Crisis Management in the Catholic Church: Lessons for Public Administrators

The Catholic Church offers a timely, significant case study of institutional failure. Looking at an in‐depth examination of the sex abuse scandal conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the author discusses how the church crisis relates to classic public administration and crisis management theory. Given the similarities between the church and the government as public bureaucratic institutions, public administrations have much to learn from the case. Lessons include immediately sharing harsh truths with the public, accepting the stark realities of higher “public” expectations, establishing appropriate accountability systems, and fostering trust by building close community relationships. It is equally important to consider that church leaders neither fully considered nor absorbed key lessons from existing administrative theory. Concepts such as inappropriate organizational culture, bureaucracy, technicism, and goal displacement often blind leaders to adopting best practices based on well‐established theory.     

Downsizing,competition, and organizational change in government: Is necessity the mother of invention?

One answer to the question of why government organizations don't perform better—common in academic “public choice” literature but also in folk wisdom—is that resources come too easily, independent of performance. Some businessmanagement literature suggests that a crisis in resource flows can force successful change—”necessity is the mother of invention.” However, the literature also presents an alternative view: that crisis promotes rigid preprogrammed responses, not new ways of behaving. This paper examines the impact of crisis on organizational change in government by examining an organizational change effort in the U.S. federal government (procurement reform during the 1990s) that occurred simultaneously with an organizational crisis involving workforce downsizing and introduction of competition for some buying offices. Using a dataset consisting of a survey of approximately 1,600 frontline government contracting officials, the impact of variation in crisis at different buying offices on variation in behavior change is examined. Necessity was found to be the mother of invention, not rigidity. However, these effects were counteracted by two negative effects of crisis on organizational change: 1) employee resentment over violation of a “social contract at work” reduced behavior change, 2) employee association of the change effort with downsizing reduced attitudinal support for the change, which translated into reduced behavior change. On balance, crisis inhibited organizational change, rather than promoting it. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

The Impact of Fiscal Crisis on Decision‐Making Processes in European Governments: Dynamics of a Centralization Cascade

The Great Recession resulted in fiscal crises for governments across the Western world. Significant cuts in government programs were initiated as many governments scrambled to reduce their growing budget deficits. This article explores how European governments reacted during the recent crisis. In particular, the authors focus on the interlinkages between shifts toward more centralized decision making. The article uses a survey of thousands of public sector executives in 17 European countries. The authors find evidence of a centralization cascade, such that centralizing one element of the decision‐making process leads to greater centralization throughout the system. Results also show that having a high number of organizational goals and facing clear sanctions for failing to achieve goals lead to greater centralization, but greater organizational commitment reduces the need to centralize.     

Network of Networks: Preliminary Lessons from the Antwerp Port Authority on Crisis Management and Network Governance to Deal with the COVID-19 Pandemic

In this article, the authors describe and illustrate what they call a “network of networks” perspective and map the development of a lead network for the Antwerp Port Authority that governed organizations and networks in the port community before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. They find that setting a collective focus and selective integration are crucial in the creation and reproduction of an effective system to adequately deal with a wicked problem like the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings on crisis management and network governance are used to engage practitioners and public policy planners to revisit the current design and governance of organizational networks within organizational fields that have been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.     

Learning from the Katrina Crisis: A Global and International Perspective with Implications for Future Crisis Management

The study of crisis and emergency management—or mismanagement—during Hurricane Katrina will continue to proliferate in the near future. This article presents a global and international perspective on Katrina as a case of "grand failure" in crisis and emergency management, with lessons and implications for future crisis management. Benefiting from empirical data collected from international interviews, the essay presents a theoretical analysis of emergency governance and crisis management, discusses a detailed global perspective on Katrina crisis management as "management and leadership crisis," offers a number of key lessons learned from Katrina, and draws policy and administrative recommendations for future crisis and emergency management through a theory of "surprise management" that is adaptive, collaborative, and citizen engaging and draws on chaos and complexity theories to cope with hyper-uncertainties and unknowns.     

Coping with the Global Economic Crisis: The Regional Political Economy of Emergency Social Shock Absorbers in Italy

This article contributes to the debate on governing the global financial crisis, focusing on the regional governance of emergency social shock absorbers in Italy. The article seeks to make two related contributions. First, it argues that subnational governments have been the main drivers of change in labour market policies. Second, it shows that state–local governance elicited a path-altering system by ‘patching up’ a hybrid administrative structure and by ‘converting’ the traditional goals of social shock absorbers from income maintenance to welfare-to-work. The article provides qualitative evidence on the changing organizational bases of the labour markets of two large Italian regions: Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna. Evidence suggests that administrative innovation and path dependence intertwined in the governance of the global economic crisis in Italy, mitigating the entrenched distortions of labour market policies.     

Discursive Dislocation: Toward a Poststructuralist Theory of Crisis in Global Politics

In the discipline of International Relations (IR) and beyond, the concept of crisis is essentially contested, and one specific usage, it seems, is called into question by alternative uses of the term. The article develops the argument that crisis must not be misunderstood as exogenous to social construction; indeed, the very notion of crisis only makes sense if understood as produced entirely in what we will later specify as discourse. In this way, it can be illustrated how allegedly objective crises are expressions of particular configurations of social forms of power. The discourse theoretical notion of dislocation will be introduced in order to develop an understanding of crisis as a qualitative as well as constitutive feature of the social crisis. Crisis can in this sense be seen as a permanent attribute of the social, not some transitory condition that appears from time to time.     

Issue management as a post‐crisis discipline: identifying and responding to issue impacts beyond the crisis

• While there is a prolific literature on processes for organizational crisis management, and extensive scholarship on response methodologies such as apologia, image restoration and immediate post‐crisis discourse, little has been written about the longer term post‐crisis challenge beyond recovery, business resumption and organizational learning.
• Crises can lead to persistent and damaging issues, but there has been limited substantive research to illuminate the optimal processes to navigate the transition from crisis to issue. Moreover, if organizations remain in conventional post‐crisis mode there is a real risk of failure to put in place proper processes for longer term management of post‐crisis issues.
• After considering linear and non‐linear process models, and the development of a more holistic, integrated approach to issue and crisis management, this article proposes issue management as the most effective practical discipline to identify and respond to longer term post‐crisis impacts.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Organizing for Crisis Management: Building Governance Capacity and Legitimacy

What makes a well‐functioning governmental crisis management system, and how can this be studied using an organization theory–based approach? A core argument is that such a system needs both governance capacity and governance legitimacy. Organizational arrangements as well as the legitimacy of government authorities will affect crisis management performance. A central argument is that both structural features and cultural context matter, as does the nature of the crisis. Is it a transboundary crisis? How unique is it, and how much uncertainty is associated with it? The arguments are substantiated with empirical examples and supported by a literature synthesis, focusing on public administration research. A main conclusion is that there is no optimal formula for harmonizing competing interests and tensions or for overcoming uncertainty and ambiguous government structures. Flexibility and adaptation are key assets, which are constrained by the political, administrative, and situational context. Furthermore, a future research agenda is indicated.     

男孩危机:一个危言耸听的伪命题

针对目前社会上流行的中国男孩"陷入全面危机"、需要被"拯救"的专家观点和传媒误导,本文对"高考状元女生多是‘男孩学业危机'的主要标志"、"应试教育是‘男孩危机'最凶猛的杀手"、"‘父亲榜样缺失'导致‘男孩阳衰'"以及"‘因性施教'、‘限招女性'是‘拯救男孩'的妙方"等观点提出质疑,并以相关的研究结果和统计资料论证了"男孩危机"并非是一个振聋发聩的警言,而是一个危言耸听的伪命题。     

政府公共危机处置的阶段划分与管理对策

公共危机管理是现代政府亟待加强的重要职能之一,为了提高政府公共危机的管理能力,应当科学认识政府危机管理的全过程,正确处置危机管理程序.政府危机管理依据工作重点的不同可分为储备、预警、控制和恢复4大阶段,针对政府危机处置的程序,可以从10个方面加强管理.     

The Rationality Crisis in US Higher Education

Over the course of the last century, many of the stresses and contradictions of advanced capitalism have been displaced onto colleges and universities, which are now directly attached to the state—whether legally, politically, or financially—as an important component of the ideological and economic state apparatuses. As a component of the ideological and economic state apparatuses, the university is implicated in the state's ongoing fiscal crisis as both a cause of the crisis and a solution to the crisis. The author argues that the possibilities for crisis management within the existing corporate model of higher education have been exhausted in a rationality crisis that threatens to implode the administrative apparatus in higher education. The author calls for a radical reconstruction of power relationships within the university and in its relationships to capital and the state.     

Crisis Accountability: Ministerial Resignations in Sweden

Accountability processes after crisis events sometimes entail harsh criticism from public and political players alike, forcing cabinet ministers to be on top of the political game and sometimes even resign. However, harsh accountability processes are just as likely to leave ministers undamaged. This article combines two existing theories that propose different factors to account for variation in outcomes: ministerial resignations as a consequence of cabinet formation and individual positions; or resignations as a result of blame management strategies involving individual actors within the cabinet and beyond. Ten crisis episodes in Sweden are analysed and compared. The findings suggest that individual political power bases and experience matter to how well blame management strategies can be employed, while the composition of the government gives structural constraints. The dynamic interplay and framing battle between incumbent decision makers, and external arenas and the skill with which individual ministers engage and frame responsibility, play a key role in determining their post‐crisis careers.     

Crisis and employment: The case of Korea

This paper examines Korea's employment dynamics and analyzes how adverse impacts could be mitigated during the recent economic crisis in comparison with the 1997 to 1998 Asian crisis. A clear lesson is that policies to mitigate adverse impacts of financial crisis on the macroeconomic level should be given priority for preserving employment. In this regard, expansionary monetary and fiscal policies to keep aggregate demand from collapsing need to be emphasized once a crisis breaks out. However, equally crucial is the maintenance of sound pre‐crisis fundamentals to help keep negative impacts from proliferating, even when a crisis is triggered. In addition, flexible labor market structures and temporary employment‐boosting policies appear to be necessary to reduce the negative impacts of a crisis on workers. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Class, Capital and Crisis: A Return to Fundamentals

The financial crisis that currently threatens the stability of global capitalism is the latest in a long line of similar episodes stretching back some 200 years. While many orthodox economists explain the crisis in terms of the failure of the proper operation of the market mechanism, radical accounts see crisis as an aspect of the constitution of capital and of the process of the accumulation of capital itself. This article explores the extent to which Marx's understanding of accumulation and crisis can provide the basis for a general theory of capitalist crisis. It concludes that the growing and chronic separation between financial (fictitious) accumulation and productive accumulation is the key to understanding the latest crisis of capital expressed as a global credit crunch. Furthermore, Marx opens the door to the development of an overtly 'political' theory of crisis stressing the 'capitalist use of crisis' as a means for the violent reassertion of the fundamental class relation.     

Our Crisis of Self-evidence

Confidence that the we can hold and be guided by the self-evident truth about our natures is the only real foundation of the liberty our Founders—our political Fathers—worked so hard to protect. But the truth is the more consistently we are guided by our Fathers’ philosopher—John Locke, the more self-evidence becomes a problem for us. We can only address our crisis in self-evidence by knowing better than our Fathers thought they knew.     

Crisis and Response: Treasury Cash Balance Crisis in Thailand 1980-1982

The author traces the treasury cash balance crisis in Thailand from 1980-1982 and finds that the crisis was a result of economic, political and technical factors. The world recession had a significant impact on revenues, as did the inability of the government to accurately project revenues. Politically, budget participants evaded prescribed procedures and resorted to emergency spending, which resulted in expenditures beyond budget planning. The Thai government resorted to borrowing, spending cuts, adjusting corporate tax payments and increasing taxes to cope with the crisis. The author calls for legal reforms to limit discretionary spending.     

Stability,Crisis and Breakdown: Some Notes on the Concept of Crisis in Political Analysis*

The argument of the paper is that political science would benefit from clarification of the concept ‘crisis’. and that this clarification should be related to neighbouring concepts such as ‘stability’ and ‘breakdown’. It is suggested that the stability of a political regime is demonstrated by its ability to avoid transformation as well as breakdown at times of crisis when the continuity of the regime's identifying characteristics is threatened.     

Stories and Interests in Finance: Agendas of Governance before and after the Financial Crisis

The financial crisis can be understood in many different terms. In this article, it is analyzed in terms of the unfolding of a series of elite narratives that shaped the agenda of regulation before the crisis, that were damaged by the crisis, and that were then reframed and recounted again in the wake of the crisis. The form of these stories differs in subtle ways by jurisdiction, and thus the fate of postcrisis regulatory practice likewise differs.