Issues and crisis management in a convergent environment

Increasingly issues and crisis management are occurring in an interactive environment in which activists use online communications and networks to attack organisations and promote campaigns. This paper outlines examples of such developments and suggests that there is a still a need to consider them within the context of the overall social and economic environment as well as from a technological viewpoint. It also argues that technological change accentuates issues and crises rather than creating new forms of crises. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

论罪犯危机干预

罪犯在长期的监禁生活中 ,因为要承受来自各方面的心理压力 ,容易导致心理危机。经过危机干预 ,给罪犯提供即时的帮助 ,可使陷入危机中的罪犯恢复身心平衡 ,度过危险的紧急救助时期。心理危机干预直接指向罪犯的情绪困扰和心理失衡 ,对于缓解心理冲突、避免意外事故、防止心态的进一步恶化具有显著的效果     

论危机证券公司的救助制度

危机证券公司的产生需要经过一定的时间.当发现问题证券公司接近或已经丧失流动性清偿能力或资本清偿能力时,必须采取果断措施进行风险处置.救助证券公司不能以行政代替市场,以次参优,形成"木桶现象",而必须坚持公平与效率的原则,实行信息公开,不搞"暗箱操作",更不能以简单重组代替退出,致使风险越积越大.因此,在相关法律、法规中需要对救助条件、救助主体、救助的方式等做出规定.     

Escape to the island: International volunteer engagement on Lesvos during the refugee crisis

As hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants haphazardly crossed the strait between Turkey and the Greek island of Lesvos on their way to safety in Europe in 2015, thousands of citizens from all over Europe temporarily abandoned their day jobs to be of some sort of assistance for the refugees as they arrived on the beaches of Lesvos. We analyze the process and the relationships between the various stakeholders who were involved in the refugee crisis between April 2015 and January 2018, arguing that there is a need to find new ways of managing this type of spontaneous volunteerism without on the one hand strangling flexible and innovative volunteering initiatives, and on the other hand without compromising knowledge-based humanitarian responses.     

Collective memory and social movements in times of crisis: the case of Romania

Social movements are not completely spontaneous. On the contrary, they depend on past events and experiences and are rooted in specific contexts. By focusing on three case studies – the student mobilizations of 2011 and 2013, the anti-government mobilizations of 2012, and the protests against the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation project of 2013 – this article aims to investigate the role of collective memory in post-2011 movements in Romania. The legacy of the past is reflected not only in a return to the symbols and frames of the anti-Communist mobilizations of 1989 and 1990, but also in the difficulties of the protesters to delimit themselves from nationalist actors, to develop global claims, and to target austerity and neoliberalism. Therefore, even in difficult economic conditions, Romanian movements found it hard to align their efforts with those of the Indignados/Occupy movements. More generally, the case of Romania proves that activism remains rooted in the local and national context, reflecting the memories, experiences, and fears of the mobilized actors, in spite of the spread of a repertoire of action from Western and southern Europe.     

Economic crises and augmenting financial bureaucratic power in South Korea

Despite negative public opinion, the role of the Korean government has expanded, while overcoming two rounds of global financial crises. The phenomenon of the re-swelling state is mainly attributed to the strengthening of the central bureaucracy, in particular the financial bureaucracy, rather than the whole central government or the state. The argument of the strengthening of the ‘state’ or the ‘government’ after economic crises might be subject to the error of generalization. Through the two rounds of economic crises, the financial bureaucracy succeeded in acquiring the authority of market supervision and industrial support. In consequence, the bureaucracy's institutional supremacy within the government grew less challenged. The central bureaucracy was no longer the loyal servant to the President. It has reinforced its institutional strength and autonomy vis-a-vis the President, the National Assembly, the Central Bank and civil society, under the pretext of building up the rational and autonomous market and democratic politics.     

Appropriating Nature in Crisis-ridden Greece: The Rationale of Capitalist Restructuring,Part 1

The ongoing crisis in Greece constitutes an emblematic case of repressive capitalist restructuring. In this first part of a two-paper series, we argue that public debt is used as a vehicle for furthering the neoliberal transformation of Greek society with serious implications for the appropriation of nature. We present theoretical considerations about nature in capitalism, the rationale of neoliberal capitalist restructuring, as well as the relation between nature and neoliberalism. We finally present the timeline of the Greek crisis, as well as how the three structural adjustment programs wrought a severe capitalist restructuring upon Greece.     

Central Decisions,Decentralized Solutions: Comparing the Implications of Central Cutback Policy for the Agency Level in Estonia and Latvia

Abstract

The paper investigates the implications of governmental cutback strategies related to the recent fiscal crisis at agency level in Estonia and Latvia. For this purpose, the article applies a comparative case study approach, through a purposeful selection of five agencies – three in Estonia and two in Latvia – to map the maximum possible variation of before-and-after effects of the crisis on organizational responses and individual-level coping. The selected agencies represent a range of regulatory and social policy domains directly and severely affected by the crisis through budget cuts and increased demand for services, and therefore most affected by the crisis. The study demonstrates that the budget cuts imposed by the cabinets of both countries and widely praised internationally actually left agency-level actors in an extremely difficult situation. Centrally imposed across-the-board cuts resulted in diverse public service gaps, leading to a range of hardships for the citizens, and therefore turning out to be neither equal nor fair for the target groups. The study concludes that centrally decided cutbacks shifted the burden to street-level bureaucrats, who in turn took on the role of key policy actors by ensuring the delivery of public services during the fiscal crisis.     

Homeownership and Nontraditional and Subprime Mortgages

This article documents the growth and geographic distribution of nontraditional mortgages (NTMs) and subprime mortgages during 2000-2006, and examines the association between these products and homeownership at the county level between 2000 and 2012. It finds a significant relationship between the origination of NTM and subprime mortgages during the boom and changes in the number of homeowners (positive during the 2000-2006 period and negative during the 2006-2012 period) but no significant relationship with the change in the homeownership rate. Looking at specific categories of the population, the results indicate a positive relationship between the presence of NTMs and subprime mortgages and increased numbers of homeowners for young households as well as for low income and minority households, but the relationship is smaller than for the general population. Overall, the relationship between NTMs and homeownership is stronger than the relationship between subprime mortgages and homeownership during the boom and it is less negative during the bust.     

How NATO remembers: explaining institutional memory in NATO crisis management

This article introduces an argument for how institutional memory of crisis management operations develops in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Scholars of European security and of international organisations have examined organisational learning, but have yet to explain its precondition: institutional memory. In a context of increasing turnover due to defence budget cuts, it remains unclear how shared knowledge of strategic errors is acquired. This article finds that the NATO secretariat facilitates practitioners’ use of informal processes for contributing to institutional memory in response to the constraints of existing formal learning processes. These formal processes, including a lessons learned centre and a lessons learned database, inadvertently disincentivise practitioners from contributing such knowledge as using them can incur reputational costs. Drawing on NATO documentation and interviews with 27 NATO elite practitioners, the paper provides evidence that practitioners instead share knowledge through three informal processes: interpersonal communications, private documentation and crisis simulations.