Crisis Governance, Emergency Management, and the Digital Revolution

Digital technologies have fundamentally altered emergency and crisis management work through increased potential for role ambiguity, role conflict, distraction, and overload. Multilevel approaches to improve congruence between crisis managers and their environments have the potential to reduce cognitive and organizational barriers and improve decision making. The future of crisis management lies in reducing the misalignment between personal, proximal, and distal environmental conditions.

Application of ICT in effective crisis management: A systematic review

Introduction: Effective crisis management can reduce the costs and consequences of a crisis and has a significant impact on saving human lives in critical situations. Proper use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) can improve all crisis management phases and crisis communication cycles according to the needs of stakeholders. The purpose of this review article is to identify which ICTs have been used in effective crisis management and what managerial tasks they support.Method: A systematic review was conducted based on PRISMA protocol. The investigated articles that have been published in English were all indexed in PubMed, Science Direct, IEEE, Web of Science, and Google Scholar databases from 2005 to 2019. The keywords searched were “Crisis Management,” “Emergency Management,” “Information and Communication Technology,” and their synonyms.Results: A total of 1,703 articles were retrieved, and 81 articles that met the inclusion criteria were retained. In terms of content, there were 54 case studies/review articles, 38 proposals, and seven prototypes among which 18 case studies and proposals were the same. According to surveys, 18 ICT tools and technologies have been used in effective crisis management with the purpose of supporting managerial tasks such as situation assessment, decision-making, coordination/command and control, communication with the public, and supply of basic services in order to enable crisis management and logistics.Conclusion: This study showed that proper use of ICT can help crisis managers optimize their performance that will consequently result in effective crisis management and the reduction of casualties. In the crisis management cycle, several tools and technologies have been used for various purposes, however; some crisis managers’ tasks were still not taken into consideration sufficiently, and thus, some recommendations for further research in this field were provided.

Accounting and analysis of bankruptcies

The textbook introduces the history of the formation of the institute of bankruptcy, conducting reorganization and liquidation procedures in a crisis, diagnosing the financial condition of an enterprise based on situational and coefficient analysis, multiplicative factor models for assessing the threat of bankruptcy, methods for assessing the value of an insolvent enterprise, as well as accounting for operations related to bankruptcy procedures. The possibilities of an integrated approach to the development of a strategy for overcoming the crisis and choosing ways to restructure a bankrupt enterprise are considered. Meets the requirements of the federal state educational standards of higher education of the latest generation. For teachers, postgraduates and students of higher educational organizations, employees of analytical services, anti-crisis managers.

A Novel, Reliable and Real-Time Solution for Triage and Unique Identification of Victims of Mass Casualty Incidents

A mass casualty incident may result in tens or hundreds of victims. Triage, being the procedure of classifying victims according to their medical emergency, and the unique identification of victims are equally crucial procedures for effectively managing the crisis with respect to personnel (emergency medical services and non-medical civil protection practitioners) and assets (ambulances, medical equipment, hospital beds, etc.). The solution developed in this work aims at reducing the time needed for triage and identification procedures, and at the same time enhancing the situation awareness of crisis managers. Our system consists of (a) electronic wearable triage tags, aiming at replacing the legacy paper tags, supporting enhanced actuating and connectivity functionalities, visually presenting the status of the medical emergency of the victims and uniquely identifying them, (b) a mobile application, connected in real time with a cloud-based data aggregation node, enabling the emergency personnel to control the wearable device and to record the personal and medical emergency information of the victims, (c) an interoperability layer, supporting different connectivity options and capable of secure and reliable distribution of the collected data to multiple systems, such as Command and Control (C2s) systems of civil protection agencies, and (d) a web application, graphically presenting the victims’ medical emergencies and their personal information in aggregated and in-detail views, intended to be utilized by crisis managers in tactical and strategic levels of command. The efficiency of our system has been demonstrated in multiple civil protection full-scale exercises across Europe.

An Investigation on Construction Crisis Framework Based on the CRITIC and WASPAS Methods, a Case Study; Khuzestan province (Iran)

The crisis in construction industry are deemed a negative event in the security, economic, political, materials, or natural affairs, especially when they occur abruptly, with little or no warning; and it has always caused damage, therefore crisis management is necessary to order not turn crisis into a disaster. The present study focuses on exploring the impact of the crisis in construction projects by offering a review of the literature to identify the various associated crisis and made a case study of ‟Khuzestan province (Iran). First, through a questionnaire survey with construction experts as respondents, the initial list of 222 sub-factors were confined to a list of 174 essential crisis sub factors and were grouped under 20 main crisis factors. Second, the shortlisted 174 essential crisis sub factors conduct a questionnaire-based survey with top experts from ‟Khuzestan province (Iran) construction organization as respondents to obtain the Importance of each sub factors based on the rating of its impact the second list and using CRITIC method to weighting crisis factors. Third, ranking the influential sub crisis factors from the all sub factor list and provide a single list without considering the initial list crisis through WASPAS model. Finally, The result of the crisis effects rating, seen that the most crisis effects rating in the Khuzestan construction industry is the economic crisis, followed by the market and real estate, and then insurance, maintenance, after that respectively, logistics, and materials crises. Identify the crisis is the main part of crisis management; the obtained results help construction crisis managers and all stakeholders to achieve sustainable development in construction projects. Identifying and prioritizing construction-specific crises allow sustainable crisis managers to concentrate to be successful projects.

Leading and Working From Home in Times of COVID-19: On the Perceived Changes in Leadership Behaviors

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, managers and employees in many organizations suddenly are forced to work from home. Although working from home (WFH) is not a new phenomenon, it is new in its current scale and scope because of COVID-19. Against this background, we investigate the effect of WFH during the COVID-19 crisis on changes in leadership behaviors, and associated changes in perceived manager quality and productivity, at different hierarchical levels in organizations. Based on the literature, we develop two predictions in opposite directions. On the one hand, implementing WFH may force managers to show less direction and control and especially more delegation. On the other hand, research into the effects of exogenous shocks such as COVID-19, suggests that managers may become more controlling and delegate less. Consistent with the first prediction, we find that managers perceive they execute significantly less control and delegate more. Employees also perceive a significant decrease in control, however they perceive on average no change in delegation. Furthermore, and in line with the second prediction, employees of lower-level managers even report a significant decrease in delegation. Finally, our results show that increased delegation is associated with increased perceived productivity and higher manager quality. Together, these results suggest that in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, the effectiveness of WFH might be hampered by the fact that required changes in leadership behaviors, in particular in delegation, are difficult to realize in times of crisis.

Geographically Masking Addresses to Study COVID-19 Clusters

The spatial analysis of health data usually raises geoprivacy issues. But with the virulence of COVID-19, scientists and crisis managers do need to analyse the spatio-temporal distribution and spreading of the disease with spatially precise data. In particular, it is useful to locate each case on a map to identify clusters of cases in space and time. To allow such analyses with breach of geoprivacy, geomasking techniques are necessary. This paper experiments the geomasking techniques from the literature to solve this problem: masking the real address of positive cases while preserving the local cluster patterns. In particular, two different approaches based on aggregation and perturbation are adapted to the geomasking of addresses in areas with different densities of population. A new simulated crowding method is also proposed to preserve clusters as much as possible. The results show that geomasking techniques can spatially anonymize addresses while preserving clusters, and the best geomasking method depends on the use of the anonymized data.

Unwitting Architect

The global rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s is widely seen as a dynamic originating in the United States and the United Kingdom, and only belatedly and partially repeated by Germany. From this Anglocentric perspective, Germany's emergence at the forefront of neoliberal reforms in the eurozone is perplexing, and tends to be attributed to the same forces conventionally associated with the Anglo-American pioneers. This book challenges this ruling narrative. It recasts the genesis of neoliberalism as a process driven by a plenitude of actors, ideas, and interests. And it lays bare the pragmatic reasoning and counterintuitive choices of German crisis managers obscured by this master story. This book argues that German officials did not intentionally set out to promote neoliberal change. Instead they were more intent on preserving Germany's export markets and competitiveness in order to stabilize the domestic compact between capital and labor. Nevertheless, the series of measures German policy elites took to manage the end of golden-age capitalism promoted neoliberal transformation in crucial respects: it destabilized the Bretton Woods system; it undermined socialist and social democratic responses to the crisis in Europe; it frustrated an internationally coordinated Keynesian reflation of the world economy; and ultimately it helped push the US into the Volcker interest-rate shock that inaugurated the attack on welfare and labor under Reagan and Thatcher. From this vantage point, the book illuminates the very different rationale behind the painful reforms German state managers have demanded of their indebted eurozone partners.