A Climate for Change? Critical Reflections on the Durban United Nations Climate Change Conference

Despite more than 15 years of high level efforts led by the United Nations to broker a binding agreement on emissions reduction, negotiations at every annual meeting have failed to establish a global agreement mainly due to significant disagreements between industrialized and developing countries over differentiated responsibilities in reducing emissions. In this paper I describe my experiences as a participant-observer at the 17th United Nations Climate Change summit held in Durban, South Africa during December 2011. I provide a critical analysis of the political economy of climate change and discuss power dynamics between market, state and civil society sectors as well as the shifting geopolitics that marks the emergence of China and India as major players in the climate change arena

Responsibility modelling for civil emergency planning

This paper presents a new approach to analysing and understanding civil emergency planning based on the notion of responsibility modelling combined with HAZOPS-style analysis of information requirements. Our goal is to represent complex contingency plans so that they can be more readily understood, so that inconsistencies can be highlighted and vulnerabilities discovered. In this paper, we outline the framework for contingency planning in the United Kingdom and introduce the notion of responsibility models as a means of representing the key features of contingency plans. Using a case study of a flooding emergency, we illustrate our approach to responsibility modelling and suggest how it adds value to current textual contingency plans

What lies beneath? The role of informal and hidden networks in the management of crises

Crisis management research traditionally focuses on the role of formal communication networks in the escalation and management of organisational crises. Here, we consider instead informal and unobservable networks. The paper explores how hidden informal exchanges can impact upon organisational decision-making and performance, particularly around inter-agency working, as knowledge distributed across organisations and shared between organisations is often shared through informal means and not captured effectively through the formal decision-making processes. Early warnings and weak signals about potential risks and crises are therefore often missed. We consider the implications of these dynamics in terms of crisis avoidance and crisis management

The changing nature of risk and risk management: the challenge of borders, uncertainty and resilience

No abstract available

Competing biosecurity and risk rationalities in the Chittagong poultry commodity chain, Bangladesh

This paper anthropologically explores how key actors in the Chittagong live bird trading network perceive biosecurity and risk in relation to avian influenza between production sites, market maker scenes and outlets. They pay attention to the past and the present, rather than the future, downplaying the need for strict risk management, as outbreaks have not been reported frequently for a number of years. This is analysed as ‘temporalities of risk perception regarding biosecurity’, through Black Swan theory, the idea that unexpected events with major effects are often inappropriately rationalized (Taleb in The Black Swan. The impact of the highly improbable, Random House, New York, 2007). This incorporates a sociocultural perspective on risk, emphasizing the contexts in which risk is understood, lived, embodied and experienced. Their risk calculation is explained in terms of social consent, practical intelligibility and convergence of constraints and motivation. The pragmatic and practical orientation towards risk stands in contrast to how risk is calculated in the avian influenza preparedness paradigm. It is argued that disease risk on the ground has become a normalized part of everyday business, as implied in Black Swan theory. Risk which is calculated retrospectively is unlikely to encourage investment in biosecurity and, thereby, points to the danger of unpredictable outlier events

The vulnerability of public spaces: challenges for UK hospitals under the 'new' terrorist threat

This article considers the challenges for hospitals in the United Kingdom that arise from the threats of mass-casualty terrorism. Whilst much has been written about the role of health care as a rescuer in terrorist attacks and other mass-casualty crises, little has been written about health care as a victim within a mass-emergency setting. Yet, health care is a key component of any nation's contingency planning and an erosion of its capabilities would have a significant impact on the generation of a wider crisis following a mass-casualty event. This article seeks to highlight the nature of the challenges facing elements of UK health care, with a focus on hospitals both as essential contingency responders under the United Kingdom's civil contingencies legislation and as potential victims of terrorism. It seeks to explore the potential gaps that exist between the task demands facing hospitals and the vulnerabilities that exist within them

The cultural grammar of governance: The UK Code of Corporate Governance, reflexivity, and the limits of 'soft' regulation

We identify limits of ‘reflexive governance’ by examining the UK Code of Corporate Governance that is celebrated for its ‘reflexivity’. By placing the historical genesis of the Code within its politico-economic context, it is shown how its scope and penetration is impeded by a shallow, ‘single loop’ of reflexivity. Legitimized by agency theory, the Code is infused by a ‘cultural grammar’ that perpetuates relations of shareholder primacy as it restricts accountability to narrow forms of information disclosure directed exclusively at shareholders. Engagement of a deeper, ‘double loop’ reflexivity allows account to be taken of the historical conditions and theoretical conceptions that shape practices and outcomes of corporate governance. Only then is it possible to disclose, challenge and reform narrow conceptions, boundaries and workings of ‘reflexive governance’

THE ROLE OF INTERDEPENDENCE IN THE MICRO-FOUNDATIONS OF ORGANIZATION DESIGN: TASK, GOAL, AND KNOWLEDGE INTERDEPENDENCE

Interdependence is a core concept in organization design, yet one that has remained consistently understudied. Current notions of interdependence remain rooted in seminal works, produced at a time when managers’ near-perfect understanding of the task at hand drove the organization design process. In this context, task interdependence was rightly assumed to be exogenously determined by characteristics of the work and the technology. We no longer live in that world, yet our view of interdependence has remained exceedingly task-centric and our treatment of interdependence overly deterministic. As organizations face increasingly unpredictable workstreams and workers co-design the organization alongside managers, our field requires a more comprehensive toolbox that incorporates aspects of agent-based interdependence. In this paper, we synthesize research in organization design, organizational behavior, and other related literatures to examine three types of interdependence that characterize organizations’ workflows: task, goal, and knowledge interdependence. We offer clear definitions for each construct, analyze how each arises endogenously in the design process, explore their interrelations, and pose questions to guide future research

Colonialism, postcolonialism and the liberal welfare state

This article addresses the colonial and racial origins of the welfare state with a particular emphasis on the liberal welfare state of the USA and UK. Both are understood in terms of the centrality of the commodified status of labour power expressing a logic of market relations. In contrast, we argue that with a proper understanding of the relations of capitalism and colonialism, the sale of labour power as a commodity already represents a movement away from the commodified form of labour represented by enslavement. European colonialism is integral to the development of welfare states and their forms of inclusion and exclusion which remain racialised through into the twenty-first century

A systems approach to policy evaluation

There is growing interest in evaluating policy implementation in ways that grapple with the complexity of the process. This article offers an example of using systems methodology to explore how the child protection policy in child contact centres has functioned in practice. Rather than just asking the traditional evaluation question “is it working?” this study sought to understand how the policy was working and how it was interpreted as it interacted with other systems, producing conflicts, local variation and emergent effects. It illustrates how the systems concepts of ‘emergence’, ‘local rationality’, ‘socio-technical systems’ and ‘feedback for learning’ can contribute new knowledge and understanding to a complex policy evaluation problem