Introduction
This book introduces the reader to a new kind of case study methodology currently being used to investigate crisis and disaster management in the United States.We have found that this methodology can help academics and government officials to better understand:1）the dynamics and processes（individual, group, institutional/bureaucratic/psychological）that impact decision making in times of crisis;2）the patterns of organizational management that appear to be particularly effective or ineffective in forecasting, preparing for, managing, communicating about, and learning from crises;3）the difficulties that all decision makers must confront as they navigate crisis situations.
The book contains eight cases of crisis management in the United States:an accident at a nuclear facility; a forest fire at a national park;an earthquake; a strike by transportation workers in New York city; the failure of an electricity grid in California; the outbreak of an infectious disease through the contamination of a municipal water system; an investigation of mysterious deaths caused by the purposeful contamination of a consumer product; and a major oil spill.Taken together, these cases illustrate how crises can come in many forms and force people and organizations that have never worked together before to jointly address an issue of critical importance.
In this introductory chapter we briefly discuss what crisis management is and review the impacts that crises have on political institutions. We then provide an overview of our case study methodology and offer a preliminary set of lessons learned that are drawn from our cases.This introductory chapter is followed by individual chapters on eight cases of crises in the United States.Finally, the manual used to write each case is included at the end of the book.
What is Crisis Management？
Crisis management refers to the set of decisions made and actions taken by decision makers to:assess, mitigate, prepare for, respond to, recover from, and learn from crisis situations.Such situations challenge government at all levels（from local to international）, can emerge across any issue area（e.g., health, environment, natural disaster, civil unrest）, and are triggered by both natural and man-made events.Accordingly, crisis situations vary in a number of important ways.Some crises last only a short period of time, such as a transportation accident.Other crises can last weeks, such as an industrial accident and its aftermath. Still other crises, often called ‘creeping crises', can for last years, such as the global climate crisis.
All crises have certain elements in common.First, each threatens core societal values.These might include, for example, human life, organizational survival, environmental security, or political reputation.Second, crisis situations are urgent; when confronting them decision makers usually have a short period of time in which to make critical decisions.Third, crises are surprises and therefore contain a high degree of uncertainty about ‘what's going on'.
A combination of high threat, urgency, and surprise makes crises one of the most challenging situations that government officials and political leaders will ever face.Managing problems which present a threat to core values increases the complexity of the decision making process and can create a decision making vacuum as different stakeholders argue over the importance of one critical value verses another.High threat also creates conflict between crisis managers as different organizations or institutions with different interests try to achieve their goals simultaneously.Finally, because the threat is so high the public will pay close attention to everything that public officials are doing throughout the crisis.
Urgency increases the likelihood that public officials will make fast and often ill-informed decisions.Often urgent situations result in officials overlooking critical aspects of what is going on as they struggle to make sense of what is going on and manage stress.Urgency often causes a‘contraction of authority'whereby mid or low-level managers are pushed aside as more senior officials step in.Often these senior officials have less knowledge about the realities of the situation or the barriers to effective response at the local-level.
Finally, surprise means that officials are faced with great uncertainty about what is going on and often lack a response blueprint.As a result, different officials will often ‘frame'and define'what is going on'vastly different ways.
Impacts
Crises have the potential to transform politics, economics, and social relations.The successful management of crisis situations helps to build public trust in government institutions.Failures in crisis management can result in organizational decline, political instability, and even leadership change.Such dramatic impacts are particularly concerning to public officials because many researchers now argue that crises are likely to increase in intensity in the years to come.This is because societies are increasingly inter-dependent and rely on a complex and highly technical infrastructure.Interdependency and complexity can cause dramatic ‘ripple effects' when crises do occur. Specifically, when one part of the system fails others follow, much like the outward rippling of water when a stone is thrown into a pond.In addition, researchers argue that modern crises cross multiple j urisdictional boundaries. These include organizational boundaries, national boundaries, and even international boundaries.This cross-j urisdictional character of crises-evident with such challenges as global climate change, economic depression, and health pandemics such as SARS-makes it essential that organizations will little experience working together cooperate effectively.
Crisis Management Research and the Case Writing Method
Research being conducted on crisis management in the United States is currently being done across a number of academic disciplines.These include public administration, public communication, psychology, and foreign policy decision making. Each of these disciplines has a unique research outlook, however, all studies of crisis management tend to focus on one question:what factors best explain success or failure as officials try to prepare for, respond to and recover from crises？
To answer this question we focus on a distinct collection of social psychological, bureaucratic and organizational variables that appear to make the difference between success and failure in times of crisis.Each of the cases found in this book look at each of these variables, which range from problem framing, to preparedness, the management of information and the media, to the formation of a decision unit. Our case research methodology is often called the ‘structured-focused comparison methodology'. It is ‘structured'because each case asks the same set of questions.It is ‘focused'because each of the questions is drawn directly from ideas and theories that come out of current academic research.It is ‘comparative'because generalizations about crisis behavior can be drawn by comparing across all cases.Finally, ‘case study'simply means that the researcher can choose different kinds of crises, disasters, and emergencies to compare. In short, the comparative case study methodology allows the researcher to：
（1）be systematic
（2）generalize across cases
（3）examine where phenomenon is present and absent
（4）consider causality
（5）build theory
Lessons Learned
The cases in this book allow us to make a number of generalizations about what dangers face public officials as they confront a crisis situation and what processes tend to facilitate effective crisis managemen.t Lessons learned from the book include the following：
（1）Crises never happen in exactly the same way twice.However, organizational leaders often use the most recent crisis that they experiences as a guide for preparing for the next one.This can lead to faulty logic and the development of a frame of understanding that is inappropriate for the new situation.
（2）Politics should be left out of the risk assessment process. The first step in effective crisis management is to accurately assess risks across all areas where a potential crisis can occur. However, those doing risk analysis often have a political stake in the outcome of that assessment. For instance, a local police department may overestimate the danger of civil unrest in order to gain additional funding for their department. This political bias sends inaccurate signals to centralized government officials about what risks are actually most pressing and thus distorts a rational allocation of resources. The solution to this problem is to appoint a risk assessment team without a political stake in the risk assessment outcome.
（3）Preparedness plans are useful but should not be exclusively relied on to manage a crisis.This is because unforeseen combinations of system failures are normal in crisis situations making standard operating procedures, protocols, and preestablished management plans of limited use.
（4）At the same time, the preparedness process is highly useful in helping different organizations to learn how to effectively work together. Working together on a plan helps to facilitate inter-organizational familiarity and the development of'social capital'across organizations. This, in turn, facilitates positive interpersonal relations, effective communication, and effective problem-solving.
（5）Effective crises planning should focus both on prevention（activities designed to keep a crisis from happening in the first place）and on resilience（efforts, ideas, and information that help communities bounce back once inevitable crises do occur）.
（6）Top-down crisis management is very important, however, effective crisis management also requires the capacity to act at the grassroots or local level.Citizens and local officials must have the capacity to react and respond to crisis situations in the event that centralized authorities are unable to act.The failure of crisis management often occurs because management efforts are overly hierarchical.
（7）Sometimes poor decision making by public officials during a crisis occurs because they act before all information is known. We have found that in the rush to act officials may come together around one plan of action without considering other plans.One effective response to this danger is to make sure that it is the role of someone on the management team to express a contrary viewpoint and to push the group to consider options that have not been expressed.
（8）Crisis management simulations are often highly effective ways to discover weaknesses in the crisis management design.
（9）Good crisis management includes efforts to ‘learn'while the crisis is occurring.Crisis management planning, therefore, should include a discussion of how to collect information about what is going right and what is going wrong as the crisis is taking place. Only through learning do public officials ensure that they don't repeat their mistakes when the next crisis happens.
Conclusion
History contains thousands of examples of public officials who mis-understood what was happening during crisis situations and/or were prevented from acting effectively because of organizational, bureaucratic, or psychological barriers.A systematic study of crisis management is therefore needed to better understand what exactly contributes to successful or unsuccessful crisis outcomes. Research using the case writing methodology helps us to draw broad conclusions about the kinds of situations and institutional arrangements that facilitate effective crisis management.We hope that practitioners that read this book will find valuable insights about the many factors that facilitate or hinder effective crisis decision making. For the researcher we hope that the book will be used as a model for how crisis management case studies can be systematically investigated and comparatively analyzed.