Response Systems

“…An information element deals with bits and pieces of information that may be helpful during the mitigation of the incident. An information structure deals with information source, recipient, content, and quality [Yang et al 2009]. The 5 element types help provide a more nuanced understanding of the message content.…”

Service source and channel choice in G2C service environments: a model comparison in the anti/counter‐terrorism domain1

“…Although disaster/crisis management research (Baum et al ., 2007; Chen et al ., 2009; Mills et al ., 2009) usually includes terrorist‐induced emergencies, most disaster/crisis management studies carried out in the past have emphasised the technologies for, or interactions among, responder agencies (i.e. government‐to‐government [G2G] ) (Bharosa et al ., 2009; 2010; Yang et al ., 2009), leaving citizens outside the loop (Janssen et al ., 2010).…”