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Read the attached article by Perry.
Perry, R. W., & Quarantelli, E. L. (eds.) (2005). What is a disaster? New answers to old questions. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris
and Summarize the major concepts and discuss the implications for emergency management. The paper should be in APA stlye format
WHAT IS A DISASTER?
WHAT IS A DISASTER?
New Answers to Old Questions
Ronald W. Perry
E.L. Quarantelli
Editors
Copyright © 2005 by International Research Committee on Disasters.
Library of Congress Number: 2004195094
ISBN : Hardcover 1-4134-7986-3
Softcover 1-4134-7985-5
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
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recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the copyright owner.
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2 7 5 0 9
CONTENTS
Contributors …………………………………………………………………… 1 1
Forward ………………………………………………………………………….. 1 3
Introduction …………………………………………………………………… 1 9
PART I
1: An Interpretation Of Disaster In Terms Of Changes In
Culture, Society And International Relations
David Alexander ………………………………………………….. 2 5
2: Are We Asking The Right Question?
Susan L. Cutter ……………………………………………………. 3 9
3: Disaster: A “Reality” Or Construct”?
Perspective From The “East”
Rohit Jigyasu ………………………………………………………. 4 9
4: What’s A Word? Opening Up The Debate
Neil R. Britton ……………………………………………………. 6 0
5: Not Every Move Is A Step Forward:
A Critique Of David Alexander, Susan L. Cutter,
Rohit Jigyasu And Neil Britton
Wolf R. Dombrowsky …………………………………………… 7 9
6: The Meaning Of Disaster:
A Reply To Wolf Dombrowsky
David Alexander ………………………………………………….. 9 7
7: Pragmatism And Relevance:
A Response To Wolf R. Dombrowsky
Susan L. Cutter …………………………………………………. 104
8: Defining The Definition For Addressing The “Reality”
Rohit Jigyasu ……………………………………………………. 107
9: Dog Or Demon?
Neil R. Britton …………………………………………………. 113
PART II
10: Disaster And Collective Stress
Allen H. Barton ………………………………………………… 125
11: From Crisis To Disaster:
Towards An Integrative Perspective
Arjen Boin ………………………………………………………… 153
12: Disaster: Mandated Definitions,
Local Knowledge And Complexity
Philip Buckle ……………………………………………………. 173
13: In The Eyes Of The Beholder? Making
Sense Of The System(s) Of Disaster(s)
Denis Smith ……………………………………………………… 201
14: Disaster, Crisis, Collective Stress,
And Mass Deprivation
Robert Stallings ………………………………………………… 237
15: A Response To Robert Stallings: Ideal Type Concepts
And Generalized Analytic Theory
Allen H. Barton ………………………………………………… 275
16: Back To Nature? A Reply To Stallings
Arjen Boin ………………………………………………………… 280
17: Response To Robert Stallings
Philip Buckle ……………………………………………………. 286
18: Through A Glass Darkly: A Response To Stallings
Denis Smith ……………………………………………………… 292
PART III
19: Disasters, Definitions And Theory Construction
Ronald W. Perry ………………………………………………… 311
20: A Social Science Research Agenda For The Disasters
Of The 21st Century: Theoretical, Methodological And
Empirical Issues And Their Professional Implementation
E. L. (Henry) Quarantelli …………………………………. 325
Bibliography ………………………………………………………………… 397
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1. Globalization, modernity and their
implications for disaster …………………………………… 207
Table 2. Elements of the crisis timeline …………………………… 219
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Disaster: towards an initial construction ……………. 209
Figure 2. Elements of disaster research ……………………………. 214
Figure 3. Towards a root definition of disaster …………………. 223
Figure 4. Shifting definitions of the disaster
process in three stages …………………………………….. 225
Figure 5. Space-place-time and the development
of disaster potential ………………………………………… 228
Figure 6. Learning and the incubation
process within disasters …………………………………… 229
Figure 7. Issues for disaster research ……………………………….. 235
In memory of
Fred Bates and Ritsuo Akimoto,
Disaster Research Pioneers
11
CONTRIBUTORS
David Alexander is Scientific Director of the Region of
Lombardy School of Civil Protection, based in Milan, Italy.
[the.catastrophe@virgin.net]
Allen H. Barton was for many years a Professor of Sociology and Director
of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University,
and has retired to North Carolina at 118 Wolf ’s Trail, Chapel
Hill, NC 27516 USA. [allenbarton@mindspring.com]
Arjen Boin is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Public
Administration, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
[Boin@fsw.leidenuniv.nl]
Neil R. Britton is Team Leader (International Disaster Reduction
Strategies Research) and EqTAP Project Chief Coordinator, at
the Earthquake Disaster Mitigation Research Centre, National
Research Institute of Earth Sciences and Disaster Prevention,
Kobe, Japan. [neil@edm.bosai.go.jp].
Philip Buckle is a Senior Lecturer in the Coventry Centre for
Disaster Management, Coventry University, Priory Street,
Coventry CV1 5FB United Kingdom. [p.buckle@coventry.ac.uk]
Susan L. Cutter is a Carolina Distinguished Professor and Director
of the Hazards Research in the Department of Geography at
the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208 USA.
[scutter@sc.edu]
Wolf R. Dombrowsky is Director of the Katastrophenfor-
schungsstelle (KFS) [Disaster Research Unit], Christian-
Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Olshausenstraße 40, Kiel D-
24098, Germany. [wdombro@soziologie.uni-kiel.de]
12 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
Rohit Jigyasu is a conservation architect and planner and visiting
faculty in the Department of Architectural Conservation,
School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India.
[rohitjigyasu72@yahoo.com]
Ronald W. Perry is Professor of Public Affairs in the School of
Public Affairs, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287
USA [ron.perry@asu.edu]
E. L. Quarantelli is Emeritus Professor at the Disaster Research
Center, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware 19716,
USA. [elqdrc@udel.edu]
Denis Smith is Professor of Management and Director of the
Management School at the University of Liverpool, United
Kingdom. [denis.smith@liverpool.ac.uk]
Robert A. Stallings is Professor of Public Policy and Sociology,
Program in Public Policy, School of Policy, Planning, and
Development, University of Southern California, Los Angeles,
California 90089-0626, USA. [rstallin@usc.edu]
13
FORWARD
T. Joseph Scanlon
Professor Emeritus and Director,
Emergency Communications Research Unit,
Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I received a phone
call from Canada’s public radio system, the CBC, asking me to
comment on the terrorist attack on the United States. I said among
other things that New York City had enormous resources and that
these resources would give it the resilience needed to cope with
and recover from the events of that day. My host was to say the
least skeptical. Mesmerized by the visuals of the planes hitting the
towers and the towers collapsing, she was—at least at that
moment—incapable of grasping the concept of resilience or of what
Susan Cutter might call an “affordable disaster”.
This volume—What is a Disaster? Perspectives on the Question—
is the fourth volume in our series of books on disaster, the second
to tackle the definition of disaster. Reading it, I was struck by how
much of the debate was—or so it seemed to me—influenced by
awareness of various events and how much of that awareness was
media related. That was of course especially true of 9/11, an event
which most, but not all of the contributors to this volume, felt
compelled to mention, and an event that was not even in the back
of our minds when the first volume was published, yet an event
that has changed the way many think about disaster. As Neil Britton
writes: “ . . . the fundamentals of conventional organized emergency
14 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
management are now about fifty years old. During that period,
the practice of emergency management has changed from an
essentially reactive and response-focused command-and-control civil
defence approach, which grew out of the 1940s World War II and
1950s Korean War eras, phased into a comprehensive and
integrated approach during the late 1970s, and from the 1990s
started to re-emerge around the twin concepts of risk management
and sustainable hazard mitigation.” However, recent events
connected with highly organized terrorist attacks in different parts
of the world, most notably in the USA whereby a strong reaction
has resulted in its lead disaster agency being subsumed into a federal
homeland security mega-department, might see this latest
transformation being short-lived in favour of a replay of earlier
cycles.
Ron Perry makes the importance of 9/11 similarly clear: “As
we move into the new century, the experience with terrorism has
challenged both governments and disaster researchers. In the United
States, all levels of government have invested substantial resources
in emergency management, with much of that devoted to terrorism
consequence management. With the investment of resources,
governments expect more from the community of disaster
researchers. To answer such questions regarding the need for and
implementation of warning systems, appropriate mitigation
measures, tactics for response and recovery, researchers need to
have a firm grasp on what a disaster is and what it is not.”
There is no question 9/11 has become important in our struggle
to find an acceptable definition of disaster. Yet reading this book
made me reflect not so much on 9/ll and its significance but on
the agenda setting role of the mass media in determining what we
think about and write about. Everett Rogers and Rahul Sood raised
this issue when they discussed the way American media—in fact
most of the world’s media—ignored the Sahel drought. Phil Buckle
touches on it when he mentions the attention given to the heat
wave that led to 10,000 deaths in France in 2003. “There is now
[Buckle writes] broad acceptance at political and community levels
that heat waves are disasters. But heat waves have been with us
15WHAT IS A DISASTER?
since time immemorial. So why the change now to move heat
wave from a weather condition to a disaster?” The role of media
possibly—but this begs the question—why were the media
interested? Why is heat wave now a disaster when a year ago it was
not? Eric Klinenberg’s book Heat Wave underlines the importance
of this question. Though the heat wave in Chicago costs more lives
than the Northridge earthquake, Hurricane Andrew or the bombing
at Oklahoma City, there were many debates in Chicago newsrooms
about its news value and whether it was truly a disaster. Certainly,
Barton makes clear that the absence of media attention explains
why some events have not become significant in our attempts to
explain how we perceive disaster:
Media coverage of human suffering in countries with
authoritarian regimes is subject to government censorship and
control of both domestic and outside news media. The outstanding
example is the largest famine in modern history in which
somewhere around 30,000,000 Chinese died in 1958-61 as a result
of Maoist mismanagement. The famine was kept secret within the
country and from the outside world, and indeed the highest levels
of government refused to accept information on it and continued
to demand extraction of food from the starving areas. Other examples
of “secret famines” come from the Stalinist dictatorship in the Soviet
Union. In the 1930s the government created the Ukraine famine
to wipe out peasant resistance to collectivization, and a similar
famine right after World War II, in both of which millions died
under conditions of secrecy and state terror. The British colonial
government imposed wartime censorship on the Bengal famine of
1943 in which over 2,000,000 died, to avoid pressure to divert
resources from the war effort. Around 3 million are estimated to
have died in the North Korean famines in the 1990s under
conditions of secrecy and suppression of information.
Strangely, I also thought of the media when I read Wolf
Dombrovsky’s story of the old Chinese tale about an Emperor.
“One day [the Emperor] asked his court artist, ‘What is easy to
paint and what is difficult to paint?’ The courtier thought hard on
this for as long as he knew his master’s tolerance would permit and
16 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
replied, ‘Dogs are difficult, but demons are easy.’ The courtier
explained further to his Emperor that obvious things are hard to
get right because everyone knows all about them and hence
everyone thinks they know what the essence of a dog is. However,
since no one has actually seen a demon then drawing one is easy,
because who can say it is not correct.”
I once did an examination of reporting textbooks and one thing
that became evident was that there is no accepted definition of the
term, “news.” In fact there was not only massive disagreement
among the authors about what the term meant a number simply
gave up on the task of definition. At the best they concluded,
“News is what an editor says it is,” a useful but not very illuminating
definition. We are, in short, not alone in struggling to define a
seemingly commonplace term. Yet the media seem sometimes to
force us into definitions that are adjusted to those events we know
or think we know.
All those who read this book will probably notice some references
more than others partly because of their own awareness of the
world. Just as this book stimulated me to think about the mass
media and the problems Journalism scholars have had with
definitions, others will think about other concerns. In that way,
this book will have achieved its goal—to make us think about
disaster. Ron Perry explains why that is important: “The variation
observed among researchers permits one to assess the extent and
the conceptual dimensions along which the field of study is growing
and changing. Second, the discussion of disaster definitions
encourages refinement of the concept of disaster. It enables the
reader and the authors to reflect on their definitions and trace
through the consequences of those definitions for different aspects
of the field of disaster study, whether academic or applied. As we
sharpen our conception of disaster, we identify the disciplinary
niches and their value in a field that is almost inherently
interdisciplinary. The extent to which we are able to identify and
manage disasters of the future is contingent upon our collective
understanding of the meaning and dimensions of the concept.”
In a way this book reflects the work of the first and third
17WHAT IS A DISASTER?
generation of scholars in the field of disaster study. I am aware of
course that many consider the pioneer to be Samuel Henry Prince
with his study of the 1917 Halifax explosion. I am also aware of
the recent work Russ Dynes has done on Voltaire and Alexander
Pope and others and their appraisals of the significance of the 1775
Lisbon earthquake.
But I think all of us would agree that our field took off roughly
40 years ago with Russell Dynes and Henry Quarantelli and the
creation of the Disaster Research Center. One of their students
was Bill Anderson and one of his students at Arizona State University
was none other than Ron Perry. In fact—and I am relying on the
memory of others here—when Ron first became Bill’s student he
was the only undergraduate allowed into the graduate section of a
course on Collective Behavior. [He was also the best in the class.]
Historically, that means Ron became the first scholar in our field
to have been the student of a student of Russell Dynes and Henry
Quarantelli, in short our first third generation scholar. Now he
and Quarantelli have teamed up.
I noted the important contribution Henry Quarantelli has
made to our field in the foreword to the first version of What is a
Disaster? and was delighted to do so again at the celebration we
had for him and Russell Dynes at the DRC last spring. I have not
had the chance until now to say anything in writing about Ron
Perry. I first worked with Ron when he was in Seattle shortly after
Mount St. Helens but only got to know him well when I was
President of the International Research Committee on Disasters
and he was editor of the International Journal of Mass Emergencies
and Disasters. It was a wonderful relationship, one that makes me
not the least surprised to note how many scholars he has worked
with. Ron maintained his editorial independence and integrity
but at the same time was supportive. And when the time came for
him to move on we together were fortunate enough to be able to
choose a wonderful successor in Bob Stallings. But what most of
you will not know if that our relationship was defined not just by
mutual respect and goodwill but by a document—a written
definition of the role of the editor and the editor’s relationship to
18 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
the President of the IRCD. And that document—this should come
as no surprise—was written by none other than Henry Quarantelli.
I want to thank both Bob Stallings and Benigno Aguirre for allowing
me to stay on as general editor of this series of books because of the
opportunity it has given me to say thanks to both Henry and Ron
for their contributions to our field of which this book is only the
latest example.
19
INTRODUCTION
This volume represents the second book devoted to the issue
of definitions of disasters, and the first to deal with this topic in
the International Research Committee on Disasters book series.
The first book—What is a Disaster? Perspectives on the Question—
appeared in 1998 and brought together thirteen contributors and
discussants from six countries and nine academic disciplines. The
goal for the second book is the same as that for the first: select an
interdisciplinary, international collection of disaster researchers and
ask them to present their definition of disasters. In both volumes
the selection of authors followed a philosophy of gaining wide
variation, rather than attempting any sort of random or
representative sampling. The principal product of both books is
an examination of meaning, as well as the exchange of ideas, with
respect to disaster as a phenomenon of study. Ultimately, the
purpose of course is to emphasize the exchange, not to promote
any particular definition. The exercise of defining and then
discussing definitions addresses several important issues in both
research and application. First, it enables one to gage the consensus
about what disasters are both among researchers and between
researchers and practitioners. The authors in this volume go far to
differentiating the use of disaster definitions as a basis for
government action versus as a basis for identifying a field of study.
The variation observed among researchers permits one to assess
the extent and the conceptual dimensions along which the field of
study is growing and changing. Second, the discussion of disaster
definitions encourages refinement of the concept of disaster. It
enables the reader and the authors to reflect on their definitions
20 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
and trace through the consequences of those definitions for different
aspects of the field of disaster study, whether academic or applied.
As we sharpen our conception of disaster, we identify the
disciplinary niches and their value in a field that is almost inherently
interdisciplinary. The extent to which we are able to identify and
manage disasters of the future is contingent upon our collective
understanding of the meaning and dimensions of the concept.
Finally, there is a strong policy side to this work. As we move into
the new century, the experience with terrorism has challenged both
governments and disaster researchers. In the United States, all levels
of government have invested substantial resources in emergency
management, with much of that devoted to terrorism consequence
management. With the investment of resources, governments expect
more from the community of disaster researchers. To answer such
questions regarding the need for and implementation of warning
systems, appropriate mitigation measures, tactics for response and
recovery, researchers need to have a firm grasp on what a disaster is
and what it is not. This is especially relevant to the issue of
comprehensive emergency management and integrated emergency
management systems as promoted in the United States. To say
that an “in place” system (for mitigation, preparedness, response
or recovery) that works for one “disaster” will also work for another
requires that one know about the comparability and “types” of
disasters.
This volume is structured to follow the first book. Authors
were asked to present their definition of disaster and explain it,
and in addition to react to the definitions offered by authors in the
first volume. The eight contributors were paired with one of two
discussants. Wolf Dombrowsky, a German Sociologist by training,
was asked to react to the papers created by David Alexander, Susan
L. Cutter, Rohit Jigyasu and Neil Britton. David Alexander teaches
in England and was trained as a geographer and geologist. Dr.
Cutter is an American Geographer, Dr. Jigyasu is an architect and
planner, and Dr. Britton is a social scientist with broad applied
experience at the national level in disaster management. In Part I,
each contributor presents their discussion, followed by Dr.
21WHAT IS A DISASTER?
Dombrosky’s critique; the discussion closes with reaction papers
to the critique by each author.
Part II of the book presents the definitional statements by four
additional authors. Allen Barton is a sociologist and pioneer in the
field of disaster studies. Arjen Boin is a professor of public
administration, Philip Buckle is professor of disaster management
and Denis Smith a professor of management. Robert Stallings,
professor of sociology and public policy serves as discussant for
this group. This part also closes with reactions from each author to
Dr. Stallings’ critique.
The book closes with Part III, which contains two papers. Perry
reviews the efforts of the contributors and discussants in this book
and examines conceptual definitional differences among them and
implications for theory construction. Quarantelli’s paper is more
broad ranging and focuses upon the current state of the field and
scenarios for the future. The purpose of this closing paper is to
explore the field of disaster research and define an agenda for study
in the twenty-first century. He identifies and examines critical
questions in the areas of theory, methodology and professional
implementation.
Ronald W. Perry
Tempe, Arizona
E. L. (Henry) Quarantelli
Newark, Delaware
PART I
25
1
AN INTERPRETATION OF DISASTER
IN TERMS OF CHANGES IN CULTURE,
SOCIETY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
David Alexander
On average about 220 natural catastrophes, 70 technological
disasters and three new armed conflicts occur each year (IFRCRCS
2002). Calamity is thus a recurrent feature of human life. Bearing
in mind that the temporal distribution of extreme events of all
kinds tends to be irregular, at the world scale, an “average” day
would see two or three disasters in their emergency phases, 15-20
in their recovery periods, and about a dozen conflict-based
emergencies in progress. Catastrophe is exceptional for the people
involved, but at a grander scale it is almost run-of-the-mill, even
more so given the recurrent spatial patterns that characterise it.
Even at the local scale, extreme events can be routine (see Jeffrey
1981).
Not only is disaster common—and increasingly so—it is an
extraordinarily revealing sort of affliction. It can be interpreted in
various ways as a window upon the inner workings of society. To
begin with, any failure to mitigate hazards is shown up in their
impacts. Second, corruption is exposed by bringing its consequences
to light, for example in the collapse of a badly-built structure during
26 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
an earthquake. Third, human relations are made more explicit and
conspicuous by the increased levels of socialization that commonly
occur in the immediate aftermath of disaster. In this respect,
people’s attitudes and preferences are revealed (Rogers and
Nehnevajsa 1984). Fourth, the spotlight is turned on ways of life
that have been threatened or disrupted. As a result, cultural traits
may be accentuated and subjected to scrutiny by outsiders
(Gherardi 1998).
Models and interpretations of disaster abound, but the
phenomenon is so multi-faceted that a general theory of universal
explanatory power is unlikely ever to be formulated. Moreover,
changes in society and economy (dare one call them evolution?)
continually alter the tenets and controlling parameters of disaster.
For this reason, it is important periodically to revisit the question
“what is disaster?” in the light of current concerns. This chapter
will therefore examine various thematic interpretations of
calamity—perceptual, symbolic, socio-economic and strategic—
in relation to world events and current developments in society. It
will seek out the connections between them. First, however, I will
begin with a word about definitions.
A DEFINITIONAL MINEFIELD
Some years ago I identified six distinct schools of thought and
expertise on disasters (Alexander 1993: 13-14). They can be classed
broadly as geography, anthropology, sociology, development studies,
health sciences and the geophysical sciences with engineering.
Possibly social psychology can be added as a seventh. Not all of
these fields have made a serious attempt to define disaster before
studying it. Indeed, many researchers have either taken the
definitions for granted or have side-stepped the issue.
The explanations and definitions given by Quarantelli and his
colleagues in the first symposium and book entitled What is a
Disaster? (Quarantelli 1998b) are so varied and detailed that they
are practically impossible to summarise in brief. All that can be
said is that these authors have chosen to define disaster as something
27WHAT IS A DISASTER?
that is mostly social in character. Quarantelli himself argued
(1998c: 236) that we define disaster intuitively. Gilbert (1998:
11) regarded it, among other things, as the passage to a state of
uncertainty. Following Fritz (1961), who interpreted disaster as a
state in which the social fabric is disrupted and becomes
dysfunctional to a greater or lesser extent, Fischer (2003: 94)
suggested that “What disaster sociologists actually study is social
(structure) change under specialised circumstances” (his italics).
Several of the authors in Quarantelli’s book seem to bear this out
(e.g. Porfiriev 1998: 72), but the definitions are very tentative and
mostly rather specific to the sociological perspective on disasters.
Would geophysical scientists and engineers accept them?
Perhaps they ought to, as the following comparison suggests.
The Sherman landslide in Alaska, a direct consequence of the 1964
earthquake in that state, involved 29 million cubic meters of rock
that slid at 180 km/hr into an uninhabited valley (Shreve 1966).
Except from the point of view of local flora and fauna, the event
was a mere geological curiosity, discovered by accident during a
routine aerial photography over flight. In contrast, the Aberfan
landslide of 1966 in South Wales was 193 times smaller and moved
25-30 times more slowly, but it killed 144 people, 116 of them
small children. It was a major disaster and led to decades of hardship
for bereaved survivors (Austin 1967). This implies that physical
magnitude is not necessarily very useful to our attempts to develop
a general definition of disaster.
Three important questions related to the definition problem
are as follows. (1) At what point do routine emergencies pass a
quantitative threshold or go through a qualitative change and
become disasters? (2) Is a catastrophe a large disaster, and if so,
how large? (3) What functional attributes turn an emergency into
a disaster? I t would be interesting to see whether physical and
social scientists have the same answers to these questions. It is
pretty clear that the sociologists would look for the solutions in
the form, function and mutation of the social system. Most engineers
would have at least a rough, intuitive idea of the physical forces
(relative to earthquakes, explosions, crashes, etc.) that would be
28 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
required to cause major disruption to the social system. Their advice
is often more central to policy formulation than are those of social
scientists who are more able to predict the actual human
consequences. But despite the current vogue for examining the
societal implications of engineering (Zebrowski 1997), there is
little evidence that social and physical scientists are on the same
wavelength and would arrive at a common perspective.
Rather than seeking to resolve the definitional problem, in
this chapter I will take up a theme discussed by Hewitt (1998) in
Quarantelli’s book: that of equity in disaster. My aim here is to
explore the ways in which our view of the phenomenon should be
adapted to accommodate the perspectives of the most severely
affected victims, as more than ever before disaster is becoming a
question of social equity and manipulation of society (Bankoff
2001).
FIXITY OF PERCEPTION:
DISASTER AS MINDSET
Whereas much has been written about the perception of hazard,
risk and disaster (Saarinen et al. 1984), little attention has been
devoted to disaster as mindset, fixity of opinions or states of mind
created by events. Regularities in perception are usually considered
to be dependent upon consensus (i.e., the mean of individual
experiences), which implies a certain freedom of interpretation
(Rubonis and Bickman 1991), but what happens when the
consensus is manufactured?
The terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September
2001 ushered in a new era of emergency preparedness in the world’s
richer countries. It seems logical to assume that the outrages did
not change the essence of disaster itself, but perhaps the matter is
not quite so simple (Alexander 2002a). The attacks were a watershed
in both official and public perception of disaster and they changed
the focus of preparedness (Calhoun et al. 2002). The picture that
has emerged is that of a large and powerful nation under threat,
and a significant number of people, organizations and governments
29WHAT IS A DISASTER?
engaged in a gigantic conspiracy to threaten it. Some would even
regard it as a clash of civilizations (Huntington 1996). As a strategic
reality this generalization may not survive critical analysis, especially
as it relies upon maintaining a widespread ignorance of history,
both ancient and modern. But for many world leaders it is a
convenient fiction, for it endows international relations with a new
form of polarity to replace that lost when the Soviet bloc crumbled
and the Chinese started to liberalize their economy.
Whether or not it has adopted the right approach towards
international relations, the United States of America has shown
a genius for organization. The U.S. federal agencies responsible
for emergency management have provided a model for the rest
of the world (Sylves and Waugh 1996). It is a remarkably
progressive model in which the foundations have been laid to
tackle one of the great challenges of the 21st century: how to
involve ordinary people democratically in preparation for and
management of emergency situations, and thus devolve more
of the responsibility for public safety to the actual stakeholders
(Platt 1999). Thus, civil protection has evolved out of civil
defense. Flexible, collaborative forms of the local management
of incidents has supplanted monolithic command and control
procedures.
However, disaster is not defined by fixed events, or immutable
relationships, but by social constructs, and these are liable to change.
The new U.S. model that other countries may begin to emulate is,
of course, the homeland security one (CSIS 2000). Natural disaster
management is once again subsumed into a command-and-control
structure in which secrecy and authoritarianism are ever-present
risks. At the time of writing, the full implications of homeland
security have not yet become clear, but they could easily mean
greater rigidity in the approach to extreme events, both conceptually
and operationally (Alexander 2002b). At the very least, around
the world national priorities seem to have shifted from “neutral”
threats, such as earthquakes and floods, to teleological ones, in
which deliberate harm is done. This can be judged as mindset if it
does not reflect an objective assessment of what is likely to happen.
30 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
DISASTER AS SYMBOLISM
Any other collective view of disaster, whether it be a rigid one
such as a mindset or a more pluralistic one, is achieved by
converting complex events into symbolic ones (Kroll-Smith and
Couch 1991). Thus one arrives at models in which phenomena
are endowed with meaning. In order to interpret the symbolism of
disaster, it is useful to distinguish between individual and collective
viewpoints (Dynes and Quarantelli 1976). For the survivor, a
catastrophic event is a milestone in his or her life and something
that for better or worse will help define the rest of it. Individually,
disaster brings people back to the basics of survival, deprivation,
injury or bereavement (Erickson 1994). Except perhaps for the
chronically imprudent, or for hopelessly disadvantaged people, it
graphically demonstrates the apparent arbitrariness of fate. On a
more positive note, it may mark a high point of social participation
through involvement in the so-called “therapeutic” or “altruistic”
community (Barton 1969). Of course, Cuthbertson and Nigg
(1987) and Olson and Drury (1997) have questioned the universal
applicability of Barton’s original concept of the therapeutic
community in disaster. For some people, perhaps too few, such
social participation represents a direct lesson in the value of hazard
and risk mitigation.
With these differences in mind, we may divide the symbolism
of disaster into three categories: functional (i.e., symbolic of physical
or social process), linguistic (i.e., a convenient form of notation),
and as an allegory or parable (i.e., with a tale to tell, possibly of a
moral kind). In reality, symbolic views of disaster can be endowed
with more than one of these attributes. For example, disaster may
be regarded as a punishment, a wake-up call or a betrayal of trust
in safety systems (Horlick-Jones 1995), all of which are both
functional and allegorical representations. In western societies, there
is an increasing tendency to equate disaster with notions of
recrimination, scapegoats, negligence and culpability, ideas that
have strong moral overtones (Olson 2000). In this process, societies
attempt to neutralise fear of disaster through anger and blame. It
31WHAT IS A DISASTER?
contrasts with the older, more conventional symbolism in which
disaster is seen as a sudden reminder of one’s own mortality and
the impermanence and precariousness of life:
And Hell the Shadow of a Soul on fire,
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerg’d from, shall so soon expire.
[Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam, LIV,
trans. Edward FitzGerald, 1859]
Nothing could be more symbolic than the disaster memorial
book, a publication, usually dominated by eye-catching
photographs, put together hastily after a particular event and sold
mainly in the region affected by the disaster it portrays. Such books
are quite common, at least in western societies, and are a perishable
record of the events that form their subject matter. A typical example
would seek to portray the following aspects of the disaster:\
• the enormity of the event;
• the paradoxical beauty—or at least the visual novelty—
of destruction;
• the courage of rescuers;
• humanity reasserted amid terrible physical destruction;
• the pathos of charity and solidarity;
• the triumph of moral purpose over arbitrariness or
malevolence;
• the value of determination and staying power;
• the wonder of an indomitable spirit.
As there is seldom much intellectual or analytical depth in
such books, they rely heavily on symbolism, which according to
the above list uses the functional aspects of disaster to make points
that are heavily moral. In the visual images there is often a heavy
dose of iconography. Thus in the Florence floods of 1966 the
tattered remains of Cimabue’s crucifix (circa AD 1284) symbolised
the event, especially as that particular work of art was already
32 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
symbolic of age-old suffering. In New York on September 11, 2001,
the jagged screens of lattice-work girders which were all that
remained standing of the World Trade Centre towers powerfully
symbolised destruction, precariousness and impermanence.
But symbolism changes over time, even with respect to a single
event. Symbols thus form markers in the long process of
rationalizing a disaster progressively over time, in which the details
become hazy and the event gradually loses its grip on people’s
imagination. The explosions against blue skies that characterised
both the May 18, 1980, eruption of Mount St Helens and the
attack on the World Trade Centre assume a different significance
as they lose their immediacy. They become rather flatter and less
suggestive icons, overlain with meanings that accrete during the
recovery phase and thereafter (cf. Cross 1990).
Two aspects of symbolism deserve special mention. First, until
the 20th century there was very little Darwinism in catastrophe
(Alexander 2000: 67). There was little sign of the survival of the
fittest building, community, administration, emergency service or
infrastructure. To a certain extent, with the endless resurgence of
vulnerability, this is still true in the 21st century, as socio-economic
inequality continues to grow throughout the world. This implies
that good examples of mitigation have had little symbolic value in
histor y (for example, it took 500 years for a short-stubby,
earthquake-proof minaret to appear in Turkey, one of the world’s
most seismic countries). Given the pervasive need to mitigate the
recurrent effects of disaster, this is a singular omission, especially
as items destroyed have often been heavily endowed with meaning
and symbolism.
Rather different is the symbolic value of the victim in modern
society (Lifton 1980). Due partly to mass media constructs and
partly to the growing culture of blame, victims who survive disaster
assume the status of beneficiaries and acquire a degree of moral
authority. If they are articulate and well-organized they can become
significant players, perhaps even points of reference, in the debates
that follow extreme events (Mulwanda 1992). Certainly, in the
mass media victims are now often seen as being as authoritative as
33WHAT IS A DISASTER?
are technical experts. It is hard to determine whether this shows
the democratization of disaster or some kind of inversion of values.
DISASTER AS SPECTACLE
In the modern world the meaning of disaster cannot easily be
dissociated from how it is portrayed and interpreted by the mass
media (Couch 2000). In the popular culture shaped by and
reflected in the media, news is essentially whatever people are
interested in. Newsworthiness is defined by people’s interest level.
Disaster assumes a symbolic value as spectacle, as a story or saga,
or as competition, imbued with notions of the breakdown of society,
the spread of anarchy, heroic leadership and villainous malevolence.
At worst, such crude notions can descend to the level of voyeurism,
analogous to watching a spectacular crash at a motor race. Above
all, when there is a lack of personal experience to relate it to, an
event may become associated with the distillates or stereotypes of
popular culture.
Such shallowness is very much in the interests of the main
providers of information who are increasingly the same commercial
oligarchies that, through intensive lobbying, have done much to
shape the political process (Smith 1992). At its most negative,
modern journalism reports facts selectively to suit partisan or
commercial objectives, seldom explains causes adequately, simplifies
events until they are deprived of real meaning, and conflates
entertainment values with real-life ones until they become
indistinguishable. To obtain an accurate and objective picture of
situations requires much reading and comparison between reports.
The symbolic aspects of disaster can easily lead one away from real
understanding.
Newsworthiness also depends on the systems of values held in
common between the purveyors and consumers of news (Goltz
1984). In the western world we see an increasing primacy of the
entertainment industry in public communication. News and
entertainment are often conflated, or at least given equal weight.
Though people are interested in history, current affairs and
34 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
environment, they seem increasingly willing to accept versions of
events that lack depth. In the disasters field, there is no sign of an
end to the antagonism of popular culture and academic research.
For decades the latter has striven to debunk the model of the
breakdown of society in disaster. In this, mass panic and flight
occur, chaos and anarchy prevail, antisocial and competitive
behaviour proliferate, populations are stunned and made helpless
by sudden shock, and authoritarianism is the only means of
restoring calm and reason (Mitchell et al. 2000).
The primacy of image in the mass media does little to encourage
subtlety of interpretation. The breakdown of society remains
extraordinarily persistent in the western public’s mind, as this model
is continually reinforced by the products of mass entertainment.
Conspiracy theorists may argue that this very convenient for the
forces that command society, as it prepares the ground for Draconian
measures, should homeland security require them to be used.
Whether nor not that is so, globalization drives both the diffusion
of media stereotypes of disaster and the real patterns of change in
the impacts of extreme phenomena.
DISASTER AS A CONSEQUENCE
OF GLOBALIZATION
More than ever before, natural, technological and social
disasters are becoming internationalised. They are intertwined with
the course of human affairs in ways that were unimaginable decades
ago. The rapid global movement of capital and standardization of
information, the importance of disaster to geo-strategic policies,
and the multinational growth of poverty and marginalization all
have a bearing on our interpretation of calamity in the modern
world (Dembo et al. 1990). Disaster occurs against the background
of three separate worldwide tendencies:
• the onset of global change, which for the present
purposes means the possibility of more frequent or
higher magnitude natural hazard events;
35WHAT IS A DISASTER?
• the rise of globalization, which could signify more
frequent or higher magnitude exploitation, given its
tendency to concentrate power and wealth in the hands
of international corporations and oligarchies;
• the emergence of global consciousness in the form of a
collective, international attempt to fight injustice.
Although the alignments that prevailed during the Cold War
(1948-89) have changed, it appears that it may take 15 years or
more to shape the new pattern of global strategic alliances.
Currently it is not clear what the final balance of power and interests
will be. Capital has scored many victories over labor (hence the
second point, above), but there are signs of a resurgence in popular
consciousness in response to the excesses of capitalistic exploitation
(hence the third).
I suggested above that the contemporary challenge is to
democratize society’s responses to risk and disaster. However, there
are two kinds of democracy, not one. In the present day we have
become used to the idea that democracy should take its
representative form by allowing people to choose and vote
periodically for candidates at elections. This idea has been
vigorously fostered in western society by the mass media and has
proved convenient to the ruling oligarchies in that many people
tend to demonstrate innate conservatism in their choice of
candidates and political ideologies. It is wrongly supposed that
representative democracy is part of a tradition invented in the city-
states of Greece more than 2500 years ago. In fact, democracy was
born in its participatory form, which is now regarded by the rich
and powerful as “subversive,” because it involves direct collective
action.
If, for the purposes of argument, we consider representative
democracy to be “top-down” in its organization and participatory
democracy to be “bottom-up” or grass-roots based, then there is
clearly a need for more of the latter in disaster mitigation and
management throughout the world, for risks and emergencies
cannot be tackled effectively without robust local organization.
36 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
In fact, the Western mass media have put about the idea that
participatory democracy is inimical to representative democracy,
which it undermines. In reality, the two are complementary:
democracy cannot be healthy unless it is both participatory and
representative. Three aspects of modern western presidential and
parliamentary democracies suggest that they have become
insalubrious: first, people have become disaffected and, in many
cases, disinclined to vote; secondly, corruption in high places has
become very hard to stem, which points to a lack of accountability;
and thirdly, industrial and commercial lobbies seem to have gained
as much power as the voters have. Therefore it is hardly surprising
that resilience to disaster has only increased, where it has increased
at all, painfully slowly: in many places it lacks the essential
democratic base.
It is axiomatic that socio-economic stability is a pre-condition
for resilience against disaster. Instead, increased militarization has
had the effect of fragmenting and factionalizing peoples, as in
Colombia, Liberia, Somalia and Angola. A divide and rule strategy
has preserved the West’s global hegemony. But this is beginning
to look fragile. It is possible that people of entirely different
persuasions who are disaffected with the course of globalization
will eventually find common cause.
Clausewitz wrote that war is politics carried on by other means.
Others have since suggested that economics, more than politics,
are at the root (Atmore 2001). If this is true, then global polarization
is a response to economic forces which create and maintain the
forms of deprivation that foster ideological struggle. Globalization
has resulted in increasingly vast expenditures on defending
particular interests, especially the main sources of crude oil
exported to North America and Europe. The Persian Gulf War
of 1991, for example, is reputed to have cost $692 billion (1992
dollars) in short term expenditures on military action (Hillel 1994).
Policies leading to containment or regime change in Iraq have, at
the time of writing, met with only limited success but have been
extremely expensive.
37WHAT IS A DISASTER?
There seems to be no better example of lack of resilience to
disaster than that of Afghanistan. The rural and provincial areas of
the country, perhaps Kabul too, appear to be stuck at the lowest
level of mitigation and highest level of vulnerability. With regard
to one of the country’s most frequent kinds of natural disaster, the
earthquake, for the overwhelming majority of the population all
the achievements in seismic engineering and civil protection of the
last hundred years might as well never have happened. There is no
sign that progress has been made in protecting the population
since the magnitude 8.1 earthquake of 1907 that killed 12,000
Afghanis. Over most of the twentieth century lethal earthquakes
have occurred in the Hindu Kush at the rate of one every nine
years, but in the period 1993-2002 there were nearly 10,000
deaths in five events—once every two years. The trend is towards
larger, more lethal seismic disasters: the average magnitude is 6.3,
but twice as many people are killed as are significantly injured, a
clear sign of the severity of disasters or the heightened nature of
vulnerability in Afghanistan. The country is populated by an inter-
ethnic society. It slides towards the contemporary model of “war
lordism” by a process of vicious circles within vicious circles:
internal factions thrive because of the existence of external
divisions between the forces that have intervened in Afghanistan
(Atmore 2001). This, of course, is a disaster in its own right,
and it adds up to the complete stagnation of measures to reduce
the impact of other prevalent forms of disaster, such as earthquake
and landslide.
Many traditional societies still face up to the scourge of disaster
with religiously-inspired fatalism (Sims and Baumann 1972).
Catastrophe is once again an “Act of God”, a punishment for sins
committed, part of an inscrutable higher plan. Are we to call this
retrograde, a sign of cultural underdevelopment? Such means of
rationalizing disaster are coping mechanisms and we might judge
whether or not they are effective ones. Certainly the symbolism
involved is no worse than that constructed by the western media
(Vitaliano 1973, frontispiece).
38 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
CONCLUSION
Disasters are rationalized or interpreted according to the canons
and preoccupations of the contemporary period. Modern
interpretations are increasingly dominated by the new forms of
symbolism constructed by the mass communication industry
(Lombardi 1997). These encourage a shallow view of history and
strategic relationships, and thus a superficial approach to causality.
Instead, one needs to search for the explanations of disaster in the
global changes that are currently altering the scope and tenor of
international relations (Anderson 1997). On aggregate, vulnerability
to disaster is set to rise with the increasing polarization of a world
in which two billion people have practically no access to modern
technology and 800 million live in conditions of misery. As yet
they have little collective voice, but that cannot be true forever, as
present trends are unsustainable.
The foregoing discussion implies very strongly that disasters
in the modern world are an artifact of two forces: commercialism
and strategic hegemonies inherent in globalization. At the broadest
scale that may be true, though it does not preclude more traditional
interpretations based on primary vulnerability (Blaikie et al. 1994),
or more optimistic ones based on globalism (Kelman and Koukis
2000). Perhaps one reason why “disaster” will probably never be
completely, immutably defined is because the definition depends
on shifting portrayals and perceptions of what is significant about
the phenomenon. I would argue that it must be interpreted, and
continually reinterpreted in the context of contemporary issues.
NOTES
1 “Der Krieg ist nichts als eine Fortsetzung des politischen Verkehrs mit
Einmischung anderer Mittel.” War is nothing but a continuation of politics
with the admixture of other means. Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
Vom Kriege (1832-4) book. 8, chapter 6, section B.
39
2
ARE WE ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTION?
Susan L. Cutter
In his landmark volume, What is a Disaster?, Quarantelli
(1998b) lamented the state of theory building and conceptual
development the disasters field. In his imperturbable manner,
Quarantelli challenged the community to come to some conceptual
closure regarding the nature of a disaster—was it fundamentally a
social construction, some physical event, or a combination of the
two? As he stated, “ . . . unless we clarify and obtain minimum
consensus on the defining features per se, we will continue to talk
past one another on the characteristics, conditions and consequences
of disasters (Quarantelli 1998b:4).”
I submit that disasters studies (as recognized in the 1998
volume) are spending too much time and intellectual capital in
defining the phenomena under study, rather than in researching
more important and fundamental concerns of the field. The question
is not what is a disaster, but what is our vulnerability (and resiliency)
to environmental threats and extreme events? In other words, what
makes human and environmental systems vulnerable and more or
less resilient to threats and extreme events? As conceptual frameworks,
vulnerability and resiliency imply an examination of human systems,
natural (or environmental) and technological systems, and the
interconnectedness between them. It is, in fact, the linkages and
interdependencies between these three systems and the built
40 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
environment that amplify or attenuate vulnerability. While each
component can be studied independently, it is the interaction that
becomes most important in understanding vulnerability, resiliency,
and their correlates. To use the old adage, the whole (vulnerability) is
greater than the sum of its parts (human systems, the built
environment, technological systems, natural systems).
TALKING PAST EACH OTHER
It has always been a source of professional frustration that as
the risk, hazards, and disasters communities evolved along parallel
paths, there was little intersection and integration of knowledge
between them (Cutter 2001a). White (1988) noted this
communication and intellectual divide more than a decade ago,
when he opined that the risk analysis field failed to include the
social context within which risks occurred, a fundamentally
important element for social scientists. With a few rare exceptions,
there is very little crossover in literature, concepts, and methodologies
among these three communities who study disasters (Kunreuther
and Slovic 1996). Simply put, we rarely read each other’s work unless
it is in our own academic discipline (e.g. geography, sociology,
planning) or in our own hazard specialty domain (e.g. earthquakes,
floods, hazardous technologies). Why is this?
The segregation of the research community is due to a number
of factors, among them differences in the type of event examined
(natural hazards, technological risks, industrial failures); methods
employed (qualitative versus quantitative analyses, computer
modeling and simulations versus survey interviews); and outlets
for research findings (Risk Analysis, International Journal of Mass
Emergencies and Disasters, Natural Hazards Review, Environmental
Hazards, Disasters). In many ways, the risk, hazards, and disasters
communities could not (and still do not) fully understand each
other’s “science”. How are we ever going to advance social science
perspectives on risk, hazards, and disasters if we are unaware of the
totality of social science perspectives that can be brought to bear?
There are many critical challenges that confront the disaster research
41WHAT IS A DISASTER?
and practitioner communities. How we approach them will dictate
the relevance of disaster studies in the future. Will the field be
mired in the depths of ontological debates on the meaning of
disaster, risk, hazards, and vulnerability? Or, will the field forge
ahead with new understandings of how these phenomenon affect
the human condition, how human agency increases or decreases
their temporal and spatial distribution, and how individuals, social
groups, and society at large perceives of and responds to external
threats, regardless of their origin?
REFLEXIVE SOCIETIES AND ADAPTIVE THREATS
The centrality of risk in modern society pervades everyday life—
from the food that we eat, to the water we drink, to the air we
breathe, to where we live and work. We live in a global risk society
(Beck 1992; Adam, Beck and Van Loon 2000), one that is
influenced by a myriad of global processes, many of which interact
to produce unforeseen dangers and an endless array of risks. The
range and diversity of threats that face modern society are too
numerous to catalog and they constantly change. Some arise from
the intersection of human use and natural systems, which in turn
are exacerbated by social practices such as construction in known
floodplains or along coastal margins (Heinz Center 2002). Others
are seemingly random events, by-products of locational choices,
decisions often constrained by class (Davis 1998), privilege (Pulido
2000), and gender (Fothergill 1996, Enarson and Morrow 1998).
Some threats are perpetuated over time and across space creating a
disaster culture replete with unsustainable practices. Others like
human-induced threats, such as terrorism, are equally complex,
yet they entail even greater challenges in detection, warning, and
response because of their adaptive nature. There is little constancy
to the threat, which is highly responsive to changing conditions
and opportunities in both targets and methods. If detected, the
terrorist simply changes the preferred target, location, method of
delivery, or scale of the attack. Under these conditions, it is very
difficult to assess all the known points of vulnerability within
42 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
modern systems, systems that in turn give rise to and ultimately
produce the global risk society.
The global extent of risks (and disasters and hazards) does not
imply that they are equally distributed among all places or among
all social groups. Often, they are also influenced by societal needs
and wants, which are quite variable as well. The reflexive nature of
the risk society (influences risk production and is influenced by
risks) suggests a need to move away from analyses (and control
strategies) based on singular events with proximate causes
(somewhat akin to a simple cause and effect model) toward a more
dynamical understanding of the global interdependence of human,
natural, and technological systems. The interaction of these systems
in untold ways produces risks, hazards, and disasters, or what some
term, complex emergencies. Some are controllable, others are
unintended; some have spatial-temporal limits, while others are
simply accepted by those affected. The scare of the week or hazard
de jour approach to the disasters field is rapidly becoming passé. In
its place, we see a more complicated and nuanced set of explanations
that help us to understand how, where and why human
intervention 1) changes the way in which individuals and societies
cognize and detect threats, 2) reduces the initiating sources and
root causes of threats, 3) mediates vulnerability to threats, and 4)
improves resiliency and responses to threats.
POST-SEPTEMBER 11th
The world was significantly altered by the events of September
11, 2001 in both incalculable and measurable ways. The trio of
events on that day—airline crash in Pennsylvania, airline projectile
into the Pentagon, and the collapse of the World Trade Center in
New York City—were clearly disasters. There is no debate about
that. Disaster researchers were mobilized and dispatched into the
field to examine a wide range of post disaster event responses
(Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center
2003). These field studies included an examination of student
responses in New York City (Peek 2002); the development of
43WHAT IS A DISASTER?
emergent organizations in the crisis response (Tierney 2002),
mental health impacts (Sattler 2002), institutional warnings and
response (Grant et al. 2002; Rubin and Renda-Tenali 2001); and the
role of geographic information technologies and digital disaster
assistance in the rescue and relief efforts (Thomas et al. 2002; Michaels
2001). This is what the community does extremely well—applications
of our social science in understanding the immediate disaster situation
and assisting in recovery operations. What we don’t do as well or as
consistently is examining the historical antecedents (Alexander 2002),
or underlying conditions (or root causes) that produced such an
unexpected event in the first place (Blaikie et al. 1994).
Why didn’t we foresee the events of 9/11 occurring? How did
we become so vulnerable in the first place? How can we reduce our
vulnerability and make society, the built environment, and the
natural world more resilient in the face of unanticipated, unexpected,
and unknown threats? How do we move beyond the singular
disaster or disaster situation to a more robust understanding of
local conditions and the geography of the everyday that gives rise
to crises in the first place? What conceptual frameworks and
organizational structures are required to anticipate and respond to
human-induced deliberate threats? Can we build a more secure
homeland with increasing security without reductions in privacy,
civil liberties, and trust in democratic institutions?
I have intentionally conflated the terms to make the point.
Disasters research, thus far, has failed in responding to many of
these questions, but this is precisely how a shift in our orientation
towards vulnerability science can assist and advance our thinking.
So where do we begin? How do we identify non-structural
vulnerabilities in society? How do we understand our vulnerability
to the unknown? What theoretical constructs are required to address
vulnerability from a social science perspective?
A PARADIGM SHIFT
A number of researchers have commented on the need for a
redirection of risk, hazards, and disasters research into understanding
44 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
vulnerability and reorienting disaster policy (Comfort et al. 1999;
Cutter 2001b, 2003). Science, as a 20th century construct has lost
some of its explanatory power in anticipating and understanding
unexpected events. Questions surrounding applied versus basic science
(Stokes 1997), science as a driver for technological change, and science
in support of public policy have increased science’s own vulnerability
as the dominant explanatory paradigm. This has lead some to question
whether we’ve reached the limits of scientific explanation (Horgan
1996). For example, one of the most powerful weapons in the terrorist
arsenal is fear. How do we understand the social consequences of fear
in modern society and what does this tell us about individual and
collective willingness to respond to and recover from disasters? One of
the conclusions of the National Research Council’s (2002) post-
September 11th study, Making the Nation Safer, was a need for better
understanding of human systems—how people respond to crises and
threats; how they reduce their vulnerability to them; what social
conditions give rise to terrorist threats in the first place. Yet, the
contributions from the disasters research community are conspicuous
by their absence or unknowing misinterpretation.
In responding to the events of 9/11, the geographical community
developed a research agenda on the geographical dimensions of
terrorism (Cutter et al. 2003) and highlighted a number of research
themes focusing on variability in the root causes, geo-spatial
technologies, and hazards research including vulnerability. Many of
the research questions that were identified transcend disciplinary
boundaries and thus form a core set of topics that warrant further
investigation by the research community interested in risk, hazards,
and disasters as well as vulnerability science (Cutter 2001b, 2003).
These broad domains are listed below:
Root causes/driving forces—Identification of the root causes,
underlying conditions, and driving forces that amplify
or attenuate vulnerability across social groups, over time,
and through space.
Risk transference—Role of current policies and practices in
transferring threat burdens from one social group to
45WHAT IS A DISASTER?
another or from one institution to another, transference
of threat burdens from one generation to another
(generational inequity), and risk relocation (spatial
transference from one region or place to another).
Dynamic models—Advancements in risk, hazards exposure,
and consequences modeling that link events to impacts
(biophysical and social) and to causal factors in dynamic
ways.
Vulnerability/resiliency indicators—Development of relative
indicators of vulnerability to enable comparisons among
social groups and/or places.
Decision making under uncertainty—Enhanced understanding
of individual and collective decision making processes,
especially those decisions made under high levels of
uncertainty.
Perception-behavioral linkages—Role of fear, emotions, trust,
personal responsibility, and altruism in risk perception,
risk sharing, and disaster response.
Capturing surprise—Incorporate surprise, uncertainty, and
adaptability into models of understanding human
responses to disasters and unexpected events.
Emergence and convergence—Role of emergent technologies,
organizations, social groups in anticipatory planning
for and response to disasters, role of convergence in
response, and conditions that support adaptive
behaviors during crises.
Universality and replication—Movement beyond localized
case studies and after-event analyses to broader
generalizations of human responses to environmental
threats and unexpected events utilizing both qualitative
and quantitative analytical techniques.
AFFORDABLE DISASTERS?
Disaster research was conceived as an applied subject—an effort
to engage the sociological community in responding to an external
46 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
threat, initially viewed as warfare and then later expanded into
disaster studies (Gilbert 1998; Quarantelli 1988b). This public
policy orientation is one of the great strengths of the field and is as
important today as it was fifty years ago, perhaps more so.
The United States has a set of policy constructs that enable
the federal government to assist state and local communities in the
aftermath of a natural hazard or unexpected event. Largely codified
and implemented under the auspices of the Robert T. Stafford
Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (commonly known
as the Stafford Act) disaster policy in the U.S. essentially begs the
question of what is a disaster? As defined in the legislation, a major
disaster
. . . means any natural catastrophe (including hurricane,
tornado, storm, high water, wind driven water, tidal wave,
tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption, landslide, mudslide,
snowstorm, or drought), or, regardless of cause, any fire,
flood, or explosion, in any part of the United States, which
in the determination of the President causes damage of
sufficient severity and magnitude to warrant major disaster
assistance under this chapter to supplement the efforts and
available resources of States, local governments, and disaster
relief organizations in alleviating the damage, loss, hardship,
or suffering caused thereby (FEMA 2003).
As many have suggested (Platt 1999; Downton and Pielke
2001), the mechanism for declaring Presidential disasters (and
thus determining what is a major disaster) is essentially a political
process, not a determination based on a consistent definition or
clear-cut criteria. Are disasters the same for all places? How do we
know whether they are or are not?
Some communities are more resilient to environmental hazards
and unexpected events than others. This resiliency is derived, in
part, from individual wealth and financial health; human resources
and social networks; infrastructure age and density; adequate
planning, mitigation, and preparedness; local governance; and the
47WHAT IS A DISASTER?
site and situation (absolute and relative location) of communities.
A million dollar loss in Miami-Dade County, Florida, for example,
might be expensive and devastating to the individuals who incurred
the loss, but in fact might be quite “absorbable” within the existing
financial setting of the county. It might even spur a rise in economic
growth given the need to rebuild and recover. If this same million-
dollar loss was to occur in eastern North Carolina, say in Edgecombe
County (where Princeville, a historic African American community
hard hit by Hurricane Floyd is located), it could prove devastating
to the community. Edgecombe County had a local economy based
on slave labor and plantation agriculture (cotton and tobacco).
The declining agricultural base, the county’s rural nature devoid
of any industrial development, the above average levels of poverty,
and the below average levels of educational attainment all contribute
to Edgecombe’s vulnerability and weaken its ability to respond in the
aftermath of a disaster such as Hurricane Floyd. At what point does
an event overwhelm local capacity to respond and recover? Is this
point the same for all communities and all states? Should there be a
minimum threshold of disruption, lives lost, property damage to even
qualify as a disaster, regardless of where you are? Similarly, are some
disasters affordable while others are not, and if so, according to whom?
How might the concept of an “affordable disaster” be manifested
socially, economically, politically, temporally, and spatially?
These questions require sound social scientific responses to
help us understand the socioeconomic and demographic differences
among communities and how this influences their vulnerability
and resiliency to environmental threats. Perhaps a differential system
of qualification (with minimum thresholds, and triaged based on
local capacities) for Presidential disaster declarations might be
warranted rather than a one-size-fits-all model, which is subject to
political whim and favoritism, and the continued irresponsibility
of state and local governments. Disaster studies and broader-based
social science perspectives will be important in helping to
reformulate disaster policy in the U.S. This type of research is
what the community should be pursuing, not examining semantic
differences in our terminology.
48 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
CONCLUSIONS
While it is important to advance conceptual and theoretical
understanding of the field, we also must be vigilant to apply this
knowledge in the solution of real-world concerns and every day
issues. The prescriptive agenda suggested here will position the
field to undertake the requisite research on the “big unanswered”
questions in disaster studies, while at the same time enhancing
our capabilities to inform policy makers and local responders on
the human dimensions of disasters and emergency response. It is
difficult to do one without the other.
We are facing a future full of pessimism. The events of
September 11, 2001, as tragic as they were, provided a newly
found respect for the social sciences, especially those engaged in
risk, hazards, and disasters research. We must capitalize on this
and turn our knowledge base and practical experience into
addressing some of the most vexing issues in the next decade. The
motivating question for this new paradigm is not what is a disaster,
but rather what makes people and places vulnerable (and resilient) to
environmental threats and unexpected events?
49
3
DISASTER: A “REALITY” OR CONSTRUCT”?
PERSPECTIVE FROM THE “EAST”
Rohit Jigyasu
Disaster is a term, which has been defined, understood and
packaged by the so-called “experts” to an extent that disaster
reduction has become merely a problem solving exercise. The
definers declare what they perceive as a problem and how they
intend to solve it (Dombrowsky 1998: 19). Gilbert (1998: 11)
has classified numerous theoretical approaches to disasters into
three main paradigms:
The first is disaster as a duplication of war (catastrophe can be
imputed to an external agent; human communities are entities
that react globally against aggression). The second is disaster as an
expression of social vulnerabilities (disaster is the result of underlying
community logic, of an inward and social process). The third is
disaster as an entrance into a state of uncertainty (disaster is tightly
tied into the impossibility of defining real or supposed, especially
after the upsetting of the mental frameworks we use to know and
understand reality).
Disaster has been viewed in its extended scope and definition
by taking into account all these perspectives and together these
form the basis on which disaster vulnerability is understood and
defined. The bottom line of all these paradigms is that disaster is
50 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
supposed to represent total or near total breakdown of local systems.
Ironically, the dilemma with all these paradigms is that while on
one hand they define disaster as an objective reality, on the other
hand measures to reduce disaster seem to be so far from reality,
that in most cases one finds that disaster vulnerability is increasing
at very fast pace. Dombrowsky (1998:19) rightly states that
emancipation of the field from everyday knowledge and from the
practical needs of disaster management has been neglected during
the phase of its establishment.
This leads us to ask several questions. Has disaster lost touch
with the reality? If yes, why this is so? What is this reality, after all?
Is there anything that we can say is universally “real” or reality
itself is a construct, specific to shared values, thinking processes
and visions of the groups of people—which we call communities.
Many or rather most of the times, these values, thinking processes
and visions are consciously or sub-consciously shaped by religious
philosophies, which have broadly or rather vaguely been categorized
as “western” and “eastern”. The latter is primarily based on
Hinduism and Buddhism, two great religions that originated in
South Asian subcontinent. In this chapter, I will make an attempt
at understanding the “reality” of disaster from “eastern” perspective.
Let us begin by discussing the main aspects, which help us
d e f i n e t h e s c o p e a n d e x t e n t o f t h e “re a l i t y” o f d i s a s t e r.
Dombrowsky (1998) sees disaster as the outcome of a scientific
tradition that is “concentrated in time and space”, implying
that disaster has mainly two types of “reality;” the spatial and
the temporal. In the following sections, I will discuss each of
these in detail with respect to spatial and temporal connotations
in “eastern” way of thought
DISASTER: A “SPATIAL” REALITY
Disaster has clear geographical connotations with defined extent
and boundaries. In fact space characterizes key local factors that
trigger disasters. These include natural hazards such as earthquakes
that a particular space is exposed to. Also it is characterised by
51WHAT IS A DISASTER?
local vulnerability processes at a particular point of time. Needless
to say, space is also defined by the natural resources available and
not to forget the people who inhabit that particular space and
intervene over time to create a distinct cultural landscape. Disaster
adversely affects the natural and human resources characterising
the space and creates sudden disruption in the local processes
defining human environment relationships in that particular space.
All these aspects help us to spatially delimit disasters.
Now let us understand how space is understood and defined
in an “eastern” way of thought. The physical manifestation remains
the same, as this is the reality which human senses can perceive,
irrespective of social, cultural or religious background. However,
in eastern thought, such a physical manifestation gets directly
linked to the understanding at sub-conscious level, which give
shape and deeper meaning to the landscape. Such a landscape
is constructed through symbolic representations, sometimes even
representing the whole cosmos at the micro level (Galtung 1979;
Vatsayan 1994). This has clear philosophical connotations, which
I would not pursue in detail. However, the main point is that
space—its elements and processes—is no longer “real”, but in fact
a “construction” at one or more levels of consciousness, which we
will discuss later in detail.
This forces us to go beyond our traditional understanding of
disaster as a spatial reality and view it as a phenomenon, which has
impact deeper than visual. Its comprehension goes deeper for its
effect on human perceptions. Disaster is no longer bounded by
the physical boundaries; rather it extends deeper into human
consciousness, extending much beyond physically perceived
boundaries. The psychological impact of this is very deep. It is
much deeper than one can expect, not only shaping the way people
perceive the cause of disasters but also the way they respond to it.
Interestingly, similar kinds of symbolical associations shape the
perceptions and response actions as the ones, which give meaning
to the space in the first place. However, there is always a limit to
what our senses and the tools available can measure and these in
fact pose a limit to individual ability of comprehension.
52 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
DISASTER: A “TEMPORAL” REALITY
Our understanding of disasters is also linked to temporal
dimensions. In fact the changing theoretical paradigms of disaster
mentioned before are very much linked to the notion of time. The
perception of disaster as an “event” implies that disaster has a point
of beginning and an end. Therefore we categorize disaster situations
with reference to the event in focus; before, during and after
disasters. This also determines disaster management actions as
prevention or mitigation (before), emergency response (during)
and long term rehabilitation and development (after), which
together form part of disaster management cycle. When viewed
this way, disaster has periods of onset, development and finally
an end One wonders, if it begins at a moment in time and
stops at another moment; the moment being the smallest
possible unit in time scale, which our senses or available tools
can visualise. While considering disaster this way, we view time
in a linear scale. (Jigyasu 2002)
However the “eastern” notion of time is cyclic; an endless cycle
of birth and death, creation and destruction, implying that there
is no beginning or an end (Galtung, 1979; Vatsayan, 1994). When
seen from this perspective, disasters repeat themselves as part of
this endless cycle of creation and destruction. Although, this seems
to be compatible with widely accepted disaster management cycle,
the division of cycle into clearly demarcated phases, is very much
part of the “reality” that we construct for the sake of comprehension.
However, when we dissolve these thresholds which distinguish one
phase from another, disaster is a continuum; a part of the continuous
complex process, which cannot be clearly distinguished.
Another interesting aspect of this continuum is that the cyclic
process is not really a cycle, as we do not return to the point from
where we begin. This is because nothing is permanent. All things
change. One has to work hard to reach salvation (Buddha, 543BC).
Our actions and thinking processes can change the point of return
in a way that we return but not exactly at the same point. It is part
of our evolution process in a cyclic loop (and not a cycle). So we
53WHAT IS A DISASTER?
discover that even the “reality” of time is what we “construct” for
the sake of comprehension.
THE “EXPERIENTIAL” DIMENSION
Now that we are breaking boundaries between “reality” and
“construct”, I would like to bring in the third dimension, which is
crucial in our understanding of disaster but has often been
overlooked. This is “experiential” dimension, which is inherently
linked to our cognition levels determined by three modes of
comprehension, namely conscious (visible), sub-conscious (hidden)
and unconscious (invisible) modes. In fact, the “spatial” and
“temporal” constructs that we discussed before get their enlarged
meanings when we adopt a holistic view combining these three
modes, each of which I will discuss briefly.
The visible pratakshya refers to the tangible aspect,
which is mostly physical. The world itself is an illusion and
its material content is completely destructible. The illusion
is created to confuse oneself from the right path of God.
The Maya or illusion seduces one into the “worldly materialist
aspects away from God and the real experience and thus all
tangible aspects are of no or very little importance (Gupta
2003). This mode of comprehension is most easily and
clearly measured by our senses.
The hidden, covered, adrishya is the second level where
one starts recognizing the illusion and making the effort of
“discovering” (trying finding the truth and the meanings).
This aspect is represented in nature, as it is believed that
whatever God “created” (even illusionary) is greater than
man-made, so sacred gets associated with nature. The divine
aspect of trees, mountains, rivers, water bodies, forests, stones
etc. may not be apparent but needs discovery and creativity
in this mode of comprehension (Gupta 2003). The “visible”
manifestation of this hidden aspect is in the form of rituals
and practices.
54 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
The invisible, intangible, apratakshya can never be
seen by “human eye” and can only be accessed through
a pure heart. However, it can be experienced. This is
considered as the “true” landscape where all tangible
and intangible, visible and hidden aspects become
meaningless. The quality is only experiential without
any physical attributes. It is something, which is a
perfection of divinity and even difficult to define (ibid.)
One of the important aspects which come forth in the last
mode of comprehension is that human being is inseparable part of
these “constructs”. After all, these are “constructed” within his “self ”,
which is defined metaphorically but experienced spiritually.
Importantly, “experience” is different from “perception”. The latter
determines opinion and not comprehension.
Now I return to our discussion on disasters. “Experiencing” a
disaster may be part of survival strategy; a source of continuity of
existence, by accepting disaster as part of the endless cycle of birth
and death. Within experiential mode, disaster is not an event to
fight with; it is part of existence to live with. In a way, this seems
to point to a tendency to turn people passive and not take actions
they are supposed to take. Clearly this might be the case, but on
the other hand, this also turns out to be an effective psychological
coping mechanism that helps communities to live with disasters.
THE UNDERLYING REASON: INTERNAL CHAOS ?
I shall like to extend the discussion from the core question “What
is a disaster? to finding out the underlying causes of disaster in the
first place and also probing the reasons for its increasing frequency
and intensity. This will again require an understanding much beyond
the tangible level of comprehension. In the present age, we are changing
at a fast pace, faster than ever before. We have reached a point where
science and technology has completely over-dominated our lives. From
a tool, it has become a weapon, which is turning back on us; from
masters of technology; we have become its slaves.
55WHAT IS A DISASTER?
This has a direct implication on our conception of space and
time. At spatial level, world has become much smaller due to
increasing mobility and powerful media images, which was
unthinkable proposition before. However, contrar y to these
achievements, it is getting larger in our subconscious mind. We
tend to see it physically so small, but perceive many more
distinctions within it. Similar changes are happening at temporal
level. We have been able to beat time through sophisticated
technology but now we have reached a stage, where time is beating
us. We are no longer able to get hold of it, rather always running
after it. Undoubtedly, our ability to grasp time and space are being
severely delimited, if not at the physical level, at the experiential
and metaphysical level.
We, the humans (I would say, humans will be more appropriate
term than human beings as many times, we cease to exist as beings;
forget what is “to be”) are finding ourselves in the midst of deep
metaphorically divisions. We have become “educated” and
supposedly “expert” with tonnes of information loads and not
necessarily knowledge (to know one needs to develop cognitive
thinking abilities). We make notions of “development”, which are
primarily visible in nature and overlook other dimensions. On the
other hand, the local “illiterate” people (I will call them illiterate
and not ignorant as they may have their cognitive abilities but
may not be formally able to read and write) may have the hidden
and invisible dimensions intact but fail to link these to the visible
reality. To substantiate this, I will cite an example from my own
“eastern” context.
River Ganga and Yamuna are the holiest rivers for Hindus.
The spiritual association with these rivers has been so strong that
it has led to the evolution of one of the greatest civilizations in the
world. In fact religious landscapes like Braj, in which the story of
Lord Krishna”s childhood is interwoven with the natural landscape,
have evolved around these rivers. Undoubtedly, the visible qualities
of these human interventions were (and remain) of extraordinary
architectural and ecological merit. For generations these have been
maintained without much or rather any help from the so called
56 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
“experts;” the distinct elitist category of engineers, architects, disaster
managers, sociologists, that we, the users of this book, identify
ourselves with.
To get to the issue lets look at the present status. Most of the
rituals and beliefs remain as strong as ever (in fact, many of them
have become more intense for better or for worse). So the hidden
and invisible dimensions are intact to a great extent. But what
about their “visible” condition?
The rivers are polluted to dangerous proportions. In fact these
have become dumping grounds for throwing all kinds of waste.
There is a clear indifference towards cultural heritage, which in
more tangible aspects continuous to be replaced by poor and ugly
“modern” construction. So most of the times, even new creation is
not visibly pleasing. True, these are directly linked to increasing
poverty, urbanisation and population growth. But on close
inspection, one can easily see that much of the threats to visible
aspects of cultural heritage are due to indifference and neglect. It
seems that heritage is slowly but consistently being disowned by
its own bearers. It is like separating body from the soul.
Now let us look at the way, we “the experts” handle the
problems. To get rid of pollution in these “holy” rivers, an action
plan was drafted in early 90s spending millions of dollars from
international aid. Most of this money was used to install sewage
treatment plants to clean the water. Nearly every town along these
rivers established these plants, including the holy cities of Mathura
and Vrindavan, which were part of sacred landscape that I
mentioned before. So the entire urban sewage in these towns was
collected through electrically driven motors. These were installed
in a direction opposite to the natural slope to prevent the sewage
to flow towards the river. The entire system was heavily dependent
on technology. Also it required regular maintenance. Contrary to
this, the traditional system worked obeying the natural landform.
Not to mention, there also existed some local ecological ways and
means to dispose the sewage. People had a certain sense of
responsibility towards the river, which deliberately prevented them
from doing those things, which polluted the river. Now, this I
57WHAT IS A DISASTER?
would not say was a perfect system, but nevertheless it worked to
an extent that we read such beautiful accounts of pleasant
experiences of the pilgrims and travellers.
But what is the status of these plants now? Most of them are
not working at all or working half of their original capacity. This is
because there is not enough electricity to keep them running all
the time and once power fails, the entire sewage system gets clogged
and pollutes the river (remember it is in a direction opposite to
natural topography). And the “visible” results are devastating. Most
people do not take the initiative as they think, technology is meant
to do the job. So here is what we end up with solely techno-centric
way of thinking.
Here one can see clear dilemma and conflict at two levels.
First, increasing gap between visible, hidden and invisible
dimensions. Second, between the perceptions of “experts” and local
people. No longer are we able to make the link between the three
levels of cognition. We need to ask ourselves, why this is so? Are
these a result of some deeper struggle that we are entangled within
ourselves, at this stage of our super technological advancement?
(Malik, 1990, 1995). I believe that this internal chaos is the
underlying cause of the slow onset of disaster situation; the central
subject of our discussion.
CONCLUSION
We are now at the “crossroads” where we suffer from this internal
chaos and all this is getting reflected in what we call “a disaster”.
Although it is triggered by an extreme natural hazard, it is a slow
onset process, which is making us, the humans, not just physically
but mentally more vulnerable than ever before. We are living in an
age of “lost” generations, which are neither able to reap benefits of
what we call as “modern”, nor able to make use of traditional
systems developed over time through trial and error, which seem
to have become outdated.
According to me, the main reason for all these contradictions
is that we no longer live on our own terms; by this I mean those
58 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
conditions which are collectively defined by particular group of
people with shared values and visions. Although our perception of
world has drastically changed, thanks to technological
advancement, our humanness (that we can not deny even if we
want) enables us to relate best to other humans through these
shared values and visions. No matter how much these values and
visions change, they still exist in various forms.
There is a deep division between our perceptions of what is
“modern” and what is “traditional”. The former carries with itself
the notions of development of “backward” traditional communities;
while latter either implies outdated knowledge or nostalgic images
to be romanticised. Our perceptions have taken over our ability of
comprehension at various levels. We no longer look deep inwards
but tend to look outwards, denying “internal” contradictions as
well as capacities. All this clearly influences the actions that we
take to reduce the impact of disaster.
I shall like to exemplify this on a more tangible level by citing
the case of post earthquake reconstruction process following 1993
earthquake in Marathwada region in India. The reconstructed
villages had “city-like” plan with wide streets forming grid-.iron
pattern and row housing. The designers in the local town planning
office perceived that such a “modern” planning would ensure
“development” of “backward” local communities. Ironically many
local people also shared this perception. Interestingly however,
several years after the quake, the villagers themselves have initiated
drastic changes in these tailor-made designs to suit their way of
life. Moreover, “earthquake resistant” technology, which was
imported as rigid design packages has failed to take roots with
local communities, owing to the fact that these were found to be
unsuited to local climate, affordability and identity. Besides in the
absence of proper workmanship, these in fact have resulted in poor
constructions, which ironically are even poorer than traditional
technology that they have replaced (Jigyasu 2001). Such examples
are not uncommon. In fact, we continue to see the same
phenomenon and repeat the same mistakes, over and over again,
irrespective of geographical context. Again, I would emphasis that
59WHAT IS A DISASTER?
this should force us to look for deeper reasons behind all this,
which I have mentioned before.
I would like to conclude this discussion by stressing on the
fact that “disaster” is not just about spatial and temporal reality
that has to be resisted. Disaster is as much rooted in consciousness
of “the self ”, which makes and breaks these spatial and temporal
boundaries. This rediscovering of “the self ” places ethics and
responsibility on each human being. In this experiential realm,
we start from “the self ”, move on to the community (with whom
we share values and visions by choice and not compulsion) and
to other levels, even extending to the cosmos (the most
perceivable entity). But at the end, we must return and get
connected to “the self ”.
This implies that our understanding of disaster needs to be
turned inside out and not the other way around, as it tends to
become, thanks to the “expert” notions of what is a disaster. There
needs to be a strong interface between “reality” of disaster constructed
by us “the experts” and the one created by the victims, based on
their worldviews. After all, “reality” is nothing but a “construct;” it
is about rediscovering “the self.” Only “the self ” is real in the sense
that it is insurmountable truth of our existence; omnipresent in
visible, hidden and invisible realms of consciousness.
Rather than wasting all our time and efforts in finding out
ways to fight the disaster as an external objective reality, we need
to live with disaster, not as passive recipients but as proactive
participants. This essentially requires moving from “perceptual”
mode of thinking (that unfortunately we have got entangled at
present) to an “experiential” mode of comprehension. To this end,
I would even deny the very understanding and divisions of so called
“east” and “west” that we construct as part of perceptual reality.
The perspective on disaster that I have brought forward through
this discussion is not “eastern”; it is rather “human”.
60
4
WHAT’S A WORD? OPENING
UP THE DEBATE
Neil R. Britton
Definitions are meant to be clarifying statements that assist to
distinguish a specific phenomenon from others in a way that
highlights any unique attribute or set of differentiating features so
that all potential social actors, operating in similar social time and
social space, can extract the same, or similar, meaning and/or
application from the term. However, to achieve this there needs at
the very least, to be consensus about what the distinguishing features
are. This might be achieved by comparing phenomena that have
some level of commonality but when put side by side, the
uniqueness of each is made clearer: this is what I tried to do, primarily
for my own benefit, in an early attempt to understand what a
disaster was (Britton 1986). Since many terms are dependent on
others, for example the concept of masculine is dependent in
explanation as well as in social action on the reciprocal concept of
feminine this approach has some sense. However, defining
phenomenon by comparison only will not by itself provide a full
explanation. A concept should stand in its own right; its uniqueness
should be expressed. If this is not possible then perhaps it is not a
unique phenomenon and is dependent on reciprocal relationships.
Hence a relative distinction may be all that is required for social
61WHAT IS A DISASTER?
actors in social time and social space to develop a mutual
acknowledgement of what “it” is. This last point is significant
because, at the end of the day, if different groups of social actors
cannot agree on what “it” is in terms of distinguishing features or,
more importantly, about how to explain the phenomenon then
successful social action based on mutual understanding will be
difficult to achieve. For a notion like “disaster” with its connotation
that specific social action is an associative factor, this is an important
consideration.
Is it important that disaster has a “pure” definition or is a
relational explanation acceptable? I don’t know the answer, although
in many ways this seems to be where we are in the current debate.
We appear to be having problems reaching agreement on what we
are dealing with in a pure sense even though we all seem to agree
on, and are comfortable with, the parameters that distinguish
disaster from other relative terms. Is there anything really wrong
then, working with a concept that portrays “family resemblance”,
as Tony Oliver-Smith (1999: 21) aptly puts it? I acknowledge that
for some, such as most of those who contributed to the 1998 text
(which includes Oliver-Smith), and its precursor, the 1995 special
volume of the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters,
that developing a precise definition for “disaster” is an intellectual
challenge worth the effort; even if this is undertaken by a
comparatively homogeneous group of social actors (that is, scholars),
albeit from a range of disciplines that have very different start and
end points. There is no doubt that scholars have been a major
contributing force in helping wider society recognize that disaster,
as a specific phenomenon, has distinct characteristics and that these
need to be taken into account in terms of social organization.
Moreover, many of these same scholars have turned their attention
to implementation strategies that has enabled a generation of
practitioners to more readily utilize the results of research. This
contribution has been outstanding and it is a legacy that these
researchers should be especially proud.
My suggestion, however, and hence the point of this essay, is
to bring into the debate the perspective of emergency management
62 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
practitioners. The fact that researchers and practitioners have distinct
cultures, institutional constraints and rewards, linkages and
interaction needs (Fothergill 2000:93) would add strength to any
definition produced. To be fair, scholars who study disasters have
never claimed sovereignty over this field, and I am not asserting
otherwise. In fact, most of the contributors to What is a Disaster?
mention in some way or another that other actors have and need
working definitions. Equally, the current group of disaster scholars
exploring issues of definition are themselves an eclectic lot covering
several disciplines, mostly from the social sciences. I suspect that
this is also one of the reasons why the debate is still open-ended
currently, since different disciplines naturally have different construct
parameters and focus on different attributes. This is the strength
of inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural research and is one of the
many reasons why disaster research is such an exciting field to be
part of. To be fairer still, there are ample opportunities for scholars
and practitioners to come together to discuss, debate, refine and
reflect on issues of definitions and their implications, and many of
these opportunities are regularly taken up. In recent years this has
been made easier because of increasing professionalism within
emergency management and in particular the development of
university-level degree courses now being offered in disasters. This
latter point is important because degree courses provide researcher
and practitioner with common platforms. Nevertheless, it is the
emergency manager who has to interpret definitions, circumstances
and information from which to develop disaster pertinent strategies,
policies, procedures and practices. It is also the emergency manager
who has to negotiate, mobilize and maintain resources from which
to create appropriate public safety programs. How emergency
managers view the world and how they define disaster is therefore
highly relevant. So, why not bring disaster researcher and emergency
practitioner together to work on the matter of “what is a disaster?”
I acknowledge this would not be an easy task. For one thing,
such an activity necessitates a definition of emergency management:
and here I agree with Waugh’s (2000) observation that a major
problem in defining emergency management today is finding the
63WHAT IS A DISASTER?
boundaries of the field; and the field is as broad as the risks that
society faces. Similarly, many practitioners would dismiss such an
exercise as too esoteric, and no doubt some academics would dismiss
the idea as being mundane, although I suspect that these views are
not as prevalent now as they were even a few years ago. There are
nonetheless some helpful signs. For example, the evolution of
emergency management practice closely follows advances in disaster
research, especially within the social sciences (Drabek 1991; Lindell
and Perry 1992; Lindell and Perry 2004). Likewise, as Anderson
and Mattingly (1991) observed over a decade ago, a symbiotic
relationship exists between the disaster researcher and the
emergency manager. Indeed, since an explicit public policy
component to hazard and disaster research exists in several countries,
many scholars have an interest in, and concern about knowledge
transfer (Fothergill 2000). More significantly, researchers and
practitioners are together developing a sustainable hazard mitigation
approach to disaster reduction (Mileti 2002). There is also the
fact that universities in many countries are increasingly recognizing
the benefits of providing outreach or service work programs to the
community, and fields such as disaster research serve this purpose
well.
I want to build on my conviction that the professional
emergency manager can assist to deepen levels of understanding
about disaster, which may lead to the creation of a definition that
will reduce the current level of discontent. Not every emergency
manager will be helpful in this exercise, certainly, as is the case
with disaster researchers: there is wide variation in terms of
competence and credibility in both groups. My purpose is not to
offer a definition of disaster (although I will express a view about
what I believe some essential attributes are in the latter part of this
discussion) but rather to request an opening up of the debate in a
collaborative manner beyond the current cadre of interested
spectators.
To initiate this process, I set out below some brief comments
that illustrate the major shifts within emergency management
practice as well as developments in the professionalization of
64 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
emergency managers that give reason for their ability to participate
in developing definitions of what a disaster might be. I then justify
my conviction for a pluralist approach to definition setting by
employing four triggers, three of which are offered up by
contributors to What is a Disaster? The first is predicated on one of
sociology’s basic concepts, the definition of the situation. The
second originates from two comments by Ron Perry in What is a
Disaster? In the first he states that “many people and groups both
define and need definitions of disaster” and in the second he
reminds us that “each group or individual creates a definition with
different ends in mind” (1998: 214). The third trigger is Ken
Hewitt’s observation, in the same text, that “the question behind
the question seems to be: How do we characterize disaster as a
social problem for centralized organizations and professional
management?” (1998: 88). The final entry is a proclamation by
Henry Quarantelli, also in What is a Disaster?, wherein he seems
worried that “our continuing dependence on the jargon inherent
in everyday or popular speech continues to blind us to other more
useful ways of looking at “disasters” (1998c: 246). To set the context
to the discussion, however, an overview of emergency management
as a research area and a practice field is useful.
DISASTER RESEARCH AND
EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
Modern disaster research in the western world has its origins
in Samuel Prince’s 1917 doctoral study of the Halifax, Canada,
munitions ship explosion and its impact on the local community
(Prince 1920). In the ensuing 85 years the field has evolved into a
well-established and eclectic area of research conducted primarily
by university-based academics who, in the past decade especially,
have increasingly learned to work and communicate with
policymakers and practitioners. Disaster academics have also learnt
to cohabit with researchers outside their own discipline to the
point where inter-disciplinary and applied approaches to research
have given birth to a “hazards community;” people from many
65WHAT IS A DISASTER?
fields and agencies who address the myriad of aspects of natural
disasters” (Mileti 1999a: 1-2). The most recent manifestation of
this endeavor is the sustainable hazard mitigation approach (Mileti
1997, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c; Beavers et al. 2000) which, since
losses from hazards have now been shown to be predictable, has
given rise to the call for a reconsideration of the relationship between
the natural environment and human use. This approach
recommends the need to think about the long-term effectiveness
of various types of mitigation efforts and the adoption of a framework
for sustainable development practices and. The approach, however,
is not without concern being expressed (see for instance, Aguirre
2002; Sachs 1999).
With specific interest on group and organizational aspects,
many disaster researchers also directed their attention to emergency
management aspects. During the late 1970s and early 1980s in
particular, US social scientists raised some serious questions about
the practice of emergency management. Picking up on the research
output of groups such as the Disaster Research Center, the USA’s
National Governors’ Association (1979), for instance, expressed
concern about a lack of comprehensive management at both policy
and operational levels; about the lack of understanding of the
relationship between preparedness and response on the one hand
and recovery and mitigation on the other; about the limited talent
pool available to manage all four phases; and about the narrow
focus on quick-onset natural hazards and the concomitant lack of
planning for technological hazards, energy and material shortages,
and long-onset natural disasters. Perry (1982) raised issues about
the appropriateness of the “dual use” policy connecting civil defense
and emergency management. Dynes (1983) queried the relevance
of the dominant “command and control” practice model. Other
issues ranged from the narrow frame of reference within which
hazards and disasters were viewed (Hewitt, 1983); to emergency
management’s tenuous links with hazard management (Burton et
al. 1978; White 1974), planning practices (Kartez 1984); and the
relative lack of understanding within the emergency management
community of mental health issues in the disaster context (Parad
66 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
et al. 1976; Raphael 1986). With the expansion of academic
interest beyond these areas in the past two decades there has been
a corresponding increase in attention about their theoretical
implications for emergency management. This has resulted in the
study of disaster research, sustainable hazard mitigation and
emergency management starting to blend as well as to burgeon.
Emergency management has followed a similar pattern and
the fundamentals of conventional organized emergency
management are now about fifty years old. During that period,
the practice of emergency management has changed from an
essentially reactive and response-focused command-and-control civil
defense approach, which grew out of the 1940s World War II and
1950s Korean War eras, phased into a comprehensive and
integrated approach during the late 1970s, and from the 1990s
started to re-emerge around the twin concepts of risk management
and sustainable hazard mitigation. However, recent events
connected with highly organized terrorist attacks in different parts
of the world, most notably in the USA whereby a strong reaction
has resulted in its lead disaster agency being subsumed into a federal
homeland security mega-department, might see this latest
transformation being short-lived in favor of a replay of earlier cycles.
Attempts to bring practice into line produced the
Comprehensive Emergency Management (CEM) approach. CEM
referred to the responsibility and capability of a political unit
(nation, state, local area) to manage all types of emergencies and
disasters by coordinating the actions of all players involved. The
“comprehensive” aspect was based on the idea that there are generic
processes for addressing most kinds of hazards and disasters. The
model included four phases of an emergency activity: mitigation,
preparedness, response and recovery. While this may have been
somewhat simplistic in terms of disaster authenticity, it greatly
assisted bureaucratic agencies to develop more realistic
administrative and human resource capacities. One of these
initiatives was the bringing forth of the “emergency manager” as a
specific administrator/practitioner. Also stemming from this
approach was the Integrated Emergency Management System
67WHAT IS A DISASTER?
(IEMS), which would help form partnerships between different
levels of resource owners, both vertically (between levels of
government) and horizontally (between different agencies and the
public-private sector). Basically a process model, Integrated
Emergency Management Systems, focused attention on hazard
analysis, capability assessment, disaster planning, capacity
maintenance, and disaster response/recovery requirements. In this
way CEM/IEMS dominated emergency management thinking for
the subsequent two decades.
The 1990s and the early twenty-first century witnessed a
different set of imperatives on the role and direction of emergency
management. Two unambiguous influences are sustainable
development and the heightened public demand for increased
safety. In this respect, disasters, now more broadly considered than
ever before, have started to become a policy problem of global
proportion because of the growing realization that what humans
do in the normal course of their lives can magnify the vulnerability
of their community. With this understanding starting to take root
emergency management is incorporating its activities into a wider
risk management framework. This approach places emergency
management in the overall context of a community’s economic
and social activities. Steps taken to manage risks of extreme events
can be justified to the extent that they deliver a net benefit to
society. Attempts to manage risks, however, will invariably impose
costs as well as benefits. Hence, the social function of emergency
management is shifting from one that only minimizes losses (for
example, reducing loss of life or property damage), but also
maximizes gains (such as supporting sound investment decision-
making, and general community well being). A key factor in this
new thinking is the concentration on the “management” component
rather than the “emergency”. This has widened the focus of
emergency management from being highly task-specific (that is
planning and responding to particular categories of events by
engaging dedicated skilled personnel and resources) to a more
generic social function looking at socially disruptive episodes from
a holistic perspective. This, in turn, directs attention to integration
68 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
as a central concept. Possible implications have been outlined
elsewhere for emergency management (Britton 2002) and
emergency managers (Britton 1999a). However, the inference that
emergency management trends have on research does not appear
to have been reciprocally and systematically explored.
WHOSE DEFINITION OF THE SITUATION
SHOULD BE CONSIDERED?
I want to return to the assertion I made at the outset of this
essay, that the supply side for current definitions of disaster is too
narrow, and turn attention to the four triggers I mentioned earlier
that, in my view help justify why an expansion of intellectual input
is required. One of the basic postulates of sociology is that each
person acts on the basis of his or her definition of the situation
(Thomas 1918). Human beings do not passively respond to
environmental stimuli, but rather we constantly interpret what
we perceive. It is difficult to account for the social action of others
except in terms of how those actors define the situation they find
themselves in. The way people define a situation is the reality for
them and they fashion attitudes, behavior and action accordingly.
Even if others regard them as misguided, if scientists or any other
social group might prove them wrong through social facts, or the
initial idea turns out to be inappropriate or false they nevertheless
during the time that they are salient have consequences for action.
Perhaps a more contemporar y and non-sociological way of
articulating this might be, “where you stand on an issue depends
on where you sit”; or to put it another way, “how a person/group
interprets something depends on what they are required to do
about it”. These expressions resonate with Dombrowsky’s comment
that definitions provide a justification of positions (1998: 20).
One important implication of this principle is that people, especially
if they are drawn from dissimilar backgrounds, may define an
identical situation quite differently and for valid reasons.
Placing this into the context at hand, Aguirre sums it up
superbly when he states, “disasters are what communities define as
69WHAT IS A DISASTER?
disasters, and are thus the outcome of social constructions” (2002:
114). If this is the case, then bringing practitioner perspectives
into definition deliberations will be useful. Governments are not
theoretical in orientation, but empirical. They form positions and
policies on the basis of reflection—and reaction—to occasions that
impact on the lives of citizens they (the government) are obliged,
both legally and morally, to protect. Disasters, as social disruptions,
are one such category of occasion that requires governmental
attention, although it must be said that low probability events
tend not to carry much weight in policymaking unless, of course,
the consequences are so great they cannot be ignored. Be this as it
may, how government defines disaster is important because this
starts the process of policy development that leads to the domain,
tasks, resources and activities mix described by Kreps (1998), the
combination of which frames social action in disaster. Moreover,
practitioners tend to operate within action frameworks that are
handed down by governments through legislation, and which they
have helped shape. Hence, practitioner explanations tend to include
statements outlining general directions and commitment of
resources. These elements give focus to specific dimensions that
may be important for clarifying what a disaster is. Two non-USA
examples will suffice.
Probably the most recent emergency management legislation
comes from New Zealand, when in December 2002 the Civil
Defence Emergency Management Act came into force, replacing
earlier legislation originally enacted in 1967. The Act redefines
the duties of central and local governments, and also directly brings
the private sector, specifically utilities, into both emergency
management strategic decision-making and operational contexts.
In particular, the Act promotes sustainable management of hazards
and risks in a way that contributes to the well-being and safety of
the public and property. This Act states “emergency” to mean a
situation that:
1. is the result of any happening, whether natural or otherwise,
including without limitation, any explosion, earthquake,
70 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
eruption, tsunami, land movement, flood, storm, tornado,
cyclone, serious fire, leakage or spillage of any dangerous
gas or substance, technological failure, infestation, plague,
epidemic, failure or disruption to an emergency service or
lifeline utility, or actual or imminent attack or warlike act;
and
2. causes or may cause loss of life or injury or illness or distress
or in any way endangers the safety of the public or property
in New Zealand or any part of New Zealand; and
3. cannot be dealt with by emergency services, or otherwise
requires a significant co-ordinated response under this Act.
(New Zealand Government, 2002: Section 4)
The link between disaster, sustainable hazard mitigation and
sustainable development proposed by Mileti and his
contemporaries are evidenced in the new legislation. This
orientation helps to distance the approach from the traditional
“preoccupation” (to use Rosenthal’s word, 1998: 148) of a prompt
return to normalcy. Instead of this, the New Zealand approach is
very much an attempt toward moving to a higher state of resilience.
Moreover, the concerns Kroll-Smith and Gunter (1998) raise in
What is a Disaster? about overly restrictive legislated definitions
hamstringing local needs and efforts are overcome in the New
Zealand context through the legislation being explicitly directed
to encouraging innovation and providing empowerment at local
levels so long as these actions are not inconsistent with national
requirements. To ensure overall consistency, the Act requires the
national administering agency to develop a national emergency
management strategy that sets out goals, objectives and measurable
targets, and which has to be publicly notified. The framework for
the national strategy is based on a risk management approach developed
by Standards Australia and Standards New Zealand. This non-
mandatory Standard defines risk management as “the culture, practices,
processes and structures that come together to optimise the
management of potential opportunities and adverse effects” (Standards
Australia 1999: 4). Together with a risk management approach for
71WHAT IS A DISASTER?
local governments (Standards New Zealand 2000), the Standard
is being promoted as the basis for developing a risk management
approach to emergency management and for communicating the
concepts of risk management to all groups and individuals with
emergency management responsibilities.
The New Zealand Act also provides an explanation about what
is expected from emergency management when it explains the
concept as being:
1. the application of knowledge, measures and practices that
are necessary or desirable for the safety of the public or
property; and are designed to guard against, prevent, reduce,
or overcome any hazard or harm or loss that may be
associated with an emergency; and
2. includes, without limitation, the planning, organisation, co-
ordination, and implementation of measures, knowledge, and
practices (New Zealand Government, 2002: Section 4).
Similarly, Emergency Management Australia suggests
“disaster” is,
A serious disruption to community life which
threatens or causes death or injury in that community
and/or damage to property which is beyond the day-to-
day capacity of the prescribed statutory authorities and
which requires special mobilization and organisation of
resources other than those normally available to those
authorities. See also accident, emergency and incident
(Emergency Management Australia, 1998: 33).
By inviting the reader to also look at the explanations offered
for other disruptive situations, Emergency Management Australia
infers that “disaster” is a relative state and its meaning made clearer
through contrast.
As sensitizing concepts (Kreps 1998: 34), these working
characterizations bring forth all the components discussed by the
72 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
contributors in What is a Disaster? They are socially defined requiring
social action by social actors in social space; they identify triggers;
they imply a collapse of cultural protection and convey the notion
of harm to the physical and social environment entailing a state or
condition that is destabilizing; they require exception routines and
extraordinary countermeasures. While the expression and approach
between the researcher and practitioner is different, the result is
similar. Few practitioners (or researchers, I suspect) would disagree
with Stallings when he states that disasters are fundamentally
disruptions of routines (1998: 129). Since researchers and
practitioners emphasize different attributes that have been extracted
from the understood agreed common pool of components, the
perspectives of each can be explored and hopefully enhanced.
SHOULD RESEARCHER
PERCEPTIONS BE PARAMOUNT?
Ron Perry’s comments that “many people and groups both
define and need definitions of disaster” (1998:214) and that “each
group or individual creates a definition with different ends in mind”
raises an issue about why the researchers’ notion of a definition
should be the one to prevail, particularly when such definitions
tend to be restricted to academic publications that even researchers
themselves agree are not good vehicles for dissemination (Fothergill
2000). Once they have been extricated from these constraining
devices, however, which takes a lot of time and effort, academic
definitions can be very influential in directing, and re-directing,
the focus of official orientations (a trawl through relevant archives
gives a fascinating insight into how word changes in official
documents has followed changes in academic thinking, although
the lag time is often considerable and the two never quite seem to
catch up). In particular, academic input has helped practitioners
to at least get some thinking straight and develop a pattern of the
type urged by Quarantelli when he stated that we should stop
confusing antecedent conditions and subsequent consequences with
the characteristics of disaster (1987a: 7).
73WHAT IS A DISASTER?
Examples of how close collaboration can have positive effects
are becoming more frequent and the results promising: New
Zealand’s emergency management legislation that is explicitly built
upon risk management principles rather than the more typical
disaster preparedness and response duo is a case in point. Another
observation about New Zealand’s legislation is that its purposeful
updating and refinement of the duties of officials and citizens took
place without a major disaster portraying the gaps and omissions
in existing systems and hence changes being demanded. It is a
nice example of a proactive output resulting from systematic
consultation with all social groups, which also involved national
and international academics. This is not an isolated example, but
it is a case in point of how things can be done, and in particular it
is a case in point that shows how significant progress can be achieved
when different sectors work together on a single issue. To quote
Alice Fothergill again, “working in separate cultures does not mean
that there cannot be communication and respect” (2000: 97).
Hence, Perry’s observation is useful, in that while different groups
inevitably have different ends in mind, it does not follow that
those ends are incompatible or unable to be linked. In the context
of definition creation, differing ends may well be a key to
establishing a better explanation of the whole.
QUESTIONS WITHIN QUESTIONS
Ken Hewitt’s point that the question What is a Disaster? has
more to do with how disaster is characterized for centralized
organizations and professional management (Hewitt 1998: 88) is,
to me, important. For decades government and non-government
agencies accepted notions implicit in the definitions at the time
that the real tasks about organizing for disaster was to concentrate
on preparedness and response. This approach seriously hampered
addressing underlying causal issues, and it weakened hazard
mitigation efforts. Even now, practitioners tend to focus on the
consequences of disasters, but many do so in a way that has shifted
their thinking from a response-focused to a consequence-based
74 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
analysis. In this respect, their thinking reflected a definitional shift
that incorporates political, economic and cultural ecological
perspectives. Emergency managers are now more likely to ask
themselves “what will the overall societal effects of impact be?”
The sustainable hazard mitigation approach will consolidate this
thinking: emergency managers in some countries have spent a great
deal of effort thinking about disaster resilience and what it means
for social stability. This thinking and the practical applications
derived from it give another dimension to the issue of how disaster
can be defined. Over time, the sustainable hazard mitigation
approach will also move thinking on, but whatever direction it
takes it is unlikely to only involve academics. Emergency managers
and many of their political masters are, now, too interested in
these fundamental issues.
ARE WE BLINDED BY EVERYDAY LANGUAGE?
Four years ago I attended a workshop sponsored by the Federal
Emergency Management Agency’s teaching arm, the Emergency
Management Institute, in Emmitsburg, Maryland. The workshop
comprised full-time academics from throughout the US who were
currently providing emergency management courses or who were
interested in teaching emergency management courses. Some were
old hands, others new. They came from a variety of disciplines and
facilitation was provided by an equally diverse group of academic
hazard and disaster specialists. The workshop highlighted several
positive aspects; such as how far and how fast practitioners are
moving to incorporate theory and empirically based knowledge
into their practice ideology, the close relationships between academic
and practitioner, and how quickly the academic community was
responding to the needs of practitioners. Perhaps too quickly,
because the workshop illustrated another, more worrying, quality.
Many of the academics at the workshop were struggling to
comprehend the basics of what they were being told. The questions
they asked about hazards, disasters and emergency management
appeared naïve and the responses given by the facilitators seemed
75WHAT IS A DISASTER?
not to resonate. Much of the difficulty centered on the precise
academic language and definitions used to describe the
characteristics and components of disaster-relevant findings, and a
lot of time was spent having to “translate” definitions so they could
be better understood.
Quarantelli (1993a) has argued that scientific jargon actually
makes for precise and clear communication within a discipline,
and that to lose the jargon would signify a loss of precision and
clarity of that discipline. In What is a Disaster? he extends this line
of argument by stating, “our continuing dependence on the jargon
inherent in everyday or popular speech continues to blind us to
other more useful ways of looking at disaster (1998c: 246). That
may be the case, but if it is then it is not without penalty. I have
emphasized the word “within” in the first reference to Quarantelli
above because we are not actually dealing with a single disciplinary
issue when it comes to disaster research. Progress in the field of
disaster research, especially over recent decades, has been the result
of inter-disciplinary activity. What this suggests to me is that a
single disciplinary perspective in terms of a definition of the field
is now incongruous. Disciplinary specific explanations couched in
jargon are not going to win the day, even for academics with an
interest in the field, as the example of the FEMA workshop
illustrates.
What is the implication of this for emergency management
practice, especially at a time when other sectors of the community,
such as lawmakers and parliamentary legislation writers are turning
more and more to “everyday language” in an attempt to make
important documents accessible to as many as possible? My own
experience tells me that if the intention is to inform and elucidate
then there is an inherent problem with academic definitions.
Lawmakers, decision-makers, teachers, practitioners and publics
don’t want to spend time being tripped up by unfamiliar words
that are strung together in an odd manner. They want to know
what the words actually mean. Surely definitions can be written to
convey unambiguous meaning while at the same time using familiar
language. This act alone would go a long way to bridge the “town-
76 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
gown” gap that currently exists. Since so much time has to be
given to “translating” definitions so they can be understood (and
not only for non-academics!), and since so much antagonism and
apprehension is created by having to do this, why don’t disaster
researchers adopt a user-friendly approach to their explanations?
This makes a lot of sense since much current disaster literature
tends to be a combination of scientific and engineering technical
reports and social science analyses, much of which is synthesized
and translated into plain English so that emergency managers,
policymakers and other researchers can understand their policy
implications (Waugh, 2000: 16). Such an approach would not
demean the scientific input. Although research sometimes seems
theoretical, jargon-laden and impractical (Quarantelli 1993b), this
research nevertheless has an important practical value even if it
does not give specific answers to specific questions. However, by
working alongside emergency managers, issues relating to
translation and the link with practicality could be ameliorated.
A CONCLUDING COMMENT
So, what is a disaster? It seems to me that it is something to do
about a set of circumstances wherein risk is realized and collective
expectations about societal safety is acknowledged to be inadequate.
Risk is realized in the form of either/or manifest and latent threats
and opportunities, and can be due to a social system’s geographical
proximity to biological, environmental, socio-political or
technological attributes that have not been sufficiently incorporated
into planning regimes of one kind or another (land-use planning,
technical systems management, public security measures, and
so forth). Collective expectations about safety are inadequate
because institutionalized beliefs, experiences and perspectives
are somehow not matched with the risk reality. These “sets of
circumstances” necessitates social redefinition and requires
changes in social action, particularly about understanding the
implications of both context and consequence with respect to
mitigation as well as remediation.
77WHAT IS A DISASTER?
I should point out that this is not a definition of disaster: I
stand by my original assertion that developing an acceptable
definition is more likely to be achieved if it is derived from a broad
base. I don’t think single discipline specialist definitions are
advantageous. This is where the four starting points outlined above
come in. They each provide justification for broadening the inputs
with respect to different social actors who can make a valuable
contribution to defining disaster.
Academic researchers have provided, and will continue to
provide, invaluable insights into the phenomenon of disaster. There
is no question about this. The systematic and objective approach
that typifies much (unfortunately not all) of disaster research
provides an essential framework for the wealth of rich descriptions
about how nature, technology or fellow humans have disrupted
social systems, much of which comes from practitioner and other
official sources. The analytic approach that most researchers display
has provided us with a detailed understanding about what the key
components of disaster might be, and this in turn has produced a
of definitions that is getting closer and closer to what disaster might
actually be in both “pure” and relative terms. Whether disaster
researchers alone can—or should—take this burden on their
shoulders exclusively is the question that I have posed. My answer
is “no”, I don’t think it is possible or desirable. When it comes to
the context and consequences of the set of circumstances I outlined
above, disaster managers are more likely to be attuned to many of
the relevant nuances. Current practitioner definitions, reflected in
recent legislation as well as in practice ideology, now reflect academic
thinking; the result of collaboration between the two groups. Since
practitioner definitions reflect the current status, there is every
reason to believe that this new breed of practitioners can also project
their reality into the definition debate and help work through this
important activity.
Outlining the role anthropology can play in disaster research
and in developing disaster theory, Tony Oliver-Smith (2002)
concluded by encouraging more of his fellow anthropologists to
become engaged. He said that “in grappling with the problematics
78 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
of disasters, anthropologists . . . can clarify the important
distinction between symptoms, the disaster events and processes
themselves, and their underlying and largely systemic causes, (2002:
46). While he did not explicitly state it, I have a suspicion that he
was also reminding the current doyens of disaster research, who
are mainly sociologists, of this matter and to let them in. Far less
eloquently than he, but with the same conviction, I am also asking
disaster researchers to open up and let others in. I am certain that
the new breed of emergency managers, as practitioners who are
becoming more capable and more willing to conceptualize the
issues they confront in their profession of choice, can make a valuable
contribution. And once the notion that other sectors can—and
should—contribute to this exercise, there is another group that
needs to be seriously considered: those involved in development
research and practice. As Quarantelli reminds us, “we can all learn
from one another if we but listen” (1993: 37).
79
5
NOT EVERY MOVE IS A STEP FORWARD:
A CRITIQUE OF DAVID ALEXANDER,
SUSAN L. CUTTER, ROHIT JIGYASU
AND NEIL BRITTON
Wolf R. Dombrowsky
One of the founders and doyens of disaster sociology initiated
the debate on the question “what is a disaster?” but in doing so
E.L. Quarantelli (1998b) probably did not intend to reflect on
disasters in epic breadth. After decades of contributions in research,
teaching and—most important, contributing inspiration and
incentive to others all over the world—he may have desired to
share the results of his assessment of his sociological specialization.
Normally, the idea of a specialization needs clarification: What is
the specialty like? In sociology, this question has historically been,
and remains, difficult to answer. Students will find dozens of books
on the question “What is sociology?” (Elias 1981). The struggle
for sociology to be recognized as legitimate science took generations.
In dispute was the subject matter of sociology, its “field” (Reiss
1972: 10f.). For the “sub-science” of “disaster-sociology”, which
emerged far later and which carries the field of sociology in its
name, one should expect an understanding of what “disaster” means;
80 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
in sociological terms above all. However, decades after establishing
sociological disaster research as a uniquely sociological
conceptualization of the core matter is still lacking. This appears
to be one of histories ironies—particularly for Quarantelli—that
the definition of the science to which he devoted his work has to
be argued out well after the original founding.
In fact, there is only a little sociology in “disaster,” but there
are a lot of other concepts derived from other sciences and from
the practitioners (see Britton’s arguments). The practitioners, of
course, strive for applicability. They prefer theoretical models that
are highly congruent with their operational needs and experiences.
However, the proximity of phase or stage models of disaster to the
demands on scene (i.e. to sequence the chaos into manageable
portions) makes them excessively attractive but not very revealing.
In the end, the sequence of phases models describe an ideal
succession, but never the social configurations of the disaster events
themselves. To some degree the description of disaster as a sequence
of phases (or stages) is in itself ideological. It is the modelled order
of succession that persuades into thinking that relief work and
reality proceed not only in the same sequence but more than that
in an orderly manner, which suggests coping will be successful
and action controlled.
Much more difficult to reconcile with the disaster proper are
so-called disaster theories that adopt fragments of models and
theories from other disciplines. Barry A. Turner (1978) adopted a
central category from physics when he defined disaster as wrong
amount of energy in the wrong place at the wrong time. To argue
consistently, the theoretical loan from physics would need to apply
the matching categorical apparatus and its appropriate
transformation into sociology, otherwise it will be nothing more
than a nice analogy without significant sociological explanatory
power. The same is true for other adoptions from other disciplines.
To define disaster as an event concentrated in time and space
combines quantity with spatial dimensions and has its roots in
geographical concepts; Jigyasu reflects on that issue. Resource
related definitions (i.e. a “lack” of something) basically stem from
81WHAT IS A DISASTER?
economics and primarily transform the concept of disaster into a
miscalculated supply and demand ratio. In the end every shortage
could be disastrous and, consequently, turns “disaster” into an empty
term that includes many diverse, unrelated events.
It is important not to be misunderstood on the issue of
borrowing concepts and vision from other sciences and social
sciences. There is no reason to avoid the use of concepts from other
disciplines or different paradigmatic orientations. In this point I
agree with Cutter’s remark on the “segregation” of the research
communities and their mutual ignorance. However, ignorance is
something different than a special, disciplinary quality. Sociological
disaster research should have the ability and scientific power to
mark its disciplinary originality, not in special self-references (or
even worse as jargon), but as evidence that sociology provides
concepts and frameworks to solve societal problems (and here again
I agree with Cutter). This notion captures the core point of my
argument and the foundation of my critique of the contributions
of David Alexander, Susan L. Cutter, Rohit Jigyasuand Neil Britton.
I simply do not believe that conceptualizations like those cited in
the two paragraphs above will achieve explanation, particularly
not in a sociological way, of the target social phenomena. I shall
use this yardstick to measure their contributions. The adoption of
paradigmatic or conceptual bits and pieces will, from my point of
view, quickly lead to a theoretically fragmented perspective that
will not serve as an effective foundation for sociological explanation.
David Alexander’s contribution confronts the reader with a
mix of theoretical imagery from multiple paradigms. I do not
contend that Alexander is inappropriately borrowing. Instead, he
is doing what his title says: providing an interpretation. I recall
Marx´ eleven theses on Feuerbach. The philosophers only have
interpreted the world differently, however, the important thing is
to change it. This is very close to what I find here. Alexander delivers
another interpretation of disaster; the important thing, however,
is to understand it.
Alexander himself has done much research and published well-
known books; the most prominent in Germany is “Natural
82 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
Disasters” (1993). These are good reasons to find substance in his
contribution to the question “what is a disaster”. However,
Alexander did not proceed beyond interpretation. His approach
combines many things together: disaster, catastrophe, calamity,
corruption, terrorism, and war, at least generalized into “affliction”.
In affliction—these so-called “phenomena”—are included the ways
to analyse them, methods, paradigms, and epistemology in the
widest sense. Alexander does not advance a notion of what “disaster”
could be in reality nor in scientific terms, because to him “the
definition depends on shifting portrayals and perceptions of what
is significant about the phenomenon.” And the phenomenon, he
argues, is “so multi-faceted that a general theory of universal
explanatory power is unlikely ever to be formulated”, which is “the
reason why ‘disaster’ will probably never be completely, immutably
defined.”
Leaving aside that general theories (as well as their operational
distinctive marks) are always subject to falsification, the quest never
was for a “general theory” or for “complete, immutable” definitions,
but simply for a scientifically solid concept, a precise definition at
least. That, of course, has nothing to do with ones disciplinary
affiliation. Alexander, as a geographer, is not expected to clarify the
specifically sociological aspects of the question. But of what fabric
is his answer? I have neither found an answer nor could I identify
the “fabric” of his multi-facetted presentation. At first I had the
impression that Alexander does not differentiate between definiens
and definiendum. Sentences like “disasters in the modern world are
an artifact of two forces: commercialism and strategic hegemonies
inherent in globalization”, disaster is “an extraordinarily revealing
sort of affliction”, and “disaster is not defined by fixed events, or
immutable relationships, but by social constructs, and these are
liable to change” are indeed asking for “the tenets and controlling
parameters of disaster.” Thus, one is eager to learn how the
geographer operationalizes “artifact”, “affliction”, “social constructs”
or “change,” and all of the other “parameters” he is mentioning.
My examination of Alexander’s work also revealed what I see as
inconsistency. Alexander surprises the reader with the introduction
83WHAT IS A DISASTER?
of the concept of “mindset”, to which, in the author’s words, “little
attention has been devoted”. However, neither an elaboration of
“mindset” nor a thorough application to disaster is presented. Very
briefly Alexander defines mindset as “fixity of opinions or states of
mind created by events” which stems from cognitive psychology
and learning theory and is contradictory to his expression that
“disaster is not defined by fixed events” (and, conclusively, will not
create a corresponding mindset). In fact, Alexander does not aim
at real phenomena (in the sense of hermeneutics; see Dilthey 1972
and Habermas 1973) or of phenomenology (see Schütz 1974).
Instead, he focuses upon perception and further on “new forms
o f s y m b o l i s m c o n s t r u c t e d b y t h e m a s s c o m m u n i c a t i o n
industry”, which originate from various possible approaches
(see, for example, Cassirer 1958; Schütz 1967; Marcuse 1964)
that Alexander again does not cite. There is some evidence,
h ow e v e r, t h a t A l e x a n d e r f a v o r s s o m e s o r t o f s y m b o l i c
constructivism with an emphasis on psychological approaches
combined with some sort of contemporary ideology critique.
Perhaps this view allows too much influence of ideology upon
science as evidenced when we consider his judgements on
poverty and globalization, or more clearly, his comparison
between modern and traditional societies and their matching
symbolic constructs. Alexander describes these as historically—
more or less—appropriate “coping mechanisms”, and “means of
rationalizing disaster”. From such a perspective of a vernacular
“Anything-Goes Constructivism” (see Feyerabend 1979), even going
back to declare a disaster as an “Act of God” appears (politically or
ideologically) as equal rights. This perspective leaves Alexander
asking rhetorically: “Are we to call this retrograde, a sign of cultural
underdevelopment?”
Coincidentally, Eric Arthur Blair, born in 1903, created under
the name George Orwell the term “New Speak” in his famous
novel “1984”. One hundred years later, David Alexander uses the
new speak principle to interpret disaster as continuous
interpretation, which has to be interpreted and reinterpreted as
often as interpretation appears contemporarily appropriate.
84 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
This disintegration of social science into interpretive discretion
appears to capture the consequences of Alexander’s admonition to
abstain from “general theory”. In his case it is more (and worse)
than a subtle subversion of the ideologically loaded controversy on
“grand theory” (see Mills 1963). It challenges the traditional
principles and practice of scientific craft. Within an approach of
continuous interpretation, precise definitions and consistent
theorizing appear to hinder the bulwarks of scrutiny and
understanding. Alexander’s characterization of science as “universal
explanatory power” and of defining toward completion and
immutability appears entirely dismissive scientific craft and reasoning
(see Chalmers 1982).
Susan L. Cutter advances another strategy. She simply redefines
the question: “The question is not what is a disaster, but what is
our vulnerability (and resiliency) to environmental threats and
extreme events?” That reminds me of the innocent question: “what
is a car?”. The reply is: “the question is not what is a car, but what
is your danger of an accident and of the vehicles pollution potential
and extreme speed?” In science, it is important to avoid answering
questions by deflecting them and redirect our attention to the
original question.
Redefined that way, Cutter becomes systematic: “What makes
human and environmental systems vulnerable and more or less
resilient to threats and extreme events?” In elaborating conceptual
frameworks, she posits that “vulnerability and resiliency imply an
examination of human systems, natural (or environmental) and
technological systems, and the interconnectedness between
them . . . it is, in fact, the linkages and interdependencies between
these three systems and the built environment that amplify or
attenuate vulnerability.” Cutter elaborates this “four systems”
approach, but does not elaborate on the question of which “systems
theory” paradigm she really has in mind. Parenthetically, to reveal
ones paradigmatic background is, in my point of view, the conditio
sine qua non of mutual understanding.
I embrace Cutter’s cautions regarding the segregation of research
communities, their mutually unperceived publications, their
85WHAT IS A DISASTER?
different methods, and the “differences in the type of event
examined,” exemplified by “natural hazards, technological risks,
industrial failures”. This enumeration is revealing, because “hazard”
is not “risk” and “risk” is not “failure” and “failure” is not “disaster”.
Above all, “disaster” is not “vulnerability”. In fact, and in that I
completely agree with Cutter, “the risk, hazards, and disasters
communities could not (and still do not) fully understand each
other’s ‘science’.” Cutter’s conclusion, however, I do not understand.
For her, the mutual ignorance of the different communities makes
each “unaware of the totality of social science perspectives” and
thus of their progressive capacities for future advance. (May be
that the reason for quotation marks around science?) But instead
of forging ahead with new understandings reflected in distinctions
among these phenomena (such as disaster, risk, hazards and
vulnerability), Cutter argues, the field “will mire in the depths of
ontological debates” about their meaning. Cutter’s vision of
ontological debate as problematic reveals her apparent suspicious
view of philosophy of science. In its neo-positivist interpretation
(which predominates in Anglo-American science in contrast to
Husserl’s idealistic restoration together with Heidegger in Old
Europe) “ontology” focuses on the relation between “word” and
“phenomenon”, or more precisely, on “term” or “idea” and “thing”
or “object”. In the German language, the play on words with
“Begriff ” (term) and “Begreifen” (understand, but also touch, grasp)
was invoked by Dieter Claessens (1980) to clarify that hand and
brain have to work together to understand the world and that this
understanding is impossible without appropriate terms (“abstract
thinking”). The terms (concepts) in mind represent (conceptualize)
the world’s reality. Thus, without correct words there will be no
correct practice. In this sense, Popper’s dictum: “Words don’t
matter, let’s look for the problems” was a joke, because without
words we would be unable to solve any problem, much less to
recognize it. This appears to be what Cutter has in mind: To proceed
to better practice while leaving the fruitless hair-splitting aside.
In the light of the interdependence of concept and
conceptualising, Cutter’s central question, her “telos” perhaps,
86 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
appears at once well-meaning but without appreciation of
philosophy of science. She asks “ . . . will the field forge ahead
with new understandings of how these phenomenon affect the
human condition, how human agency increases or decreases their
temporal and spatial distribution, and how individuals, social
groups, and society at large perceives of and responds to external
threats, regardless of their origin?” (emphasis added).
Regardless of their origin? Obviously, the 11th September attack
has focused the theorizing of both Cutter and Alexander upon
catastrophic terrorism and motivated them to do something about
the shocking brutality of international terrorism. As their first step,
they combine the incompatible together: vulnerability, disaster,
danger, failure, hazards, threat, risk, emergency, terrorism, and
war. Because they do not appreciate the origins and advances in
science, “new understandings”, can not take place.
Taking up the findings of the different communities, four rough
categories can be built, leading toward a four pattern scheme: The 1)
potential and 2) manifest phenomenon, the 3) intended and planned
and the 4) unintended and unplanned. In contrast to failures, disasters,
terrorism and war, hazards, threats, dangers and risks have not occurred
yet, “vulnerability” has to be counted for potentiality, as a result of
preventive (risk and/or danger) reduction measures. In contrast to
war and terrorism, which are both intended and planned action,
normally nobody intends and plans to produce failure, accident or
disaster. Of course, there are always, exceptions. On 1 October 1944
General Dwight D. Eisenhower approved the decision to flood
Walcheren Island, the Netherlands, by bombing the dikes. This
attempt to isolate German forces on the island has often, incorrectly,
been attributed to the defensive efforts of the German army. On 3
October 1944 dykes around Walcheren Island were bombed and
breached by the RAF. There are also many deliberate violations of
laws, standards and regulations—in work, health and environmental
safety, in constructional engineering and building codes—but nowhere
are illness, pollution or collapses, or disasters intended. Instead, what
is sought often are profits or other immediate advantages. The same is
true for intended accidents as insurance fraud.
87WHAT IS A DISASTER?
The heuristic four-pattern scheme may be shown as a table.
POT EN TIAL M AN IFEST
Risk War
Danger Terrorism
Threat
Vulnerability
Failure
Accident
Disaster
IN T EN DED &
PLAN N ED
UN IN TEN DED
&
UN PLAN N ED
Stupidity:
failure to
recognize and
prepare
When we try to fill the “unintended/unplanned-potential” cell,
we may realize that Cutter’s borrowed terminology from systems
theory remains very cursory. Each of her “human systems”,
sometimes “individuals” and “social action”, in untold ways
produces risks, hazards, and disasters, or what some refer to as
complex emergencies. Some are controllable, others are unintended;
some have spatial-temporal limits, while others are simply accepted
by those affected. I agree with this contention in general, but I
have not found the “more complicated and nuanced set of
explanations” that may help us “to understand how, where and
why human intervention 1) changes the way in which individuals
and societies conceptualize and detect threats, 2) reduces the
initiating sources and root causes of threats, 3) mediates
vulnerability to threats, and 4) improves resiliency and responses
to threats.” What we find, as an empirical outcome of existing
research, is in contrast to Cutter’s observation some sort of social
disintegration, a loss of coherence and mutual commitment. We
find an increase in carelessness, inattentiveness, thoughtlessness,
inconsiderateness, indifference, irresponsibility, or “to-hell-with-
it” attitude. But how do we conceptualize that? Has it to do with
“will” and “decision”, or is it a (self-referential) systemic outcome?
I would choose, for heuristic purposes, “stupidity” for the
“unintended/unplanned-potential” cell; in such events there was a
88 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
failure to recognize coupled with an unplanned outcome. All the
other attributes, particularly the “to-the-hell-with-it” attitude,
should go into the “intended/planned-potential” cell, because
alternative behaviors are possible but shunned. Sennet (1998), for
example, has described this development as loss of interpersonal
narratives, which tends toward the loss of ones own history and,
consequently, toward the loss of identity and sociability. Cutter’s
contingency “regardless of their origin . . .” makes a system (but
no systems theory) of this loss, and, unknowingly or not,
undermines the precepts of science.
When we regard the origins, then the differences between
hazard, threat, danger and risk reveal significant cultural
differentiation and conclusively, insight into the cultural evolution
of the fabric of the perception of our world. This is close to
Alexander’s notion of the historical “coping mechanisms” every
culture has invented as “means of rationalizing” disasters. But in
contrast to his context of political correctness, the historical
reassurance of the development of concepts should enable a
reflexivity of our own conceptualization. Thus the disaster-researcher
should appreciate that des astro, the evil star, derives from astrology
and astronomy and inherits completely different traditions of
viewing the world. This is distinct from catastrophe, with its strong
and influential connotations stemming from Jewish-Christian
apocalyptic traditions (see Cohn 1993). The geographer might
recognize that hazard stems from Indian-Arabic roots of fortune-
telling (throwing bones, engraved stones, coins or dice). Then,
and most important to me, other sciences will recognize that
sociologists are not simply espousing an argot by do not mixing
concepts into an indefinable whole with little explanatory power.
Only a few scholars in the field have paid attention to the
historical influences on our present (scientific) concepts. Barkun
(1979) did, also Dynes (2000), some others too. I (1989) have
spent some years on studying these others, finding that our modes
of perceiving, coping with and learning from failures are completely
determined by these historio-cultural but hidden, “underground
insinuating” heritages.
89WHAT IS A DISASTER?
Looking closer, we will find how these heritages work to shape
our scientific thinking. The transformation of a religious mode of
“prediction” into a secular dice game called az-zahr, where money
was put into molds, expresses a far-reaching social change over
centuries. Its most momentous aspect was the capability to dissect
and analyse the seemingly uniform and consistent. The game az-
zahr dissected decision and result. As long as the dice turn, the
effect of a past decision remains its future. Time enough to think
about and to analyse how fortuna could be charmed. In the end,
gambling and its accompanying desire to influence ones luck and
to find regularities, has led to our theories of the distribution of
numbers, of randomness, and statistics, but also to social strategies
of assurance and economical insurance (Bernstein 1996). Risk-
taking in the sense of riscare, (Latin-Italian for circumnavigate)
and risco (cliff, rock) originate from ancient shipping and have
nothing in common with our present concept of risk, which is a
mere statistical calculus which depends on a certain amount of
comparable cases and a certain time period of observation.
Historically the more appropriate term would be venture, which
literally dared the devil if it was not considered together with those
who were potentially affected. The so called “Philosophical
Probabilism” of Bartholomé de Medina (1577; see Gigerenzer et
al. 1989), a catholic moralist, formulated an ethical procedure
with which ventures had jointly to weigh up the pros and cons
until so called “probable reasons” could be defined. Before God,
only the well-considered, probably best solution was pleasant,
whereas the ill-considered, “daredevil” venture was an adventure
and a sin.
In contemporary terms, this process of consideration could be
defined as “risk-communication”. Alexander is discussing the
problem when he considers “how to involve ordinary people
democratically in preparation for and management of emergency
situations”. Our ancestors have had an appropriate answer, although
it does not originate from the field of politics. From there stemmed
the principle of majority rule that was never accepted within the
private and economic sphere. There the principle of (unanimous)
90 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
consensus rule predominated, because the “whole house”
(dominium), life, life-stock and property was “at risk” when a venture
failed. Therefore, regarding the origins, one would never mix
political decision-making and the modes of democratic participation
with risk-taking and the modes of sharing losses and profits or
disadvantages and advantages.
A similar etiology holds for the concepts of “danger” and
“threat”. By exploring the origins, one realizes that incompatible
social relations and interaction patterns are lying underneath.
“Danger” stems from the Latin words dominium/dominus and
damnum. The first meant a very specific relationship, the ownership
of a thing (slave) or a person (woman, children); the second meant
a very delicate juridical and economical relation, a flaw that could
be directly executed and, historically later, sued before a judge.
On slave markets or before marriages transfers to reserve have been
common to change the contracted prizes (or the contract itself ) or
to refund in case of hidden flaws (complaint, ailment, etc.). In
addition to the right to claim for the damnum in case of a flaw,
initially the proprietor also owed the right to “damage” his
possession when he discovered a flaw, or other cases of diminished
value. Unsurprisingly, “danger” was closely connected with modesty
and haughtiness on the side of the possessed (be with or without
flaw) and with “pity” at the side of those who were imperfect and
with “mercy” at the side of the proprietor who could graciously
overlook imperfection. Our whole Christian behavior codex roots
back to this until today: “nobody is perfect”.
Therefore a nonchalant (regardless of origin) translation of
“danger” into the German word “Gefahr” would radically miss the
subject. Etymologically, “Gefahr” stems from drive, travel, lead,
cart, ford and companion (fahren, führen, Fuhre, Furt, Gefährte)
and connotes to the venture to go on unknown or rough terrain,
virtually impassible routes or fords. On the way, only two sorts of
adversities posed peril: insurmountable natural conditions and
encroachments, mostly assaults, ambush, hold-ups. “Threat” derives
from the latter context. The Indo-European word treud as well as
the old-german thrustjan meant squeeze, press, oppression, use force.
91WHAT IS A DISASTER?
Both are related with the Latin word trudere, which is found in
obtrude, protrude, abstruse (originally: push from the hidden!).
Threat also meant troop, crowd and trouble, which altogether
points at the relation with weaponry and military force (knights or
warriors). Our present meaning of threat as an intention to inflict
pain, injury, evil, or punishment, as an indication of impending or
possible harm or menace, eludes the violent, destructive aspects,
the intentional, deliberate brutality of its origin. Therefore, the
use of the word threat in the context with nature is a mere
misconception or, to cite Alexander, “a retrograde” toward a state
of belief where an animated, intentionally acting nature “strikes
back” and “takes revenge”. This is even more true for the term
“hazard” because gambling, not the game, is hazardous. The notion
“natural hazard” distorts subject and object in the same way. Nature
is nature is nature, regardless of its form: air movement, for example.
As a mild summer wind, we love “mother nature”, as an unruly,
“destructive” tornado we blame her destructiveness.
Rohit Jigyasu’s contribution was not easy to critique: both
because of his closeness to my own ways of thinking and because
his subject matter is not familiar to me. I have never before studied
“eastern” philosophy, apart from general education (based on
Boorstin 1992). Jigyasu’s work was a pleasing expansion of my
knowledge, but simultaneously disturbing because of his central
issue: “Has disaster lost touch with the reality? If yes, why this is
so? What is this reality, after all?” As typical “Westerner” I
immediately thought of Paul Watzlawick’s question: “How real is
reality?” (1976) and the constructivist debate (see v. Foerster 1985;
Putnam 1975, 1985). Then I realized that Jigyasu referred to the
religious sources of worldview and the contemplative aspects of
“being in the world”, as Heidegger would say. The disturbing aspect
was that Jigyasu did not answer his own question. This contrasts
with the work by Alexander and Cutter that implies that the human
perceptive faculty lost touch with disaster than that disaster loses
touch with reality.
From the long pathway from Plato’s parable of the cave (Politeia),
Kant and Hegel, the Marxist theory of reflection (see Bloch 1977)
92 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
through radical constructivism, the core question always was the
relation between idea and the world beyond perception. Insofar as
these philosophical issues are concerned, Jigyasu’s expression that
disaster “is no longer bounded by the physical boundaries” fell
short. Disaster is not and never was a reality, it is a word that
describes something (damage, destruction, harm, and so on) we
perceive within the space and time we observe. More important,
disaster takes its “boundaries” from long lasting heritages.
Sometimes, the heritages are more meaningful (and thus binding)
than the present phenomena we want to describe. When we talk
in tongues, the mindsets are light years apart from present reality.
(Which is reason enough to flee such contaminated words or to
define them as precisely as possible!) Jigyasu forces us to leave the
security of our western abstract thinking. The problem of abstract
thinking, however, is the same everywhere and that is why Jigyasu
concluded that it is rather ‘human’. “Yeah! Thank God!”, I thought,
reinforced in my believe that science in the first place has to sharpen
the instruments, which, for sociologists, always are words.
Neil R. Britton has chosen that as a title: “what’s in a word”.
He is asking and reopening E.L. Quarantelli’s and his own
conceptual debate (Britton 1986). Britton is the only one of the
four contributors to explore “ontology” and makes a serious attempt
to come to terms with the term “disaster”. A concept, Britton
argues, should be more than “a set of differentiating features”, it
“should stand in its own right; its uniqueness should be expressed.”
But what if that fails? Britton offers two answers: “If this is not
possible then perhaps it is not a unique phenomenon and is
dependent on reciprocal relationships.”
Both answers are touching the core of our debate, although it
is not clear whether Britton really distinguishes between
“phenomenon” and “concept”, between definiens and definiendum.
Be that as it may, I will not allege that “unique phenomenon” was
meant as real. To do so would place Britton in the same category as
Alexander who looks at infinite changing facets of something one
always calls disaster (as the “real” phenomenon) no matter which
facets anew and anew will become selected. Taking Britton’s
93WHAT IS A DISASTER?
argument epistemologically, the uniqueness of a concept will only
emerge when it is expressed “uniquely,” which is means
“scientifically” which is tantamount to the “uniqueness” of sociology
(or another science) as discipline, not as collection of paradigmatic
“facets”. Seen that way, Britton is pointing at our proper problem.
The notion “in its own right” is only meaningful in the sense of
“expressed in sociological (or any disciplinary word) originality”.
Conclusively, Britton’s answer should read: If this is not possible
then perhaps it is not a unique science and is dependent on more
settled or accepted sciences. (Which explains why sociology still
applies definitions from other disciplines, from geography for
example, or from biology that defines disaster as infection or
disease.)
The second part of Britton’s answer, his emphasis on
“consensus”, corresponds with the peculiar self-image of sociologists.
No physicist would accept a definition of “light” other than an
electromagnetic phenomenon within the current “corpuscle-wave”
paradigm. Sociologists, however, seem to accept ever y
“interpretation” of disaster, the main criterion being that it is
consensual. But is “truth” a variable of consensus and scientific
precision a variable of majority? Britton’s line of argument is a
little bit different, of course. I have carried my own argument too
far. Hence, Britton’s distinction between “a ‘pure’ definition” and
“a relational explanation” is again not far from Alexander’s argument.
Britton prefers “relational” explanations as a temporary accepted
“mutual acknowledgement” of the needs of “social actors in social
time and social space”. Thus, “disaster” is what we think it is the
moment we deal with it. That is very close to the idea of truth as
the handy; and finally to Mao’s interpretative misshapen figure
that the truth comes out of barrels. Such a conclusion is rude and
surely never intended by Britton, although internally logical.
The problem with Britton’s contribution is that his description
of practitioners and their fruitful exchange with science makes any
critique twice difficult. First, because practitioners are “the good
ones” (the global volunteer helpers) which may bias our scientific
view a little bit, and second because they are our most important
94 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
first hand engagers of disasters (the hand we should not bite
because it feeds us). Britton knows this, because he calls it a
“symbiotic relationship” and gives many convincing examples of
successful symbioses. Sir Karl Popper however taught us that
successes are no real proof. And to carry my argument once more
too far, the successful symbioses are at the least an indication for
successful scientific scholarship. In the worst case, particularly the
symbioses could be an indication for being an accomplice with a
reality far from optimum; if not studied appropriately.
The International Decade for the Reduction of Natural
Disasters (IDNDR), for example, literally needed a decade to
overcome the ideology of “natural” disasters. The conceptual changes
from the initial UN Declaration toward the final “Yokohama-
Protocol” testify impressively to the negative effects of too successful
symbioses (Plate/Merz 2001). Thomas S. Kuhn (1962) has shown
that in most cases scientific progress was thwarted by so called
“consensus”, which very often is nothing else than the stubborn
sticking to ingrained concepts. What might the IDNDR outcome
have been like if the decade started with its final conceptual
approach to disaster? This is exactly my question for Britton: Where
might the practitioners stay if disaster sociology would provide
them with “pure”, “unique” concepts (instead of reflecting their
every-day-concepts)?
This is, of course, a heuristic question. In reverse, we know
that wrong concepts result in wrong practice. Even today, disaster
sociology has not yet developed indicators that measure the success
of disaster management. We still have no standardized benchmark,
no exact criterion to identify any valid relation between “severity”
of a disaster and the “efficacy” of disaster management. That is the
reason why each person defines disaster idiosyncratically and why
the fashionable trends rotate faster and faster. That is also the reason
why “modern” approaches focus more on management than on
emergency, as Britton reports, because “emergency” since long has
disappeared in the indefinable mush of all-is-all-terminology. Even
the legislation Britton cites as exemplary is far distant from
understandable, measurable criteria. It is more a “programmatic
95WHAT IS A DISASTER?
declaration” of those who are in charge for emergency management
but not a scientifically appropriate definition.
I completely agree with Britton that definitions about which
only researchers themselves agree are of marginal value. On the
other hand, definitions are not only the tools of our thinking,
which also includes mental and emotional orientations, models
for meaning, and worldview. Britton is absolutely right when he
points at the influence of definitions for Government Organizations
(GOs) and Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs),
governmental politics and policies and international aid concepts.
Supposing that the practitioners all over the world base their
practice on inappropriate concepts, and disaster sociology reproduces
these concepts because they are consensual in practice. What then
is our science worth?
That has nothing to do with jargon and Britton’s attack against
unintelligibility. To communicate scientific findings in a manner
laypersons can grasp is no argument against (internal) scientific
draft (including conceptual precision). More elucidating is Britton’s
reference to the FEMA workshop and the scientists who hadn’t
the faintest idea of the empirical reality of their field. Empirically
oriented researchers can tell you a thing or two about the
incongruence of the factual dealing with disaster, the after-action
reports and the different “narratives” along the levels of action,
how “emergency management” was taught and trained and the so
called “programmatic declarations” forming legislation. Scientific
precision cannot be achieved if scientists simply parrot one or
another of these “every-day-concepts”. They should decipher the
underlying “truth” and develop a concept of “disaster” as a
measurable test criterion beyond the appeasing, easing, and
whitewashing telling that dominates in practice.
That, again, has nothing to do with disciplinary narrow-
mindedness or with intellectual imperialism. Each science has to
have a unique intellectual discipline, which is in the first place,
conceptual precision. Otherwise mutual understanding across
disciplines at least, will remain impossible. To me, Britton is wrong
in setting the broadness and intellectual richness of all sciences
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into an irreconcilable contradiction with the “iron discipline”, as
Max Weber has put it, of the internal disciplinary reasoning.
Without such an iron discipline sciences in general and disaster
sociology in particular will not survive as specialized fields. Britton’s
statement that “disaster managers are more likely to be attuned to
many of the relevant nuances” sounds alarming. What might
happen to all contributing sciences, when their field can create
only disciplinary instruments that miss real nuances? In that case
we have to ask ourselves what our discipline is useful for; certainly
not explanation.
What can I conclude? I read four interesting, stimulating,
thoughtful articles that seemed to be entirely individual in the
positive sense of “headstrong” but which turned out to be very
similar, almost corresponding in their disregard of terminological
accuracy and scientific efficiency and efficacy. I was alarmed that
none of the authors seemed to embrace science, at least “western”
science, and that a strange “liberalism” comes to the fore which
makes everything equal, or at least indifferent. No wonder that the
emergency managers become the real sentinels among the
intermissions between the endless “run-of-the-mill” of their failures.
97
6
THE MEANING OF DISASTER:
A REPLY TO WOLF DOMBROWSKY
David Alexander
“Tell me, my man, which is the quickest way to Dublin?”
“Well, Sir, to begin with, I wouldn’t start from here.”
In this essay, I shall reflect on both Dombrowsky’s critique of
my chapter in this book and the wider issue he raises: namely, the
role of science and academic disciplines in conditioning the
theoretical study and practical management of disaster. With
particular reference to disaster, I shall consider how the agendas of
scientific and academic organization may have influenced the ways
in which we define the phenomena we study. The paradox of
modern intellectual activity is that we strive for objectivity but, in
the Kantian manner, construct knowledge out of our own rather
fragile sensory impressions guided by universal concepts and
received wisdom. If this makes for incomplete theories and fluid
interpretations, then perhaps that is all to the good, as they are the
raw material of healthy debate. Science is a record of incomplete
progress, rather than a path to ultimate enlightenment (Davies
1989) and hence none of us should presume to have all the answers.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s geographers conducted a
long and introspective debate on the meaning of their subject.
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They were concerned that its breadth and division into human
and physical branches allowed very little common ground. The
only lasting consensus to be achieved was that, in the words of
Peter Haggett’s famous phrase, “geography is what geographers
do.” Fortunately, the diversity of the subject is its principal strength
and so geography has survived, the science of the spatial view of
everything and anything (Holt-Jensen 1988). Geographers have
grown accustomed to the diffuseness of their collective aims, and I
would hope that sociologists and other students of disaster have as
well, for diversity is strength in this field too.
Although I have great sympathy for sociologists in their struggle
to gain as much acceptance as physical scientists and engineers, I
am not concerned about how much sociology there is in disaster.
Let there be no doctrine or dogma in studies of catastrophe: I
believe such works should be adisciplinary, based on the demands
of the problem, not the strictures of academic disciplines (Alexander
1991), though the expertise of sociologists is obviously fundamental
to such endeavours.
I do, however, believe that we should look at disaster from
different perspectives and then try to integrate them. The whole is
very definitely the sum of the parts, but, in certain cases, lack of
adequate knowledge and understanding may make integration
impossible: that is one reason why more research is needed in order
to bring subtle connections to light. In this respect, it is not clear
to me why Dombrowsky thinks that the economic interpretation
of disaster “turns [it] into an empty term that includes many diverse,
unrelated events.” Disaster does involve imbalance between supply
and demand, but no one is suggesting that this is our key to the
deepest level of understanding. It is nevertheless a factor that
influences attitudes and in some cases the ability to survive. Hence
the relationships do exist. For a detailed demonstration of this, I
recommend Eric Jones’s chapter on disaster in his brilliant treatise
on European and Asian economic history (Jones 1987).
Whether in economics, sociology, geography or another
discipline, concentrating on a sectoral interpretation of disaster
fails to gain us a holistic perspective—that was supposed to be the
99WHAT IS A DISASTER?
message of my chapter. Trying to gauge how closely or not my
contribution sticks to disciplinary norms therefore misses the point.
I believe instead that we should seek holistic perspectives even if
progress in creating them is slow and arduous—ad astra per aspera.
Contrary to Dombrowsky’s interpretation of my chapter, I do not
“admonish” the reader to “abstain from general theory”. On the
contrary, I have been struggling for years to construct one (see
Alexander 2000: 238-247). If my perspective tends to shift as I
write, besides any failings on my part, this is because of the need
to view the phenomenon of disaster from different angles in order
to get at the truth. This, pace may involve taking an epic approach
in order to search for the overall picture and at more modest levels
it may involve seeking connections between, as Dombrowsky puts
it, “diverse, unrelated events”. I fear that the links may take many
more years to establish fully.
Like Dombrowsky, I have studied the antecedents of modern
science (e.g. Alexander 1982, 1989) and found modern
practitioners to be strongly influenced by them. Science has
developed a long and honourable tradition of objective research,
but it has also developed under the shadow of various questionable
ideologies (see critiques by Meyer-Abich 1997 and Ehrlich and
Ehrlich 1996). Anderson (1997) argued that this is equally true
for sociology, whose emergence as a discipline in the nineteenth
century reflected the need for systematic control of the industrial
proletariat. I am not qualified to comment on the rightness of
wrongness of that interpretation, but I do think that, even if
Dombrowsky complains about it, we should “challenge the
principles and practices of scientific craft”: after all, they were
brought to you by the folks who gave you, not only cures for major
diseases, but also weapons of mass destruction. Hence, I have tried
to lend support to the process of breaking out from scientific
orthodoxy and academic territoriality. At the very least we should
ask ourselves whose interests science is meant to serve.
Dombrowsky seems preoccupied with the terminology of
definitions (and also with the process of defining things—circulus
in definiendo), but let us not follow his example. Whether what I
100 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
say is symbolic constructivism1 as he argues, or not matters very
little: it is all part of the struggle to understand disaster, and
preferably without loading it with too much cumbersome
intellectual baggage. I agree with Dombrowsky that the “sequence
of phases” model of disaster (the “disaster cycle”) has its faults, but
I am not sure that students of disaster regard the phases as necessarily
consecutive (Drabek 1985). Like all models, it is a convenient
simplification and we fully appreciate that the fit with reality is
somewhat awkward (Neal 1997).
Rather than being a politically correct acolyte of liberalism, I
believe the current era is similar to the Baroque period, in that
interpretations of reality are increasingly dominated by the tension
of opposites (Maravall 1979). Far from “mixing the incompatible
together”, it is my intention to differentiate them by looking at
the relationships between them (see Alexander 2000, 244-247).
To give due weight to the role of different types of coping
mechanism in reducing the impact of disasters is not “political
correctness”. Instead, it shows due respect for different ways of
viewing disasters and surviving their impacts. In this, it is well
known that modern institutional science does not have all the
answers. For instance, the original, mid-1980s version of the
Bangladesh Flood Action Plan (FAP) would have canalised the
Brahmaputra River in order to reduce its contingent flood
propensity (Dempster and Brammer 1992). Some riparian rice-
farmers in Bangladesh have developed as many as 75 ways of coping
with seasonal and contingent flooding. Most of these would have
been no use after the restricted drainage and inadequate flood
protection that massive levee building would have imposed
(Westcoat et al. 1992). Fortunately, significant pressure from
knowledgeable academics and others forced the transformation of
the FAP into a series of smaller projects that are more hospitable to
local expertise, though unfortunately, the mindset of provincial
administrators in Bangladesh quelled most of the nascent
democratisation of flood prevention (Warner 2003).
Dombrowsky argues that I contradict myself in saying that
disasters are not defined by fixed events but mindset is. This is not
101WHAT IS A DISASTER?
so. I regard the definition of disaster to be fluid, but I see fixed
attitudes to it developing in some quarters. Regarding the situation
in which perceptions and opinions are manufactured by the
controllers of mass communication, mindset is perhaps more of a
convenience term than a descriptive one. Nevertheless, Thomas
Love Peacock satirised the process very elegantly in his novel Crochet
Castle (1831):
He [Crochet of Crochet] found it essential to his dignity
to furnish himself with a coat of arms, which, after the
proper ceremonies (payment being the principal), he
obtained, vide-licet: Crest, a crochet rampant, in A sharp:
Arms, three empty bladders, turgescent, to show how
opinions are formed; three bags of gold, pendant, so show
how they are maintained; three naked swords, tranchant, to
show how they are administered; and three barbers’ blocks,
gaspant, to show how they are swallowed.
How very appropriate this seems in the modern world of mass-
media empires!
While on the subject of public opinion-mongering,
Dombrowsky appears to have misinterpreted Newspeak, from
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (first published in 1949), which was
an attempt to reduce concepts to a simple, black-and-white
juxtaposition of opposites (in the form of single words), and then
to satirise them, reductio ad absurdum, in order to stop people
thinking deeply. That was not my intention and I hope very much
that it was not the outcome of my chapter. I do not see why the
interpretation of disaster in contemporary terms is a form of
Newspeak. Instead, it is something that has always taken place.
Mere tradition may not be a good argument for its continuation,
but as people perceive disaster and deal with it in the context of
the realities of their times, so it deserves to be interpreted in that
light. Hence, we will probably never achieve a telos, or masterful
completion to our studies of disaster, so let us return to Omar
Khayyam and reconcile ourselves to transiency:
102 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand labour’d it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d—
“I came like Water and like Wind I go.”
(Rubayyat, XXX, trans. Edward Fitzgerald, 1859)
I do agree with Orwell that we are creating a dystopia (a society
which is considered undesirable), but that is as far as it goes. With
respect to Orwell’s times, the world has changed, the context is
different, and the root causes of dystopia are now based on different
patterns of inequality and power imbalances.
In his essay Dombrowsky has mounted a spirited defence of
science against “liberalism”. I agree with that stance, in so far as
neo-liberalism has done so much to subvert the aims and choices
inherent in modern scientific activity. However, that should not
be a reason for ignoring the role of science, hand-in-hand with
neo-liberalism, in the creation of both vulnerability and disaster,
as well as a set of public attitudes and perceptions connected with
technocentrism and fuelled by lucrocentrism (yes, I did coin that
term—see Alexander 2000: 244). Indigenous coping mechanisms
are thus increasingly a defence against both disasters and the
depredations wrought by the modern world’s power structures.
It is not political correctness to discuss coping mechanisms as
a means of rationalising disaster (though in reality they are a means
of coping with it). The message from fieldwork is that indigenous
coping mechanisms are not to be swept aside and replaced with
imported ones without very good justification (for a good example
of this, see Schware 1982). However, it is becoming increasingly
clear that the way to involve people in managing their own security
is to resort to participatory rather than representative democracy.
The latter has proved inadequate on numerous occasions, as Wisner
(2003) has chronicled (Dombrowsky should see this excellent article
for the details he is seeking of how geographers operationally define
the concepts “artifact”, “affliction”, “social construct” and “change”).
Finally, if emergency managers are the real custodians of truth
about disasters, as Dombrowsky seems to be saying, this is because
103WHAT IS A DISASTER?
of the failure of academics to communicate in simple language to a
wider audience than people of their own kind. Disaster studies are
very distinctive in that they rely on a mixture of theoretical
constructions by scholars and reports from the field by practitioners.
It is a major task to get the two groups to communicate with one
another, but a vitally important one.
I trust I have not been too idiosyncratic in my definition of
disaster, and have not preferred convenient fictions to awkward
truths. Scientific (or more precisely social scientific) orthodoxy is
not necessarily efficient or efficacious in getting at the latter. Instead,
it is time to strike out and look for radical new interpretations of
disaster, and that will also help keep the debate fresh and vigorous.
NOTES
1 “Symbolic constructivism” seems to be a neologism and hence its meaning
is unclear. The more common term in the social sciences is “symbolic
interactionism”, in which the individual’s concept of self is regarded as an
internalisation of social processes (Charron 2000). “Constructivism” was
originally the movement through which art was “constructed” to be
functional in some manner. The term has since been applied to the way
that images are created by publicity (Ploughman 1995). I am not aware
that this notion has yet been merged with symbolic interactionism, though
presumably it could be.
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7
PRAGMATISM AND RELEVANCE:
A RESPONSE TO WOLF R. DOMBROWSKY
Susan L. Cutter
I read Dombrowsky’s critique of the set of papers with great
interest. His critique was often difficult to follow especially the
logic of his argument, but the paper did present some interesting
points worth considering.
First, I do not hold a “suspicious view of philosophy of science”.
Rather, I acknowledge that there are competing views of science
and scientific explanation (Snow 1993). From my perspective,
science (and scientific practice) is socially constructed, a position
that is viewed as membership in relativist school of thought within
the “science wars” (Gould 2000). Science is but one set of beliefs
that help us to understanding the intrinsic order of nature. Scientific
“truth” or the universality of the findings are not absolute, but are
in fact socially conditioned. The production of knowledge itself is
partially determined by human agency and influenced by gender,
race, social, and cultural differences (Harding 1991). Thus, the
choice of scientific problems and hypotheses are not based on some
objective truth in as much as they can be defined and structured
differently depending on one’s personal agenda and perspective.
Second, I am skeptical of the continuing definitional debates
and arguments regarding the terminology that is used in our
105WHAT IS A DISASTER?
discourse involving hazards, risks, disasters, and vulnerability.
Instead of being mired in these definitional concerns about what
is a disaster, we should simply state our usage of the term and
move forward to solve some of the pressing research and applications
questions. In that spirit, I use the following definitions: risk is the
likelihood or the probability of occurrence of an event; hazards are
the potential threats to people and the things they value as well as
the impact of an event on society and the environment; vulnerability
is the potential for loss or the capacity to suffer harm from a hazard;
and disasters are singular (or interactive) events that have a profound
impact on local people or places in terms of injuries, deaths,
property damages or environmental impacts. I contended in the
paper, and re-iterate here, that this line of scholarly inquiry into
semantics (or ontological debates) is counter-productive at this
point in the intellectual development of the field. We need to
move on to more important questions. Dombrowsky suggests one
himself: “We still have no standardized benchmark, no exact criterion
to identify any valid relation between ‘severity’ of a disaster and
the ‘efficacy’ of disaster management”. This is an important
consideration that the social sciences can and should address. The
academic practice of navel staring is fine for some scholars and
disciplines, but disaster research is a relevant and pragmatic
endeavor; one that uncovers new knowledge and then applies it to
reduce the impacts of disasters on society. We must not forget
that.
Third, I would like the research community to read more
widely than we do at present and develop more intellectual
synergism in our range of perspectives and methodologies that
impinge on disaster research. Ignorance of the contributions of
allied disciplines is inexcusable especially when they can inform
and advance multidisciplinary understanding of disasters and their
consequences on society. On this point, Dombrowsky and I concur.
Fourth, I think Dombrowsky misunderstood the meaning of
my phrasing “regardless of origin”. Until very recently, research
and practice in the disasters field was segmented into specific hazard
domains; earthquake response, hurricane preparedness and so on.
106 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
Now the dominant approach by state and local governments in
the U.S. is increasingly oriented towards an “all hazards” perspective.
There is a set of generic understandings about hazards assessment
and response, which are then customized based on the source of the
threat (e.g. flooding, terrorist act). In contrast to this more integrative
perspective, the research community still generally practices its science
based on specific hazard etiologies and is not examining the
commonalities in how society responds to, learns from, and mitigates
environmental threats. This is not to suggest that all hazards are equal
in their characteristics, impact, or importance, however. Dombrowsky
does make a good point about the intent heuristic (or what many call
adaptive threats or social hazards) as a distinguishing attribute of
hazards. I would also include the voluntary/involuntary nature of the
hazard exposure and the geographic scale as other key heuristics in
differentiating among different hazards. However, we don’t need to
reinvent a typology of hazards or taxonomies of causal agents for
disasters—work that was done decades ago (Hohenemser, Kates
and Slovic 1985; Burton, Kates, and White, 1993).
Finally, I remain steadfast in my opinion that social science
perspectives on disasters will assume increasing importance and
relevance in the next decade. There are serious concerns about the
role of human agency in threat perception, hazard production,
vulnerability mediation, and response. Are disasters the same
everywhere and do they have similar effects? How are risks
transferred over space and through time? What conditions cause
adaptive or maladaptive responses to crises? In what ways do
disasters threaten the environmental security of nations? How have
the processes of urbanization and globalization increased societal
vulnerability to hazards? How do individuals and communities
respond to unexpected events? Are our organizational structures
and institutions adequately prepared to respond to unanticipated
and unexpected events? We need to shift our focus away from
semantic debates on what is a disaster to a more focused research
endeavor that is theoretically robust, methodologically challenging,
and above all, responsive to the informational needs of the hazard
and disaster practitioner communities.
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8
DEFINING THE DEFINITION FOR
ADDRESSING THE “REALITY”
Rohit Jigyasu
Dombrowsky’s response to the four approach papers is very
articulate and he manages to raise some very basic issues concerning
the theme of our discussion of “What is a disaster?”. I think one of
his main achievements has been to pull together various papers
(even those which manage to drift away) and bring them back to
the central point of our discussion.
My response to Dombrowsky and also to other approach papers
will be an elaboration of some central points raised by the authors.
I will be touching on two aspects; firstly regarding the scope, limits
and purpose behind the definition of “disaster” and secondly, I
shall attempt to answer the apt question put forward by
Dombrowsky: “How real is the reality of disaster?”
DEFINING THE DEFINITION
I shall begin by bringing forth Perry’s (1998) view that many
people and groups both define and need definitions of disaster
and that each group or individual creates a definition with different
ends in mind. In the words of Britton, definitions are not only the
tools of our thinking, but also mental and emotional orientations,
108 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
models for meaning and world-views. In my opinion, the question
of definitions with respect to important terms such as disaster in
our case is paramount but the strive towards defining commonly
acceptable definitions should be open and flexible. There may be
multiple definitions of a single term, based on what we put in the
center, whether viewed purely from a sociological view or taking
into consideration multiple disciplinary views. Even one discipline
may take an ideological view based on the undercurrents of political
standpoint and this is all the more evident in the case of sociology,
which forms diverse views on how the researcher views the society
and its interrelationships.
While the definitions are crucial for deciding the limits of any
particular discipline they should also form a blueprint where flexible
relationships with other disciplines can be developed leading to
gradual advance and extending the scope of the discipline. The
ultimate point of a field is not to become isolated shell, something
that is complete within itself, rather any advancement in the field
should ultimately contribute towards larger goals for the betterment
of humanity. Therefore it is good to have multiple definitions of a
concept. What is also needed is a debate on inherent similarities and
differences between these multiple definitions so as to be able to create
a symbiosis on the concept, thereby giving it totality of meaning.
“RESEARCHER” VERSUS “PRACTITIONER”
Britton, in his approach paper also stresses on the need as well
as existing opportunities to bring together scholars and practitioners
to discuss, debate, refine and reflect on the issues of definitions of
disasters and their implications. He emphasizes the need of
providing researcher and practitioner with common platforms. As
a practitioner, the emergency manager plays an important role in
developing procedures in disaster situations. Britton agrees with
Waugh’s observation that a major problem in defining emergency
management today is finding the boundaries of the field; and the
field is as broad as the risks that society faces. He raises the issue of
both researchers and practitioners dismissing each other.
109WHAT IS A DISASTER?
While common platforms for researcher and practitioner will
indeed be useful in order that both can draw from the experience
of each other. The question is whether the boundaries between
emergency manager (basically a practitioner) and a disaster
researcher should be merged. I am very skeptical to this idea as
both have different, although closely related roles to perform. While
a “research” (literally meaning “to search again”) by its very
definition is a backward looking activity, a practice is based on a
vision, which is drawn on past knowledge or experience. A researcher
can put on the hat of a practitioner and vice versa but a researcher
cannot be in the same mode of thinking as a practitioner at the
same time.
Actually a researcher and a practitioner can work hand in hand,
learning from each other. While a practitioner can try testing some
theoretical construct in practice, the researcher can generate
significant knowledge on the basis of the experience gathered by
the practitioner and in many cases can even decide on the question
of his or her research based on the hole in the knowledge that he
will be able to figure out only by gathering flaws in existing practice.
How emergency managers view the world and how they define
disaster is therefore highly relevant. But I feel that the task of defining
a disaster should be left mainly on to disaster researcher, who may
generate significant knowledge from the results in practice and use
that very knowledge to improve the definition of disaster. We may
define disasters for the sake of research or practice but our crucial
search here is about the meanings and characteristics of the term
itself.
To conclude however, the fundamental question is whether we
are addressing, “disaster research” or “disaster (emergency)
management”. Both these terms are quite different but may
ultimately contribute towards the definition of the disaster. As
part of disaster research, one may research on existing emergency
management systems as part of exploring the successes and failures
in dealing with disasters. Disaster Research may ultimately mean
research on disaster, research in disaster or research on disaster
management. To put it in other words, disaster researcher may call
110 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
for reflecting in the action, on the action or on the phenomena
itself that leads to or calls for action. Each of this type of distinct
research activity will contribute towards definition of disasters.
THEORY AS “PRODUCT” AND
“GENERATOR” OF DEFINITION
In order to take this discussion further, I wish to bring in the
importance of theory in the definition of disaster. Needless to say,
in the pursuit towards defining disaster, one needs a strong
theoretical basis. While I do not wish to deny the importance of
developing the theory itself, I am quite critical to the process in
which theory is constructed and packaged in many cases. Disaster
research can significantly aid towards construction of theory, which
will aid in refining the definition of disaster. However at the same
time, we need to find out why theory is not influencing results
and based on our results modify the theory. A theory might well
be the starting point of research (theory as generator) or it might
be the result of practical experience in the field (theory as product).
I agree with Dombrowsky’s criticism of Cutter that while the
relationship between disaster and vulnerability are paramount,
these cannot be lumped together. One needs to separate normative
aspects from the phenomenon itself. Underlying or root causes of
vulnerability are important in order to be able to reduce
vulnerability.
FROM PERCEPTION TO COMPREHENSION
FOR THE SAKE OF “REALITY”
Britton refers to Thomas (1918) while talking about the basic
postulates of sociology that each person acts on the basis of his or
definition of the situation. According to him, human beings do
not passively respond to environmental stimuli, but rather we
constantly interpret what we perceive. It is difficult to account for
the social action of others except in terms of how those actors define
the situation they find themselves in. This issue of perception is
111WHAT IS A DISASTER?
again raised by Dombrowsky when he raises a critique on my
question on the “reality” of the disaster. I agree with his view that
disaster is not and never was a reality and that it is a word that
describes something we perceive within the space and time we
observe. However, the critical question is whose perception are we
talking about. The moment we bring in perception, the “object”
which could be “described” turns into a “subject” which is colored
by the images, which in most societies are result of religious or
other belief systems.
In my paper, I have taken this debate further by stressing that
we need to move beyond perception. Ver y much the way
Dombrowsky states, the core question always was and still is the
relation between idea and the world beyond perception. In my
opinion, the world beyond perceptions is not about constructivism
but about comprehension in physical and mental space and time.
Although as geographers we describe disaster in space and time, it
is the mental description (collective as well as individual), that
constructs disaster in human conscience. Therefore disaster no
matter how we describe it in constructivist tradition (image
formation) is ultimately a reality, which is constructed in cognitive
mind of those who experience and also those who address disasters.
Another important point, which Dombrowsky touches upon
while giving a critique on my paper is about the problem of “abstract
thinking”. However I believe that thinking or rather thought process
is not abstract, it is always based on some underlying assumptions
and belief systems. Rather, it is only human behavior, which is
abstract in more than one ways. I am in fact glad to learn that my
paper reinforced his belief in sharpening instruments of science, so
that they are able to recognize the recognizable human behavior
and brings them into a mode of indicators, which gives us the
ability to “construct” the reality of the disaster in a scientific manner.
It is important to move beyond western world views on which
our notions of “reality” have been well-founded and take into
consideration multiple world views from various cultures, not only
to emphasize what is different, but rather more importantly to
recognize the basic similarities which form the crux of human
112 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
behavior in the times of “disasters” as is understand by us and
them. On the other hand, I very much agree with Thomas Kuhn’s
(1962) viewpoint mentioned by Dombrwosky that in most cases,
scientific progress was thwarted by so called “consensus”. For advance
of the field , it is equally important to make the differences explicit
and base our definitions on the premises of recognizing these subtle
or sharp differences in “comprehensions” and not mere “perceptions”
of a phenomena described as “disaster”.
113
9
DOG OR DEMON?
Neil R. Britton
Wolf Dombrowsky’s comments remind me of an old Chinese
tale about an Emperor who one day asked his court artist, “What
is easy to paint and what is difficult to paint?” The courtier thought
hard on this for as long as he knew his master’s tolerance would
permit and replied, “Dogs are difficult, but demons are easy.” The
courtier explained further to his Emperor that obvious things are
hard to get right because everyone knows all about them and hence
everyone thinks they know what the essence of a dog is. However,
since no one has actually seen a demon then drawing one is easy,
because who can say it is not correct.
To me, this ancient tale strikes at the heart of the debate about
‘What is a Disaster?” Is disaster a dog because when one occurs it
is “obvious”, or is it a demon because, up to now at least, no-one
really knows what it is? Even though both scientist and citizen
have trouble reaching agreement about what the precise factors
are, it seems that most are certain when one has occurred. While
there are major policy and practice, let alone theoretical,
implications in having disaster as dog, it must surely be better
than having disaster as demon. In fact, we have already been down
the latter track and thankfully got off it, although it took a concerted
effort to overcome the comfort that disaster as an “act of god”
provided. It was no doubt comforting for policy—and decision-
114 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
makers to regard disaster as an event beyond their control. Old-
time disaster practitioners certainly benefited; all they needed to
be seen to do was to play games and everyone was happy. The
reason why we overcame that particular superstition and silliness
was because academics—sociologists in particular—were able to
set the stage by identifying, qualifying and documenting disaster’s
key parameters and over time to associate many of the causal factors
to human activity rather than other-world demons. Although some
influential segments of society have not lost the need to conjure
up demons or insist on demon definitions, and here I am thinking
particularly of the current US Administration and its bizarre
rhetoric in its so-called war against terrorism, it is pleasing to know
that such a fundamentalist attitude does not appear to be in the
ascendance. The real dilemma about this specific situation is that
after all the events that the modern world has gone through, why
can such a view be tolerated at all as we move on through the
twenty-first century?
The question that I posed in my initial contribution centers
on these issues. Namely, if disaster is a social action that everyone
as a social actor has the potential to experience, but at the same
there is a gap between groups of actors about what the said activity
is, then one way to bridge this disparity is to release the definitional
debate from its customary keepers (the academics) and allow other
groups at least to contribute as of right. This should not be regarded
as an heretical recommendation, especially given today’s reality
that there are many social groups now who have the credentials as
well as the inclination to worry about definitions and generate
theories apart from the professional academic-as-scientist-or-
researcher, who at one stage were society’s paid elite thinkers, but
now are experiencing competition from many sources outside the
university or research agency. Today there are tens of thousands of
highly trained practitioners many of whom hold doctoral degrees,
who have received higher education that permits them to be
systematic in their thinking and to have excellent analytical
capabilities. Moreover, this non-academic group is able to offer
different perspectives from which to view disaster. Disaster after
115WHAT IS A DISASTER?
all, as Quarantelli and Dynes reminded us many years ago, is a
social occasion. To take this one step further, defining disaster should
also be a social occasion in the sense that those groups who have a
declared interest in it should be able to contribute to its definition.
If this was done as an open process, then it might be possible to
overcome the perennial issue of not being able to agree on what
“it” is. Of course, social scientists will be amongst those who will
put up their hands to indicate they have a vested interest; and so
they should. Social science and sociology in particular has
contributed immensely to the de-mystification of disaster. One of
the many contributions sociology makes is that it helps to explain
the obvious, the everyday as well as the unintended and
unanticipated implications of social action. In this respect, the
courtier’s “dog or demon” distinction is just as relevant for sociology
as it is for disaster:
1. Sociology as dog provides explanation of the ‘obvious’ factors
pertaining to social interaction, social systems, social
processes, social structure, interpretation of social life and
so on;
2. Disaster as dog; sociology provides explanation of the obvious
pertaining to social sequelae of threat and/or impact;
3. Sociology as demon; provides explanation of the latent,
unintended, hidden, and masked;
4. Disaster as demon; sociology provides explanation of latent,
unintended, hidden, and masked effects surrounding non-
routine events.
In my view, sociology will contribute more in the future,
particularly after sociologists specializing in disaster willingly and
systematically assess their own contribution within a wider
definitional field, which would include other disciplines as well as
practitioners from backgrounds as diverse as emergency
management, development, environment, health, welfare and
justice, and also the public administration and policy-oriented
sector. If this were to occur, it is likely to spark some interesting
116 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
synthesis. I don’t believe it will be to the detriment of any specific
discipline, certainly not sociology, in fact it might be the light
that flames a truly multi-disciplinary fusion. It will definitely be
to the betterment of understanding what disaster is. In this respect,
everyone will win.
Moving on to Dombrowsky’s central comment about my initial
paper, my sense is that he over-read my statements or else I failed
to make the point clear that contemporary practitioners who have
academic training, and who contribute significantly in academic
settings (for example as adjunct professors, special advisers,
contributors to journals, journal editors, academic text writers,
specialist presenters to academic conferences) are now very capable
of making a contribution to theory, which is an area that academics
have traditionally considered to be their turf. One aspect I failed
to mention in my initial paper is that my view on the significance
of practitioners to academic activities was formed in large part after
I had spent a few years pursuing a second career away from
universities, to realize what relatively little impact academics had
on framing and explaining some vexed issues confronting
government policy—and decision-makers. As a manager specializing
in disaster management in both local and central government
settings, and later in the international arena, one of my frustrations
was dealing with the reluctance of academics to come to grips with
the reality of actual situations that disaster managers were dealing
with. More recently, this frustration has been compounded by the
realization that academic researchers in some non-western societies,
including social scientists, are reluctant to acknowledge
practitioners as legitimate stakeholders worth engaging. In a way,
academics need to “unlearn” in order to learn what the issues are,
how the issues are perceived and dealt with by other sectors, and
how they could contribute to a process of issue solution. Of course,
this is a generalization. There are some extremely competent
academics who intuitively know how to convert their specialized
knowledge into meaningful and practical outputs. However, they
seem to be in the minority. Whether overall this is a good thing or
not, I am not in a position to answer, but I do believe this situation
117WHAT IS A DISASTER?
is socially unbeneficial. What my experience has taught me is that
these days I am more ready to call upon a practitioner with academic
training to help me out rather than a professional academic. The
specialized disciplinary approach that comes with most academics
seems to somehow get in the way.
I presented this line of argument to Dombrowsky during the
course of one of our email exchanges following his review of the
first set of contributions, and he agrees that he may have over-
emphasized the impression I placed on practitioners. However, he
did it for a reason (Wolf never does anything without having a
reason!), and that was to express a concern about what he detects
as an increasing undertone against sociology and a growing over-
estimation of what practitioners are capable of doing. In this respect,
Dombrowsky is concerned that some new myths are being created.
I do not dispute Dombrowsky’s concern. In fact I sense he is
correct in his suggestion that academics are currently afflicted by a
relative decline in favor, and that perhaps the pendulum is currently
swinging away from them. This, however, is a separate issue from
that to which the current focus is directed. On this point, however,
let me simply state that I am not happy with the apparent anti-
intellectual sentiment that often surfaces, although it does not
really surprise me. What does surprise me is how well academia
has been able to avoid, in relative terms, close scrutiny of much of
its activities, especially at a time when other sectors of society
are witnessing often nasty attacks from above and below.
Nevertheless, I would not like the comments I made in the
initial paper, or in this reply, to be regarded as an attack on
academics even though I do think there are issues pertaining to
academic competence, performance and in some cases relevance
that need to be dealt with as a matter of some urgency. Bringing
this back to the matter at hand, my reply to Dombrowsky is
that it should not be regarded as one group against another; it
should be groups complementing other groups. The matter at hand
is how to combine the efforts of all groups so that the insights and
potential of all can be brought together. This seems like an
appropriate sociological exercise to me.
118 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
Dombrowsky further states the problem with my contribution
is that my eulogy (sic) on practitioners and their fruitful exchange
with science makes any critique twice difficult: because the
practitioners are “the good ones”. In response, I don’t think in
terms of good or bad ones. I certainly do not believe for a moment
that practitioners are capable of providing the conceptual answers
on their own. This is not the point I was trying to make. Let me
repeat my original position: thinking that one group alone can
provide an acceptable definition for something as eclectic and far-
reaching as disaster is naïve. The real world is not a disaggregated
or disassembled, mass; this is the creation of academic
compartmentalization. Rather, it is a coherent, connected,
consolidated and continuous series of inter-linked phenomena
(what academia has not solved, however, is how to re-assemble the
world they have so carefully separated into different disciplinary
components). Practitioners do not have the luxury of working like
this, not when they have to deal within the political reality of
multiple jurisdictions, different and diverse publics, multiple task
masters, a plethora of organizations and agencies, unequal resource
distribution, competing tasks, and so on.
Dombrowsky is also concerned with my comment that “disaster
managers are more likely to be attuned to many of the relevant
nuances”. He thinks this is “alarming”. I think this is the reality. I
am not quite sure why he thinks that the group that does the
managing, and who know the most empirically (even if the majority
do not always have frameworks in their heads or on their shelves),
would not be attuned to the nuances. How many disaster
researchers get to routinely meet with government ministers or
city mayors to discuss the politically feasibility of a possible activity
that has city-wide, regional or national implications? Or how many
can deal with local or national constituencies to hear their voice, or
sit in inter-agency meetings to discuss joint planning programs
that have significant long-term economic and development
implications? Or how many can deliberate on the implementation
a contingency plan that has the potential to re-shape the direction
or look of an entire community; or make choices that can have life-
119WHAT IS A DISASTER?
or-death consequences? These are the everyday matters of disaster
practitioners. They are the things disaster researchers’ dream of. In
a field like disaster, policy development for appropriate operational
planning and practice, on the one hand, and theory development,
on the other, are closely entwined; or they should be. If they are
not, then one or the other is seriously out of alignment with the
real world. By forging closer alliances between practitioner and
researcher, the more likely the reality of disaster will be explored,
explained, codified, understood—and acted upon. Isn’t this what
we all want?
Disaster research cannot afford to have a situation where, for
all practical purposes, researchers and practitioners belong to two
different cultures, or think they do. This was the situation described
by C.P. Snow who by training was a scientist and by vocation a
writer. To maintain his interests he felt obliged to live in two
different worlds; or ‘two cultures’ as he described it. His description
about the gulf between these two sectors and how it barred inter-
linkages that should have been natural concomitants should give
pause:
There have been plenty of days when I have spent the
working hours with scientists and then gone off at night
with some literary colleagues. I mean that literally. I have
had, of course, intimate friends among both scientists and
writers. It was through living among these groups and much
more, I think, through moving regularly from one to the
other and back again that I got occupied with the problem
of what, long before I put it on paper, I christened to myself
as the ‘two cultures’. For constantly I felt I was moving
among two groups—comparable in intelligence, identical
in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about
the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate
at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate
had so little in common that instead of going from
Burlington House or South Kensington to Chelsea, one
might have crossed an ocean (Snow 1969: 2).
120 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
While sociology teaches us about the process of secondary (or
adult) socialization as we enter the workforce and which molds us
so we can function with a minimum of discomfort within the
workplace and identify with a new set of peers (called workmates),
this process should not close us off to other groups whose activities
are reciprocal. There is a serious need to minimize any thinking
gaps that exist between academic and practitioner. This is why I
am ambivalent about trying to preserve the uniqueness of the
sociological enterprise to disaster research if, by doing so, it blinkers
sociologists. The unique approach of sociology, especially to go
behind the veneer of society and see what is lurking underneath (I
think this was C.W. Mills phrase), is a tremendous asset. I have
always liked the legitimating feel this has given to poke, prod and
expose aspects of society that need to be revealed. For my part, I
am more interested in trying to get a better understanding of what
disaster is in all its manifestations and not just what sociology
thinks it is. This can best be achieved by merging all perspectives
(something like this was attempted many years ago, if I recall
correctly, by some of the early NORC researchers, but I have not
seen any recent replication), by looking at the issue full on, by
directing attention to finding out ‘what is a disaster?’, rather than
what do sociologists think, or what do anthropologists think, or
economists, engineers, earth scientists, or political scientists think.
The sociological perspective is, after all, only one way to look at an
issue. What is needed is recognition of the complexity, uncertainty
and ambiguity that is inherent in disaster qua disaster and to
approach the process of understanding it in a way that values and
includes the contributions provided by a wide range of observers
from academia and practice. And it should be remembered that
the practice line of work is as diverse as academia in terms of its
specializations and sub-specializations).
This line of argument reminds me of a paper I read a while ago
by Russell Blong, an Australian hazards geographer who, amongst
his many other credentials, acquired a degree in engineering and
almost also got an MBA before he saw the light (his words!). He
has spent much of his professional academic life working with the
121WHAT IS A DISASTER?
insurance sector, which is why he titled the paper I am referring to
as, “a geography of natural perils”. One part of his paper reflects on
a period of geography during the 1960s when it was struggling for
respectability (I wonder if every discipline goes through a stage
like this?). The issue seemed to resolve itself, at least for one
geographical school of thought, when one of its advocates, Ron
Johnston (my former geography professor) declared that ‘geography
is what geographers do’ (Johnston 1987: 47). What a pragmatic
and, I believe, a mature position to take. In essence it says, let’s get
on with things and stop messing around with the small stuff that
no one (apart from a few geographers) seems concerned with. While
the few were worrying themselves about definitional purity others
linked to the geographical enterprise went on to develop useful
tools such as GIS and contributed to new approaches like
environmental engineering. Setting aside the question of defining
the field hasn’t affected the credibility or output of the discipline
of geography, and if anything this pragmatism has helped it to
develop into a more useful area of study. I wonder when sociology
might do likewise. I get the feeling this is what Aguirre (2002)
might like us to do, even though in many ways he is the
quintessential sociology disaster academic.
PART II
125
10
DISASTER AND COLLECTIVE STRESS
Allen H. Barton
ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY
DISASTER RESEARCH
In 1961 I was asked to prepare a sociological review of existing
research on disasters for the Disaster Research Group of the Division
of Anthropology and Psychology of the National Academy of Sciences
and National Research Council. Note the absence of Sociology from
the National Academy division; Anthropology and Psychology were
sciences recognized by the government, but Sociology was not. The
study was intended to show how sociology was relevant to policy
advice and help get sociology into that establishment.
The Disaster Research Group had been established in 1952 as
the result of a request from the Surgeons General of the Army, Navy
and Air Force that the NAS-NRC “conduct a survey and study in the
fields of scientific research and development applicable to problems
which might result from disasters by enemy action—other words to
examine how research on disasters could be applied to civil defense in
a nuclear war (Committee on Disaster Studies 1956). After US-Soviet
relations became more stabilized and the grim interest in “thinking
about the unthinkable” lost priority, the Disaster Research Group
and its successor programs turned more toward trying to improve
response to “normal disasters,” but in the early 1960s civil defense
126 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
against nuclear war was the overriding concern, and it has continued
to be one reason for governmental interest.
At that time disaster research consisted of a few dozen field
studies of natural and accidental disasters, along with some studies
of wartime bombing including the great fire raids on Hamburg,
Dresden and Tokyo and the final paroxysms of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The studies were mostly observational or based on
informant stories, accompanied by such aggregate statistics on
damage and loss as were available; a handful had quantitative sample-
survey data on behavior of individuals and organizations. It should
be noted that in the 1960s I tried to codify results from less than
100 studies. By 1986 when Thomas Drabek created his
encyclopedic Human Response to Disaster: An Inventory of Sociological
Findings, he worked with 1000 studies. How many are there now?
RECONCEPTUALIZING DISASTER
AS A FORM OF COLLECTIVE STRESS
In examining the disaster literature available in the 1960s I
confronted the vast discrepancy between the small scale of most of
the disasters actually studied—tornadoes, explosions, impact of a
flood or hurricane in one community or at most a number of
communities within a region of a nation—and the apocalyptic
scale of a nuclear war on a whole nation. I was forced to come up
with a much broader concept than the usual one of disaster, to
avoid the folly of extrapolating from how communities and nations
dealt with localized stresses to the problems of the nationwide
impact of nuclear war, and thus encouraging the idea that nuclear
war was a workable national strategy. My overall concept was
“collective stress” (Barton 1963, 1969).
I defined collective stress situations as those in which “many
members of a social system fail to receive expected conditions of
life from the system.” This brought in comparisons with larger
and less sudden stresses such as wartime bombing, genocide, crop
failures and famines, depressions, epidemics, and environmental
decay, as well as chronic conditions like poverty, slums, racial
127WHAT IS A DISASTER?
oppression, and endemic disease. All of these prevent large numbers
of members of a society from living under conditions socially defined
as normal or adequate in terms of human needs.
Defining collective stress as arising from large-scale deprivation
of conditions of a socially defined normal way of life means that
there may be disagreement on whether conditions are normal or
create undue stress and require a remedy. The immediate victims
suffer stress, but the extent to which the rest of society and its
leadership are under stress depends on their sympathetic
identification with the victims and whether they feel psychological
or social pressure to do anything about the situation. In particular
there is often disagreement between social and economic elites
and the underlying population, and between those who define
themselves as superior in race or caste or achievement and those
they consider inferior.
Recent cross-national research on social conditions has tried
to avoid conflict with socially constructed definitions of
“deprivation” by using objective physiological indicators. United
Nations and World Bank sponsored research on “human
development” in different countries has used such indicators as
life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, health statistics
and dietary standards. Such research finds for example that the
survival rate of men in Harlem is lower than in Bangladesh (Sen
1993), and that life expectancy fell by ten years in Russia after the
“big bang” replacement of a “stagnant” socialism with a chaotic
parody of capitalism (Stiglitz 2002).
These physiological measures are powerful and convincing
evidence of extremes of deprivation, but defining “human needs”
in terms of physical survival or physiological functioning omits a
great deal which we may want to consider in making social policy.
There are psychological stresses for otherwise healthy survivors who
have lost family members, for people defined as “inferior races” or
“inferior castes”, people fired from long-time jobs in the “creative
destruction” of laissez-faire market economies, or the working poor
in such economies who experience relative deprivation. It seems
best to use a concept of deprivation relative to the standards of a
128 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
given society and historical period, and recognize that there is often
a lack of consensus between victims and non-victims, or between
sympathetic reformers and ideological conservatives. This avoids
the problem of defining even the aristocracy of medieval Europe as
“deprived” because their health was not as good as that of 20th
century populations, or arguments that because the American
poor have much higher per capita income than Namibian desert
t r i b e s m e n t h e y a r e n o t “re a l l y d e p r i v e d . ” It a l l o w s f o r
considering the social stress created when there is a “revolution
of rising expectations”, or a redefinition of human needs. On
the other hand it does leave us with the problem of how to
regard the situation of those who seem resigned to loss, poverty,
or enslavement, whose aspirations have shrunk to what experience
tells them is their lot. The degree of consensus becomes a variable
highly important in understanding response or lack of response to
given situations.
Some research on “development” of nations uses level of
expenditures on various public services as a measure of quality of
life; for example health or education expenditures. However as an
engineer put it when told that his local schools were excellent
because they spent so many dollars per pupil, “In my field we put
the cost in the denominator, not the numerator.” By this he meant
that quality of services should be measured by the social output, not
the economic input; education by what the students learn; health
services by how much they improve health; and so on. Considering
both output and cost gives a measure of efficiency of the service, but
the output cannot be assumed to be measured by the cost.
AN ATTRIBUTE-SPACE FOR
COLLECTIVE STRESS SITUATIONS
In my 1963 monograph for the National Academy and my
1969 book Communities in Disaster, I developed a typology of
collective stress situations based on the spatial and temporal
dimensions of deprivation:
129WHAT IS A DISASTER?
Societal scope: national, regional, community, or a social
category. The addition of “social category” to the otherwise
geographical levels of this dimension allows inclusion of
stress impacting a large number of people who are
geographically scattered but members of an identifiable social
group.
—Concentration in time: sudden, gradual, chronic.
Combining the two of these gives a typology with twelve
categories of collective stress situations, in which sudden
physical impacts at the local or regional level, most often studied
by disaster research, are only two of many types of collective
stress.
N AT IO N AL REGIO N AL SEGM EN T AL LO CAL
SUDDEN N uclear w ar Earthquake Ethnic m assacre T ornado
Invasion M ajor flood Corporate layoff Explosion
Econom ic
crash
N uclear plant
m eltdow n
E xp rop riation of a
class
Ghetto riot
Plant closing
Rebellion H urricane by m ain
em ployer
Depression
Epidem ic
Fam ine
Drought
Aborigines dying
off
Decline of
m ain industry
Environm ent
decay
Price collapse
of m ain crop
O bsolete
occupation
Environm ental
pollution
Governm ent
breakdow n
Land
exhaustion
Rise of group
discrim ination
Land sinking
Coal seam fire
Addictions to
harm ful
substances
CHRO N IC Poverty E nd emic
d isease Wartime
b omb ing
Colonialism
B ackw ard
regions
Endem ic
disease
Internal
colonialism
Enslavem ent Race
or Class
discrim ination,
persecution
Political
persecution
Gender or sexual
orientation
discrim ination
Slum , ghetto,
rural slum
Pockets of
joblessness
High crim e
areas
GRADUAL
A T YPO LO GY O F CO LLECT IVE ST RESS SIT UAT IO N S
130 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
QUESTIONS RAISED BY
THE COLLECTIVE STRESS CONCEPT
Comparing the results of disaster studies with research on
other types of collective stress situations, I found several main
sociological questions:
Question 1: Why are the public, the government, and
organizational elites so responsive to the needs of victims
in some situations of collective deprivation (particularly
physical disasters) and not to the deprived in other
situations?
This question is particularly raised by those such as Charles Fritz
(1961) who find that disasters create a “therapeutic community,” or
in Wolfenstein’s (1957) term, a “post-disaster Utopia,” dominated by
altruistic behavior and social solidarity, while other forms of mass
deprivation go unnoticed and unchallenged by both public and
leadership.
Question 2: What determines whether the immediate victims
of collective stress respond rationally and capably, or
conversely are passive, ineffective, or demoralized?
One of the first findings of research on physical disasters in
modern Western societies was that victims typically engage in
active and reasonably competent self-help. Other situations of
mass deprivation seem to generate fatalism, lack of active self-
help, self-blame, or irrational scapegoating. Some victims of
collective stress develop organization and win political influence,
while others are passive and unorganized. Comparative studies have
found areas in which the experience of centuries of oppression
has generated a culture of “amoral familism” which rejects
community action (Banfield 1958). In such societies natural
disasters do not result in restoration but neglect or the theft of
relief funds by a corrupt elite.
131WHAT IS A DISASTER?
Question 3: What determines the effectiveness of responses to
mass deprivations of various sorts, and how can societies
learn to improve that effectiveness?
This question arises from comparison of effective with ineffective
responses to particular types of collective stress in different
communities, societies and historical periods, as well as from
comparison of effectiveness in dealing with different types of
collective stress (e.g. chronic vs. sudden, recurrent vs. infrequent,
originating in “natural hazards” vs. social conflict.) The sources of
effectiveness lie at the individual level (motivation, skill), at the
group and organizational level (cooperation, leadership, resources),
at the community level (inter-organizational coordination, technical
and social skill of leadership, capacity to mobilize resources), and
social leadership at higher levels (in state and national government,
in large corporations, in large voluntary organizations, in
professional and intellectual communities providing knowledge to
guide policies.) At each level there can be activity or passivity,
cooperation or non-cooperation, knowledge or ignorance, and
ability or inability to bring resources to the problem. The research
I reviewed also shows that coordination between levels—mass
individual responses and organizational responses, governmental
and non-governmental organizations, and levels of government—
is a general problem.
The research reviewed also showed a problem in the transition
from immediate spontaneous and emergency-organization response
to the phase of reconstruction of a “normal” situation. Many of the
variables which stimulate the first response fade out or run into
competition with other values and interests in the restoration
phase.
Question 4: Why do some collective stresses lead to major
efforts to minimize future vulnerability and to make
preparations to reduce losses in the future, while others
are allowed to recur with little effort at avoidance or
mitigation?
132 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
Some societies historically have invested great efforts in flood
control, in water control systems to counter periodic drought, in
defense against hostile invaders, in organizations to help those in
need. Others have gone on for centuries accepting housing which
guarantees mass casualties in earthquakes, settling lowlands prone
to catastrophic flooding, failing to provide food reserves for periods
of crop failure, or allowing victims of accident or illness and their
families to be reduced to beggary or starvation. One criticism of
“modern” societies is their failure to consider the long-term
environmental impacts to their economic and population growth,
or of the catastrophic potential of complex systems in the realm of
energy production, transportation, and urban structures. On the
other hand some modern societies have created “welfare states”
which protect their populations from the worst effects of business
cycles, structural unemployment, normal accidents and illnesses,
and the economic problems of aging better than those practicing
purer laissez-faire.
My 1960s work covered the first three questions in some detail
based on the existing research on physical disasters and comparisons
with studies of other forms of collective stress. It did not however look
into the problem of reducing vulnerability to physical disaster or
collective stress generally. Since the 1960s a large literature has grown
up on problems of vulnerability to natural hazards and its reduction.
On the first question, a propositional model was developed
including variables at both the individual and collective level, to
explain why some situations of mass suffering evoke quick and
massive social response while others do not. The variables in the
model included both characteristics of the “stressor” and
characteristics of the social structure, culture, and ideology of the
community and society.
This paper re-examines that model of what determines
differences in response to collective stress, in the light of
developments of the last half century, the changes in social
organization to cope with large-scale stresses, and developments in
the theory of response to collective stress. Developments in social
133WHAT IS A DISASTER?
organization include greatly expanded national and international
organization for disaster response, social movements aimed at
advancing “social rights” of deprived people, extension and
withdrawal of “welfare state” programs, and expansion or denial of
various “human rights.” It does not however try to systematically
review the vast body of research on physical disasters or other
collective stresses since the original model was created.
THE POPULATION OF COLLECTIVE STRESS
SITUATIONS IN THE 20TH CENTURY.
It must be realized that of the largest sources of “unusual loss
of life” over the last century, the major famines take precedence.
Famines have killed about 75 million people in the last century,
over ten times more people than competing sources like earthquakes,
cyclonic storms, and floods combined, and about half of these in
the last 50 years (Devereaux 2000). Cyclonic storms and storm-
induced flooding have killed hundreds of thousands of people at a
time in the most extreme cases, but probably less than a million
altogether in the last century. Earthquakes have produced deaths
also running above 100,000 in the worst case, with perhaps again
under a million in total for the 20th century (NEIC 1999). The
greatest toll from famines, storms and floods is in heavily populated
poor countries. On the other hand highly developed countries like
Germany and the Soviet Union produced deaths of many millions
in death camps and state-organized famines.
The last 35 years have also highlighted a huge toll taken by
violent internal conflict. The concept of “Complex Humanitarian
Emergencies” has been created to apply to those cases in which
civil war and inter-ethnic violence exacerbates natural forces like
drought and flood and economic problems like backward
production systems and overpopulation in relation to resources
(Weiss and Collins 2000; Natsios 1997).
Disaster research within the United States is limited by an
advanced agriculture which avoids famines, the more limited danger
134 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
of earthquakes due to our geological underpinning and less
vulnerable housing, and a geography which lacks the extreme
vulnerability to oceanic storms and river floods found in some parts
of the world. On the other hand the United States has historically
been a country of slavery and racial oppression, of genocidal
treatment of the Native Americans, and of periodic poverty and
unemployment, so that its history is not free from examples of
large-scale collective stress. Comparison of U.S. history on these
matters with contemporary “complex humanitarian emergencies”
should help clarify the limitations of a formally democratic political
structure as a means of preventing mass emergencies or chronic
situations of oppression.
THE ALTRUISTIC COMMUNITY
MODEL REVISITED
The model laid out in Communities in Disaster operated at the
level of a local community, and was mainly based on research in
the United States, although there was reference to the Irish famine
of the 1840s and the World War II bombings. It elaborated on Charles
Fritz’s central idea of the “therapeutic community of sufferers.” It
tried to develop a model of response not only to sudden natural
disasters but to situations of large-scale deprivation generally,
including chronic poverty and institutionalized oppression.
However the model needs to be extended to explicitly cover the
levels of national and global response to disasters, and to consider
types of disasters found in other parts of the world. I will review the
model, and for each segment suggest how future research on
collective stress might respond to world developments since the
1960s.
The model was built up from several clusters of propositions
organized around the social “mechanisms” through which helping
behavior is produced. It included 71 propositions: 39 relating
individual-level variables to one another, 23 “contextual”
relationships in which an aggregate or global variable influences
135WHAT IS A DISASTER?
an individual level variable or relationship, and nine collective-
level relationships. Seven “global” variables characterized the overall
impact and community institutional structure.
Sym bol V ariable
Q Suddenness of deprivation
P Severity of Im pact
R Random ness of deprivation
S V ested interests in causes of deprivation
U Control of m edia by vested interests
M d M edia Coverage of victim deprivation
M f M edia content blam ing victim s
There were 13 individual-level variables, 6 matching aggregate
variables, and 3 individual perceptions of these aggregate
numbers.
INDIVIDUAL LEVEL AGGREGATE LEVEL
a. Helping victims
Perc. Na. Perceived number helping
b. Sympathetic identification with victims
c. Personal moral standard requiring help
Perc.Nc. Perceived number holding standard
d. Objective deprivation of individual
Perc. Nd. Perceived number of victims
e. Subjective deprivation
f. Blaming victims Nf. Number blaming victims
g. Altruistic values and ideology
h. Personal contact with victims
i. Number of primary group ties
j. Discussing own deprivation Nj. Number discussing own deprivation
k. Discussing victims deprivation Nk. Number discussing others
deprivation
t. Proximity to deprivation
v. Heterogeneity of social ties
Na.Number helping victims
Nc. Number holding standard
Nd. Number of victims
The propositions were organized around several social processes
and sub-processes: determinants of communication and knowledge
of mass deprivation, determinants of individual motivation to help
victims, and some factors involved in effectively implementing
individual and collective help.
136 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
DETERMINANTS OF COMMUNICATION
AND KNOWLEDGE
Interpersonal Communication About Mass Deprivation
For members of the community in which the mass deprivation
occurs, interpersonal discussion is a major source of their knowledge
of the situation, and this is influenced by the overall dimensions of
the deprivation and the social ties of the individual. (Numbers
below refer to the numbered propositions in Chapter 5 of
Communities in Disaster.)
1, 2, 10, 11, 12: The suddenness and severity of the
deprivation and the number of victims make it more
directly visible to community members and increase
the likelihood of interpersonal discussion of the
situation, as well as the willingness of the victims to
communicate their distress.
3, 4. The more socially random the deprivation, and the
more willing the victims are to communicate, the more
likely an individual is to have personal contact with
victims.
5, 6, 7. The closer the individual is to the location of the
deprivation, the larger the individual’s social network,
and the more heterogeneous the individual’s social
network in terms of social categories, the more likely
the individual is to have personal contact with victim.
8, 9, 13. Contact with victims and having a larger social
network makes it more likely that an individual will
serve as a communicator to others in interpersonal
discussion of the deprivation, and conversely the greater
the number of others engaged in such discussion the
more likely each individual is to participate in it (a
positive feedback from the group to the individual
level, a “snowball effect.”)
14. Mass media coverage of the deprivation promotes
interpersonal discussion, generating a “two-step flow.”
137WHAT IS A DISASTER?
In the light of worldwide social developments since the original
model was created, future research should look at the wider social
networks created by contemporary patterns of intra-national and
international migration and travel. We need to study how many
people in the economically advanced countries are immigrants from
poorer and more disaster-prone countries, how many have traveled
in those countries on business, educational exchanges, or as tourists,
and how many have resulting ongoing personal ties or sympathetic
identification with victims of apparently remote situations of mass
deprivation.
Easy telephone and internet connections now supplement the
traditional letter-writing to remote relatives and friends.
Organizations of fellow-countrymen or those identifying with an
ancestral country, alumni groups from foreign study, missionary
churches, and veterans of “peace corps” programs, and business
organizations with foreign branches, can keep their members in
touch with victims far away. In the 19th century, Christian
missionary groups pioneered in international disaster aid, although
sometimes with religious strings attached. Contemporary
environmentalist, human-rights and labor-rights groups now
supplement the religious groups in operating on a world scale to
provide information on conditions of mass deprivation.
However when a situation of mass suffering is deliberately ignored
or actually created by a government, or by competing elites engaged
in civil war, these personal communications may be suppressed. This
is particularly a problem in societies with authoritarian governments
of left or right, or rule by predatory military groups. These elites use
censorship of mail, surveillance of telephone calls, control of travel,
and secret-police terror to isolate their populations from contact with
the outside world, and from one another.
Mass Media Communication About Mass Deprivation
The mass media are also a major source of information for
members of the society in which a mass deprivation occurs.
Their coverage is a function of disaster characteristics and public
concern, but also of interest groups which can control and limit
138 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
n e w s c o v e r a g e , a n d t h e p r o f e s s i o n a l s t a n d a r d s o f m e d i a
personnel.
15, 16. Mass media coverage is a function of the “disaster
characteristics” of suddenness, intensity, and number
of victims.
17. Mass media coverage is also a function of interpersonal
discussion—a positive feedback from public concern
to media concern, since the media adjust their content
to their audiences’ concerns.
18, 19. Deprivations which arise from conditions which
benefit powerful social groups are less likely to receive
news media coverage, to the extent that these groups
exert control over the media.
20, 21. Sudden and socially random deprivations are less
likely to arise from conditions in which there are socially
“vested interests” than chronic deprivations and those
limited to particular social categories, and are therefore
the former are more likely to receive mass media attention
than the latter.
Again looking at these processes in terms of response going
beyond the local community, future research should emphasize
the role of the media. Here again the “impact characteristics” of
suddenness, intensity, and scale promote news coverage, while
chronic deprivations are given only sporadic attention (Benthall,
1993). But even an enormous and sudden disaster like the
earthquake at Tangshan, China, which killed 250,000 in 1976,
went almost unnoticed in the world press (Young 1988). The first
New York Times story appeared 9 years later, and included the
information that the government had barred foreigners from the
city for years after the disaster and that “the world was left to
speculate about what had happened in Tangshan” (Burns 1985).
A content analysis of U.S. media coverage of natural disasters
from 1964-1995 showed that disaster severity in numbers killed,
numbers homeless, and estimated economic costs were the main
139WHAT IS A DISASTER?
predictors of New York Times coverage, with no significant bias
concerning the race or region of the victims (Van Belle 1999).
However the nature and consequences of media coverage of
situations of mass suffering needs further research.
Media coverage of human suffering in countries with
authoritarian regimes is subject to government censorship and
control of both domestic and outside news media. The outstanding
example is the largest famine in modern history in which
somewhere around 30,000,000 Chinese died in 1958-61 as a result
of Maoist mismanagement (Dreze and Sen, 1989, Becker, 1996).
The famine was kept secret within the country and from the outside
world, and indeed the highest levels of government refused to accept
information on it and continued to demand extraction of food
from the starving areas. Other examples of “secret famines” come
from the Stalinist dictatorship in the Soviet Union. In the 1930s
the government created the Ukraine famine to wipe out peasant
resistance to collectivization, and a similar famine right after
World War II, in both of which millions died under conditions
of secrecy and state terror. The British colonial government
imposed wartime censorship on the Bengal famine of 1943 in
which over 2,000,000 died, to avoid pressure to divert resources
from the war effort. Around 3 million are estimated to have
d i e d i n t h e N o r t h K o r e a n f a m i n e s i n t h e 1 9 9 0 s u n d e r
conditions of secrecy and suppression of information (Devereaux
2000; Dreze and Sen 1989). Dreze and Sen argue that free
news media are one of the most effective means of early warning
and securing government action against famine, along with
competitive multiparty politics which puts pressure on rulers to
respond.
Even greater secrecy is attached to situations of mass suffering
deliberately created by authoritarian regimes to control their people:
concentration camps, labor camps, political killings, genocidal
massacres, or death camps. However even in the presence of
widespread knowledge, governments and peoples may be unwilling
to pay the costs of “humanitarian interventionism” in other
countries.
140 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
In capitalist societies where the news media’s freedom is subject
to market constraints, coverage of human suffering is limited by
its lack of “newsworthiness” in the sense of ability to attract a paying
or advertising-watching audience. This is more true of conditions
of chronic suffering than of sudden dramatic “disasters.” Chronic
deprivations usually arise from institutionalized systems of either
exploitation or neglect—in low-wage agricultural and industrial
enterprises in poor regions or countries, in reservations into which
aboriginal populations are driven, in urban slums, in “total
i n s t i t u t i o n s” f o r t h e m e n t a l l y i l l , t h e re t a rd e d , a n d t h e
impoverished elderly, and in prisons. Those who profit by these
institutions or who want to avoid paying taxes to improve them,
are likely to have considerable influence over commercial media
dependent on their advertising or tied to their corporate
conglomerates. There is a tradition in democratic societies of
media “crusades” exposing human suffering, but in the absence
of powerful social and political movements representing the
lower income groups, these crusades tend to be sporadic and have
limited effects.
Dreze and Sen emphasis the role of a free press in preventing
or mitigating famine, but they point out that premature deaths
due to malnutrition, bad water supplies, lack of health care, lack
of education and unemployment in a country like India cumulate
year by year to equal those resulting from the sporadic
governmentally-produced famines in authoritarian socialist systems
like China, Russia, North Korea and Cambodia (Dreze and Sen,
1989: 204-225). These conditions clearly do not evoke the
attention of the media or the media audience in the way that
sudden natural disasters do, even where the media are legally free
to report them.
Victims’ Communication
The victims of deprivation do not necessarily play a passive
role, but may actively communicate to others in the community.
141WHAT IS A DISASTER?
Their willingness to reveal and discuss their plight is a function of
a number of conditions.
22. There is a curvilinear relation of deprivation to
communication by the victims themselves: the more
severe the deprivation the more communication up to
a point, beyond which the victims may be incapacitated
or blocked from letting others know about their
situation. This may be particularly true of victims of
official persecution thrown into prisons or concentration
camps, and killing people is especially effective in
shutting them up, at least until the forensic experts
examine the bodies.
23, 25 Socially connected victims can communicate more
than the socially isolated, and social contact with
other victims promotes communication by making
people feel they are not alone and have social
support.
24, 26, 27. There is a positive feedback between victims
seeing that others share their deprivation, that others
are freely discussing their plight, and the individual
victim’s willingness to communicate, which in turn
increases the favorable environment for the others.
As an example of the “invisible poor” I quoted Woody Guthrie’s
“Pastures of Plenty,” on the migrants who pick the community’s
crops and “come with the dust and go with the wind.” More
recently the social movements of AIDS victims had to work to get
them to “come out” and overcome the silence of the stigmatized,
using the slogan “Silence is death.”
28, 29. Victims who accept blame for their own
deprivation, and community members who blame
the victims, are less likely to communicate about
the situation.
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This reflects the influence of ideology which makes certain
kinds of deprivation shameful, and relieves other members of the
community of concern with the victims. In a highly individualist
culture, poverty is defined as individual failure, not social failure.
Mental illness is defined as a personal weakness. Unemployment is
concealed lest the person lose status (Newman 1988). AIDS is
identified with shameful behavior. These considerations make it
difficult for victims to organize, find allies, and press for collective
action to improve their situation.
A set of derivative propositions linked the communications
variables above to the individuals knowledge of a situation of mass
deprivation. The level of individual knowledge of a given form of
deprivation is related to the number of victims (33) and the
suddenness of the deprivation (34), individual discussion of the
situation (31), personal contacts with victims (32), the number of
victims communicating (35), and the individual’s sympathetic
identification with the victims (36).
It is notable that in my 1960s analysis, done in the midst of
all manner of activist social movements, I did not go further with
the victims active role in dealing with their deprivation. I did
mention the formation of self-help groups providing therapy and
social support, but included no variables characterizing the extent
of victim self-organization, or their ability to build coalitions to
demand collective action on their behalf. To the extent that
situations of racial oppression or class deprivation are part of the
“collective stress” model, the whole social movement and class
organization literature becomes relevant. This failure reflects the
focus on community-level natural disasters in most of the research
which I reviewed, in which the victims are seen as passive recipients
of community altruism.
The role of a dominant ideology which blames the victims or
stereotypes them as less than human is to reduce communication
by and with them, to weaken their ability to organize themselves,
and to make the rest of society unwilling to listen to them or talk
about them. A society with institutions and values encouraging
collective action by working people creates channels of influenced
143WHAT IS A DISASTER?
for the deprived (Korpi 1983; Esping-Andersen 1985; Franke and
Chasin 1994).
DETERMINANTS OF MOTIVATION TO HELP
Sympathy With The Victims
Feelings of sympathetic identification with victims of
deprivation, rather than indifference, are generated by several fairly
obvious factors:
Perceived severity of the victims deprivation (37),
proximity to the victims (39), discussing the situation (41),
direct contact (42), social randomness of the impact so that
all types of people can identify with victims (44), and
exposure to mass media coverage of the victims plight (40).
Sympathetic identification is reduced by at least two
factors. Blaming the victims for their own suffering (43),
and the sheer number of victims (38). This is especially true
if that number is so great that the onlookers are overwhelmed
by the size of the problem and perhaps threatened by the
prospect of having to sacrifice too much of their own living
standard to do anything about it, perhaps of being forced
into the same deprived fate as in a famine or epidemic.
The individual’s own subjective deprivation may also reduce
concern with other victims by giving priority to one’s own problems
(45). Subjective deprivation however is counteracted by the “relative
deprivation” mechanism: if victims are surrounded by people even
worse off than themselves, they feel their own deprivation less
intensely and are more motivated to help those worse off in spite
of their own sufferings. This is particularly likely to happen through
helping the worse-off victims (propositions 46-52). This produces
the anomaly that many severely victimized people may feel less
deprivation than those on the fringes of a disaster who have little
personal contact with the most severely deprived.
144 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
Blaming The Victims
A crucial element in the growth of an “altruistic community
response” to deprivation is whether the victims are considered
blameless or to blame for their own suffering. Situational factors
which reduce blaming the victims include: the distribution and
nature of the deprivation. Social randomness of the deprivation
(53), and sudden rather than chronic deprivation (54) are important
here. If “it could happen to anyone,” then it is less likely to be
considered a deserved result of moral failings or an inferior culture.
Political and ideological factors are also influential. Moralistic
and individualistic ideologies emphasize individuals’ responsibility
for their own fate; even natural disasters may be considered divine
punishment for sin. Altruistic and collectivist ideologies emphasize
social or natural origins of deprivation (55). Religious groups like
the Mormons may have a tradition and institutions emphasizing
communal help (Fisher 1983; Golec 1983; Vogt 1953).
When there are vested social interests in the causes of the
deprivation, powerful social groups and the communications media
which they control (newspapers, churches, political organizations)
try to spread the idea that the victims and not the social system are
to blame (56, 57). This can happen also in nominally collectivist,
socialist systems if there is a one-party regime which wants to shift
responsibility for its failures to “capitalist elements” and “anti-party
wreckers.” And the more people in the community asserting the
blameworthiness of the victims, the more each member is socially
pressured to accept the idea (59). Personal contact with victims
may counteract this, setting personal knowledge against community
and media stereotypes (58). The normal segregation of personal
contacts by class and race weakens this undermining of stereotypes,
unless the disaster breaks down these social barriers.
Individual Obligations And The Formation Of Community Norms
Individuals in all societies are powerfully influenced by a
sense of right and wrong, and going beyond feelings of sympathy
145WHAT IS A DISASTER?
are feelings of moral obligation to do something. The individual
sense of obligation to help others is a product of a number of
social factors.
Proximity to the victims is relevant. One’s neighbors, people
in one’s community, people in one’s own part of the country,
are usually considered to be owed help as a matter of group
loyalty, as distinct from the vaguer obligation to “help those in
need” regardless of where they are (60). Competing with this
g r o u p l oy a l t y, h o w e v e r, m a y b e t h e i n d i v i d u a l’s o w n
deprivation; the obligation to help others competes with the
sense that one has to look after oneself and one’s immediate
family (64). As we have noted, however, subjective deprivation
may be countered by the visibility of others worse off, reducing
relative deprivation.
Ideological factors also influence the individual’s sense of
obligation; altruistic, egalitarian and collectivist values impose more
such obligations than individualistic, aristocratic, or racist values
(66). Related to this is victim blaming: those held responsible for
their own miseries do not arouse an obligation to help except in
the most charitable, while “innocent victims” move all but the
most hard-hearted(65).
Perhaps most powerfully, there is an accumulation of individual
reactions at the community level. As the number acting to help
others grows, the perception that other people expect one to join
the effort grows, so that however weak the individual motivation
people feel obliged to “pitch in.” (61, 62, 63). This is a positive
feedback mechanism producing a “snowball” effect: the first helpers
generate more helpers and yet more up to some saturation point.
The formation of a high consensus on a powerfully expressed norm
of mutual aid creates the psychological basis for the altruistic
community, the therapeutic community, the “community of
sufferers.”
These propositions were perhaps the most oriented toward
larger social systems in the original analysis, and point to cultural,
structural and political factors of great relevance to national and
global responses to mass suffering.
146 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
The remoteness, lack of direct contact, and “foreignness” of
the victims makes the remote non-victim less likely to strongly
identify with them. Impacts which are socially random within a
community or region of a nation are by necessity not socially
random in the larger society of the nation or the world: they happen
in “the South,” or “Africa,” or to people very different from “us.”
These factors inherent in geographical and cultural remoteness have
to be overcome. Hence the importance not simply of the amount of
media coverage, but its ability to bridge these distances and bring
remote victims vividly to life as fellow members of the national or
world community. Pictures of the starving or the massacre victims in
strange settings may not bring identification, but increase the sense
of difference and of hopelessness. We need experimental research on
the impact of “disaster stories” in the media.
As pointed out in the propositional model, communities
o r s o c i e t i e s d o m i n a t e d b y an economic upper class with
individualistic, laissez-faire ideologies are less likely to encourage
concern with the “undeserving poor” or the chronically miserable.
Those who advocate the “spur of poverty” in getting their own
poor to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps are likely
to say “Let those foreigners solve their own problems because
help would just turn them into parasites on more productive
societies.”
Societies with strong organization of their own working class and
a welfare-state ideology are likely to transfer this orientation to the
world society and devote more resources to foreign aid projects. The
analysis of response to large-scale suffering needs to draw on the large
body of research on the determinants of welfare-state policies. Aid to
victims of disasters and economic crises is part of a larger welfare-state
program. It is notable that the Scandinavian social-democratic
countries now devote a larger portion of their national income to
foreign aid than more conservative countries. On the other hand when
there was competition between capitalist and communist societies in
the Cold War, conservatives in the United States supported foreign
aid, including disaster relief, to keep the Communists from winning
over impoverished countries.
147WHAT IS A DISASTER?
IMPLEMENTING THE HELPING COMMUNITY
Individual Role Competence And Access To Victims
The motivational basis for a helping community is established,
resting on sympathetic identification with victims (67), individual
feelings of moral obligation (68), and a perception of a community
norm requiring help (69). Behavior however does not depend on
motivations alone: it requires opportunity and resources. Individuals
may be prevented from helping by their own injuries, loss of
resources, or lack of skills (70). A severe enough disaster destroys
the community’s ability to help itself. Individuals who have
resources need the ability to contact the victims, directly or
indirectly, to offer help (71). Victims may be isolated by floods or
destruction of roads; would-be helpers may find no organizations
through which they can send contributions to far-away victims.
Chapter 3 of Communities in Disaster examined research on
individual problems of implementing effective aid within a
community under stress. Individuals within the community may
suffer conflict between demands of their different social roles,
particularly as family member versus organization member.
Individuals vary in the occupational and personal skills which they
can bring to bear on the disaster situation. A mass of highly
motivated but poorly organized, trained and equipped individuals
usually performs the bulk of the immediate rescue and relief work
simply because they are there and professional helpers and formal
organizations are not.
Organizational Relations And The Mass Assault
Chapter 4 looked at the major problem of how to relate skilled
people and specialized organizations to this “mass assault.” The
most successful cases of rapid response coordinate the mass and
the professional resources, rather than simply chasing away the
“amateur” helpers when the “professionals” move in. The problem
of ill-conceived media appeals for food and clothing was discussed,
148 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
and the need to coordinate such public appeals with a realistic
assessment of needs and delivery systems. Then there are problems
of inter-organizational coordination which plague emergency
responses. The need for well-practiced central coordination was
clearly demonstrated.
There is now a large body of careful research studies and analysis
of these implementation problems, not only at the community
level but for world-wide disaster programs. In the problems of the
most appropriate forms of aid in famines, Amartya Sen contributed
a body of research that won him a Nobel Prize in economics.
Formal Organization, Mass Action, And The Restorative Process
Chapter 6 examined the problems of the period of restoration
in a community that undergoes severe stress. It noted the weakness
of many local governments when it comes to large-scale planning
and implementing reconstruction projects. It also considered the
strains which result from the carry-over of the “therapeutic social
system and culture” into the longer term reconstruction process,
and the re-emergence of social conflict. These problems are
particularly important in dealing with large-scale famines,
epidemics, and lowland floods, which may require changes in the
social structure if they are not simply to reemerge a few years later.
The analysis of how to effectively treat the chronic problems of
poverty and ill health in the “Third World” inherently involves
ideological and political problems.
We n e e d t o l e a r n f ro m c a s e s o f p o o r c o u n t r i e s w i t h
successful programs of improving life expectancy, health, and
education (Barton 2001). Such countries, like Kerala State in
India, Sri Lanka, Jamaica and Costa Rica, have strong mass
movements with socialist or social-democratic political parties
competing successfully in multi-party democratic systems.
Similar results on life expectancy, health, and education have
b e e n p r o d u c e d i n s o m e o f t h e a u t h o r i t a r i a n c o m m u n i s t
countries—the Soviet Union, China, Cuba. These however have
combined social welfare programs with political oppression and
149WHAT IS A DISASTER?
in the Soviet Union and China at any rate, episodes of some of
the most massive famines in history, secret police terror, and
massive imprisonment or liquidation of people defined as
enemies of the system, including large number of intellectuals
who initially supported their revolutions.
Still other countries starting out poor achieved vastly improved
living standards and incomes through market-oriented capitalism:
South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are the leading examples, with
the first two of these moving to a democratic political system and
development of strong labor organization and other reformist social
movements for women’s rights, the environment, and others.
The problems of response to natural disaster are part of a larger
issue of how to prevent masses of people from being put in harms
way from cyclonic storms, floods, famines, and epidemics, and
how to deal with the chronic disasters of poverty in a world with
unprecedented productive capability.
Those who want an extreme example of the convergence of
these problems can apply the ideas raised in this paper to the
enormous, deadly, and badly handled epidemic of AIDS in Africa.
The homosexual communities of the United States and other
advanced countries used their solidarity and resources to care for,
and eventually save the lives of victims of this disease, and to educate
their members in its avoidance. The disorganized aggregate of poor
drug users in the United States became the primary victims, but
they too are gradually being reached by public health agencies
and minority communities. The expanding but still poor capitalist
economy of Brazil developed a highly effective program of
education and treatment of the epidemic, using the countries
national public health system and domestic production of generic
drugs in defiance of the wealthy countries’ huge drug cartels
(Rosenberg 2001). The conflict between the logic of capitalism
and the desire to save human life was never more crudely displayed
than in the issue of pricing life-saving AIDS drugs, and over
providing socialized medical care versus profit-oriented medicine.
The AIDS statistics from India show that the “welfare state” of
Kerala stands out in its success in holding down the epidemic (US
150 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
Agency for International Development 2002); even the “sex
workers” have a militant organization demanding state aid in
preventive measures (Sex Workers’ Forum Kerala 2002).
Finally, it would be useful to see if the model of altruistic
community response and its wider version for national or
international response can be applied to the reverse situation of
genocidal behavior in a community or nation. The social and
psychological processes which make for identification with victims
and willingness to help appear in the negative when community
members round up a religious or ethic segment of the community
and murder them. A national society which rounds up Jews or
suspected “enemies of the state” and sends them to death camps or
deadly Siberian labor camps must have the negative of those features
which leads societies to pour out aid for disaster victims.
Paradoxically some of the examples of state-created mass
starvation occurred in societies which also provided collective welfare
services for their members and achieve long life expectancies, high
literacy, and economic security for those not sent off to camps or
shot. The fall of the Communist regime in Russia opened the prison
camps, but closed so many hospitals, schools, and factories that life
expectancy fell ten years. Similar problems are arising as China “reforms”
its economy and eliminates the collective institutions which supported
the “barefoot doctors” and the urban health services.
At the same time some societies nominally dedicated to
individual rights allowing masses of people to suffer poverty and
unemployment, racial discrimination, and lack of health care. A
crucial factor in avoiding both totalitarian and laissez-faire capitalist
forms of mass deprivation seems to be the combination of political
rights with effective economic and political organization of the
mass of the people—the working class and the small farmers—to
create a welfare state grafted onto a productive market economy.
Some relatively poor societies like Kerala state in India, Sri Lanka,
Costa Rica and Jamaica have achieved reasonably good conditions
of health and life expectancy, along with the capitalist “newly
industrialized countries” of East Asia, and the old social-democratic
industrial nations of Europe.
151WHAT IS A DISASTER?
CONCLUSION
Using the concept of “collective stress” to examine a wide range
of situations of large-scale deprivation varying on several dimensions,
with “local physical disaster” as one subtype, raises important
theoretical questions and points to a wide range of empirical cases
from which to learn answers. The wider concept relates the problems
of preventing, mitigating, and coping with physical disasters to
the general field of social problems and the means by which societies
deal or fail to deal with them. It points to variables found important
in research on the growth of welfare states (and the retreat from
welfare states), on development or underdevelopment of poor
societies, on human rights versus discrimination and genocide, on
famine and epidemic disease and the social response thereto, on
social movements creating institutions of self-help and of political
pressure on governments to deal with social problems.
Quantitative studies of populations and organizations are
needed to understand how to achieve policies to reduce
vulnerability to both natural and technological hazards. A number
of systematic studies of the process of adoption of social policies
have been made in the last 30 years, summarized in review articles
by Burstein (1981, 1991, 1998) and Amenta et al. (2001). Here
again the problems of preparing for or avoiding physical disaster
form a subset of the problems of collective stress and of social
problems generally. Systematic comparative studies of how different
societies deal with the “vulnerability” problem are needed, covering
a wide range of potential collective stresses.
There are obviously specialized problems in specifically physical
disasters in local areas, which need intensive study on which to
base the “social engineering” of effective responses. This research
needs the quantitative data which can only be provided by well-
sampled surveys of the populations of people and organizations
involved in response to disaster. Quarentelli pays tribute to the
early National Opinion Research Center survey of tornado-struck
communities as a “fountainhead study.” (Quarantelli 1988a).
Insightful field observations can guide the formulation of hypotheses
152 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
for such quantitative research, but it takes numbers to create models
for complex systems of community response. Given the social costs
which natural and technological physical disasters are likely to
continue to inflict even with much improved preventive and
mitigative policies, there is a continuing need for cumulative,
policy-relevant research on all aspects of physical disaster response.
But the usefulness of specialized disaster research will be enhanced
if it also draws on findings from the broader field of collective
stress research and theory.
153
11
FROM CRISIS TO DISASTER:
TOWARDS AN INTEGRATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Arjen Boin
INTRODUCTION: DISCUSSING DEFINITIONS
The collection of essays published in What is a Disaster?
(Quarantelli 1998b) suggests a pervasive sense of unease with the
state of the disaster studies field. In this landmark volume, key
academics join in a remarkable self-study of their field, sparing few
of the long-standing conceptual pillars that have supported the
field throughout the 20th century. Unease here is both logical and
understandable. The disaster community, dominated by disaster
sociologists and U.S. practitioners, sits atop empirically grounded
and theoretically interesting research findings that describe and
explain individual, group and organizational behavior in natural
disasters (i.e., hurricanes, earthquakes and floods). At the same
time, little work has been done on other types of crises. Henry
Quarantelli’s (1998b) effort to engage the disaster field in discussion
is therefore critical to the field.
The events of 11 September 2001 underscore both the
relevance and irrelevance of contemporary disaster research. The
9/11 events spurred demand for both theoretical and practitioner-
relevant research, not only in the U.S. but in Europe as well.
154 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
However, as the essays in Quarantelli’s book make clear, the disaster
field seems unlikely to deliver. In its enduring preoccupation with
organizational and societal response patterns in times of natural
mayhem, the disaster field has “missed” the signs of crises to come.
These signs are anything but new. The twin “manmade
disasters,” Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, were prototypes of
the modern crisis; but they did not fundamentally reorient the
field. Other time-defining crises were largely neglected. What were
initially mysterious epidemics such as Legionnaire’s Disease, AIDS,
Veteran’s Disease (Gulf War) and BSE (Mad Cow Disease); “new”
terrorism such as Waco, the Empire State Building and the Alfred
P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City; Black Monday on
Wall Street; KAL 007, TWA 800 and the Challenger; the Heizel
stadium tragedy and the LA Riots; Concorde and Koersk; the
Millennium IT threat or the coming water crisis—this is but a list
of crises that did not meet conventional disaster definitions.
The new and contemporary crises differ in fundamental ways
from “classic” natural disasters (Rosenthal 1998; Rosenthal, Boin
and Comfort 2001). The modern crisis is increasingly complex. It
is not confined by boundaries of space or time. It entangles quickly
with other deep problems and its impact is prolonged. Conventional
disaster definitions do not capture the essence of modern adversity.
Judging by the core definitions of the field and newspaper headlines
of current crises, disaster sociology runs the risk of becoming a
perspective whose time has come and gone.
Quarantelli’s (1998b) book proves that disaster sociologists
arrived at this very conclusion well before 9/11 permanently
degraded the old disaster definitions to low relevance status (see
especially the chapters by Gilbert and Quarantelli). The cautious
suggestion at the end of the book now stands as a self-evident
truth: a new perspective, or perhaps a paradigm shift, is required if
students of disaster want to be heard, not only on the characteristics
but also on the causes and consequences of today’s and tomorrow’s
crises, such as smallpox threats and Anthrax scares, beltway snipers
and economic meltdowns, eco-crises and all other “new species of
trouble” (Erikson 1994).
155WHAT IS A DISASTER?
This chapter discusses classic disaster definitions and insights
in the light of new and very disturbing threats. It articulates the
need to develop a new perspective that addresses both the classic
disaster and the modern crisis in a consistent way, while bearing
relevance for practitioners. In section 2, I briefly survey the 1998
discussion. In section 3, I focus on the relation between two key
concepts: crisis and disaster. I argue that we cannot formulate a
useful definition of disaster without a proper definition of crisis, as
the two concepts are inextricably linked. In light of these insights,
section 4 identifies key questions and the most promising
corresponding perspectives that together lay the foundations for
an integrative perspective on crises and disasters.
CLASSIC DISASTER DEFINITIONS AND
THE SUBJECTIVE CHALLENGE
The question What is a Disaster? is a deceptively simple one.
Most people associate a disaster with a destructive episode, involving
death and damage. They are inclined to speak of natural disasters,
as nature has traditionally played its devastating hand on mankind.
The traditional pendulant of “disaster” is “war;” a concept that
incorporates the same sense of loss and devastation (Gilbert, 1998).
The founders of the disaster field primarily, but not exclusively,
concentrated on public responses to natural disasters, but they
also had a keen eye for war preparation relevance.
The classic definitions in the field, discussed thoroughly and
perhaps exhaustively in Quarantelli (1998b), revolve around four
key ingredients: agent description, physical damage, social
disruption, and negative evaluation (Kreps 1998:110). Whereas
more traditional definitions tend to emphasize agents and damage,
younger definitions pay more attention to the social constructivist
dimension of disaster definition and the social disruption that either
follows or characterizes a disaster. But even the latter definitions
still hint at damage and tacitly assume natural forces at work.
The question is whether this mixture of definitional elements
is still adequate to capture the essence of disaster in today’s risk
156 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
society, which is characterized less by threat of devastation than by
an obsessive fear for safety breaches (Beck 1992). In the modern
Western society, people have become so used to physical safety
that they get easily upset over the slightest challenge to their
invulnerability. In the summer of 2001, for instance, a large crowd
of 90,000 attended a popular dance festival in a large park area
near the town of Velsen (north of Amsterdam). The beautiful day
ended in cold rain. The absence of sufficient numbers of buses and
taxis left thousands of scantily dressed people waiting in the rain. The
next days, newspapers and radio reports spoke of a “near disaster.”
The municipal government of Velsen felt obliged to hire a consultancy
firm in order to ‘learn lessons’ for the future. This silly episode illustrates
how people in the risk society have become remarkably lenient in
their labeling of adverse situations in terms of a disaster.
In the risk society, small glitches cause relatively large failures.
These failures loom large because they are experienced in a context
of near-invulnerability. The Millennium IT problem—soon to be
entirely forgotten—marked a turning point in time: doom scenarios
circulated, predicting depression, looting and other inconveniences,
all because our computers would not work for, say, a week or two. In
the risk society, a heat wave in Chicago then becomes a disaster, because
the poor and the elderly do not have access to air conditioning
(Klinenberg, 2002). A few hours of interrupted power in big city area
create hazardous situations, because most people in the Western world
apparently have no idea how to deal with such a situation.
When people die because of a malfunction in the risk society,
we gasp for words to describe the traumatic dimensions of the
occasion. The crash of an El Al Boeing in the Amsterdam Bijlmer
suburbs (1992), the fireworks explosion in Enschede (2000) and
the Volendam disco inferno (2001) had a combined death toll of
less than a hundred; yet these commonly perceived as disasters
that will define the modern history of the Netherlands. They may
not meet the disaster definition of a U.S. sociologist and may appear
little more than an accident to, say, a Chinese journalist; but in
Holland these names—Bijlmer, Enschede, Volendam—spell
disaster.
157WHAT IS A DISASTER?
As the nature of modern disaster is changing and is becoming
more a product of collective sense-making processes than of some
exogenous agent, the definition of disaster must be adapted to
preserve its correspondence with the phenomenon it describes. All
authors in the Quarantelli (1998b) collection do indeed try to
deal with the new disaster reality. “The main problematic for us,”
says Hewitt (1998:76), “does seem to be the social construction of
disasters.” The authors have done away with agent-driven definitions,
but wrestle with definitions of modern disasters.
More specifically, they wonder how to study the mysterious
processes through which people label a certain time frame or
collective experience as a disaster. This is, of course, not what most
disaster sociologists were trained to do. Many disaster sociologists
were primarily interested to learn how people and organizations
behaved in times of collective stress (Dynes 1998). Disaster as
they knew it provided excellent, almost laboratory-like conditions,
to test and develop their theories (see Merton’s foreword to Barton’s
(1969) book). These academics very well knew that disasters were
social constructions, but most were simply not interested in
reconstructing the collective sense-making processes leading up to
the disaster label (but see Stallings, 1995). This was seen as a
political science activity. It is telling that the work of Murray
Edelman (1971; 1977) is not cited in a volume heralding this
subjective shift (see also ‘t Hart 1993; Bovens and ‘t Hart 1996).
Getting a grip on this subjective dimension emerges as the
core challenge from this discussion. I know a disaster when I see one
will not do, as the discussants readily admit. Theoretical purity
induces a drive among them towards objectifying the subjective.
Disaster theorists want to know when and under what conditions
a certain percentage of people agrees on labeling some condition,
event, or time period as a disaster. Such an exercise would require
theorists to study how politicians, media, corporations, societal
organizations, academics, and people in a well-defined social unit
arrive at a common agreement—and maintain that consensus for
some time—that “something” is a disaster (Bovens and ‘t Hart
1996). This is not an easy exercise, as participants in the
158 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
Quarantelli-led discussion have found. Disaster interpretations shift
across time and space (Oliver-Smith 1998; Rosenthal et al. 2001),
creating a sense of despair for those disaster students who had
managed to stay outside the postmodernist realm.
One may well wonder whether a purely subjective perspective
on disasters does not stray too far from the concept of disaster as
we know it and as most non-academics understand it. It is, of
course, clear by now that a “legalistic” or objective definition
will no longer do (cf. Kroll-Smith and Gunter 1998). Defining
a disaster in absolute terms leaves too much room for endless
and unproductive discussion fueled by varying interpretations
and cultural differences. An absolute definition also negates what
happens in practice. In public administration, a disaster
declaration is more an outcome of politics than of absolute
measurements of death and destr uction (Por firiev, 1998).
Moreover, a legalistic definition with “objective” indicators,
rates, and scopes cannot capture the subjective feeling of loss,
which rarely correlates consistently across time and space (Barton
1969; Ellemers 2001).
But an absolute turn towards a purely subjective notion of
disaster would make us students of symbolics and semantics. It
would require disaster students to follow and perhaps explain trends,
polls, and hypes in order to understand the origins of a disaster. In
other words, if the subjective is divorced from tangible and
objectifiable features of collective distress, the relevance of the
disaster definition and of disaster studies is completely diminished.
Yet all is not lost. The promissory notion of “social disruption”
is the conceptual ingredient of existing disaster definitions that we
have not discussed. All authors in the Quarantelli (1998b) volume
agree that disasters must be defined in terms of social disruption,
whether as cause, characteristic, or consequence. This is a promising
concept, because it allows for objectification but also has
unmistakable subjective connotations. This does not solve the
problems outlined above, yet it provides an opening towards a
fresh perspective on disasters. But it is necessary, then, to introduce
a complimentary concept: crisis.
159WHAT IS A DISASTER?
WIDENING THE PERSPECTIVE:
DISASTER AS A “CRISIS GONE BAD”
The contributing authors in the Quarantelli book seem to
agree that a disaster pertains to a period of social disruption, which
is widely evaluated in negative terms (cf. Kreps, 1998). A disaster,
then, indicates that the normal functioning of a human system—
typically a community or geographically connected set of
communities—is severely disrupted. Disruption in itself is not a
sufficient condition for disaster sociologists to speak of a disaster.
An economic boom, for instance, may disrupt normality in a rather
pleasant way. Disruption becomes disastrous when the life
sustaining functions of the system break down and people are deeply
distressed as a result. This definition reflects the widest possible
common denominator among disaster sociologists.
Any attempt to “objectify” or specify this definition ruins the
consensus. It is easy to see and agree that a hurricane or earthquake
disrupts a community by killing and wounding people, destroying
houses, severing power lines, and undermining the response
capacity of emergency services. The disruption affects the entire
system. In many other cases, however, such clarity (for academics)
is a formidable achievement. The Anthrax attack killed a few
individuals and severely disrupted U.S. mail delivery, but it hardly
affected the life sustaining functions of any social system. The
Challenger explosion is still remembered as a national disaster, but
its accident statistics do not fall within the definition by any stretch
of the imagination. Very few events can be safely described in terms
of social disruption of life sustaining functions. This does not mean
that the dramatic events in question were non-disasters. It simply
tells us that, even with the help of the “social disruption” concept,
a disaster definition is rather devoid of meaning if it fails to capture
what most laymen would consider a disaster.
If we leave it to the people to define disruptions in their life in
terms of a disaster, however, the set of events becomes so large that
the term disaster is devoid of its original meaning. A rained-out
dance party may be experienced as a (near) disaster in the
160 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
Netherlands, whereas an explosion of a fireworks factory in China
is accepted as a normal accident. The notion that disaster and
destruction are God’s punishment or Fortuna’s pebble stones may
be obsolete in today’s disaster sociology, but many Africans
reportedly view the AIDS scourge still in these terms. Such
differences in perception provide food for thought to cultural
anthropologists, but make it rather difficult for disaster sociologists
to book theoretical progress.
Whereas the objective part of the disaster definition forces our
attention to undeniable adversity (i.e., hurricanes, floods, and
earthquakes), the subjective notion makes us chart all types of
collective sensemaking (including hypes, trends and rumors). The
challenge is to reconcile these perspectives on collectively defined
epochs of undesirable system breakdown. This challenge does not
require us to do away with “undesirable disruption” as a core element
of a disaster definition. After all, it is clear that the prototype—
typically natural—disaster fits this definition like a velvet glove.
Our problem is the modern crisis, which is easily described in
terms of disaster but rarely meets a mainstream definition of disaster.
The very concept of crisis helps to solve this conundrum (see also
Rosenthal 1998).
The Crisis Concept
The terms crisis and disaster are often mixed up and used
synonymously by lay people, practitioners, politicians and
journalists. In the world of theory, however, the concepts are rarely
related to each other to build and sustain a comprehensive
perspective on all forms of adversity experienced and to be
experienced. The disaster field is the well-demarcated province of
a recognized group of academics (mostly sociologists and geologists),
selected policymakers (FEMA and state administrators), and field
workers. It has its academic programs, journals, and meetings. The
crisis field, on the other hand, resembles a hodge-podge quilt of
specialist academics that are scattered over many disciplines (public
administration, political science and international relations,
161WHAT IS A DISASTER?
political psychology, but also technical specialists such as
epidemiologists and information technology experts). The two
fields rarely meet.
The term “crisis” is typically used as a catch-all concept, which
encompasses all types of “un-ness” events (cf. Hewitt, 1983). In
this rather general perspective, the term “crisis” applies to situations
that are unwanted, unexpected, unprecedented, and almost
unmanageable, causing widespread disbelief and uncertainty
(Rosenthal, Boin and Comfort 2001; Stern and Sundelius 2002).
A crisis is, more precisely, defined as “a serious threat to the basic
structures or the fundamental values and norms of a social system,
which—under time pressure and highly uncertain circumstances—
necessitates making critical decisions” (Rosenthal, Charles and ‘t
Hart 1989:10).
The crisis concept thus helps to remedy at least one problem
inherent to the classic disaster definition: it not only covers
clear-cut disasters, but also a wide variety of events, processes
and time periods that may not meet the disaster definition but
certainly merit the attention of disaster students. As it relaxes
the condition of collective assessment and thus makes way for
situations of threat and successful coping efforts, it applies to
all processes of disruption that seem to require remedial action.
The label fits all the examples mentioned in the introduction
of this chapter and covers all disasters one can remember or
imagine. Eco-threats, IT crashes and economic adversity are
joined by intrastate conflicts, prison riots, regional wars,
exploding factories and, yes, natural disasters. The wide-ranging
“case bank” of the Swedish research group, CRISMART, is filled
with examples (Stern and Sundelius 2002)
To be sure, this crisis definition is not without problems. In
the definition cited above, crisis is an elite construction. Authorities
decide whether an event or process indicates progress or disruption
of normality. This definition is, in effect, much closer to a
preoccupation with a return to order than disaster sociologists are
sometimes accused of being with their definition of undesirable
social disruption (for criticism on disaster sociology, see Hewitt
162 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
(1998); see ‘t Hart (1993) for a discussion on the government-
centric nature of crisis management studies).
This crisis definition does not solve the subjective problem of
disaster students. We can only speak of a crisis if the actors in
question perceive the situation as a crisis (the so-called Thomas
Theorem). This subjective nature of crisis makes it impossible to
neatly demarcate the beginning and end of a crisis, because different
actors perceive a situation in terms of crisis at different points in
time (‘t Hart and Boin 2001). If we say that individuals or groups
must perceive a situation in terms of crisis characteristics (threat,
urgency, uncertainty), it automatically means that we “miss” certain
events or processes that many of us would consider in terms of
crisis just because the authorities do not recognize the situation in
terms of crisis. As long as the authorities in question remain
oblivious, analysts cannot treat this situation in terms of crisis.
This problem is thus different from the subjective problem in the
disaster field, where people on the ground see a disaster that does
not meet the definition.
But the crisis field also harbors perspectives that offer objective
definitions of crisis, which creates a new and promising perspective.
The conceptualization of crisis as a period of discontinuity, marking
the breaking point in a patterned process of linearity, builds upon
classic lines of inquiry in sociology and political science (see Crozier
1964; Almond et al. 1973; Linz and Stepan 1978; Stinchcombe
1997). In this type of definition, crises are viewed as disruptions
of normality. It is inherently suspect in the eyes of contemporary
social scientists, as it smacks of structural-functionalist analysis.
But if we sidestep this ancient battlefield, we can see that this type
of definition helps to bridge the gap between disaster and crisis
studies.
We can now define crisis in terms of a state of flux during
which institutional structures of a social system become uprooted.
In this definition, the main currency of crisis is legitimacy (‘t Hart
1993; Turner and Pidgeon 1997). A crisis then occurs when the
institutional structure of a social system experiences a relatively
strong decline in legitimacy, as its central service functions are
163WHAT IS A DISASTER?
impaired or suffer from overload. Within a relatively short time,
political and societal trust diminishes in the way a social system
operates. At the heart of the crisis is an unremitting discrepancy
between external expectations and perceived performance of the
system. A combination of internal and external factors causes and
sustains this gap. External stakeholders suddenly consider routines
and outcomes that used to be satisfactory unacceptable or
inappropriate. Internal deficiencies blind authorities to these new
realities. This mismatch prevents timely adaptation, which erodes
the legitimacy of sustaining structures.
A definition of crisis in terms of disruption fits the general
disaster definition emerging from Quarantelli’s (1998b) book. But
whereas the disaster-related concept of disruption would require
‘mental gymnastics of Olympian proportion’ to translate it into
measurable indicators (Dynes 1998:112), somewhat less effort
seems necessary to make crisis-related disruption researchable. If
we take shifts in legitimacy as a key indicator for disruption, it can
be argued that the rapid decline in legitimacy for institutional
structures that were previously widely valued helps us identify a
systemic crisis. It is true that legitimacy itself cannot be precisely
measured, but it is possible to gauge and document downward
shifts by studying media reporting, political activity and other
signs of societal mobilization.
By bringing crisis and disaster under one roof, we can have it
both ways. We can differentiate between objectifiable processes of
disruption and subjective processes of collective sensemaking
without being relegated to the natural disaster niche or being turned
into societal trend watchers. This only works if we share the concepts
of crisis and disaster, which can now be sharply distinguished.
Crisis, then, pertains to the process of perceived disruption; disaster
applies to the collectively arrived-at appraisal of such a process in
negative terms. In this perspective, a disaster is a crisis with a bad
ending.
It could be said that disaster thus becomes a subcategory of
the generic crisis concept (Quarantelli 1998b). This may seem a
cannibalistic exercise with very little respect for the accomplishments
164 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
of the disaster field. It is, in fact, nothing of the kind. It is merely
a semantic reshuffling, freeing disaster sociologists from their
subjective corset and inviting them to share their insights with the
growing number of public and business administration scholars,
political scientists, organization theorists, and social psychologists
that study all forms of adversity and think of ways to deal with
them. Disaster sociologists can return to studying causes, conditions
and consequences of social disruption without having to worry
about collective labelling exercises. The new paradigm would require
disaster sociologists to reserve the term disaster for a specific subtype
of crisis, but it would allow them to study all other types of crisis.
The joint perspective leads to a dynamic approach. A crisis has
no clear beginning. The process of disruption is rooted in a
combination of exogenous and endogenous factors. The
consequences of crisis are felt in the future; a crisis may flare up
long after it supposedly terminated. Sensemaking processes have
very different dynamics. Sometimes they overlap with crisis
dynamics, creating a widespread sense of disaster that Barton (1969)
defined in terms of collective stress. More often, sensemaking
processes follow different time paths; they are fragmented across
time and space (Bovens and ‘t Hart 1996). A crisis is sometimes
declared without clear signs of disruption, thus creating a crisis
(and a disaster) in its consequences. Or a crisis is formally
terminated, even though it is only beginning for some. The crisis
dynamics and sensemaking processes affect each other in unforeseen
ways.
This new perspective requires a multi-disciplinary approach.
By relating the disaster and crisis concepts, we can encompass as
well as categorize and classify a variety of events and processes that
have long been the subject of distinct fields of expertise. The disaster
category is widened to include all types of crisis with a bad ending:
riots, stadium and crowd disasters; acts of terrorism; transport
disasters; food poisonings; epidemics and massacres. The new
perspective may do away with classic crisis categories on the basis
of on-set (creeping crises versus sudden crises), agent, sector, process
(slowly evolving versus fast-burning) and consequences (symbolic
165WHAT IS A DISASTER?
crisis versus disaster). More work remains to be done here. In the
next section, we identify some common challenges awaiting us.
NEW QUESTIONS, PROMISING PERSPECTIVES
In the study of crisis and disaster, two types of questions
dominate. First, we want to learn more about the causes of crises,
the patterns of crisis coping, and the consequences of crisis. Second,
we seek to find out how certain crises come to be labelled in terms
of disaster. The joint insights of both fields go a long way in
addressing these questions. Let us consider these questions in more
detail and discuss some promising theoretical perspectives in
addressing these questions.
Causes Of Crisis And Disaster
Most crisis and disaster researchers agree that today’s crises
cannot be explained by listing a few easily recognizable factors.
Disaster sociologists have left the act-of-God explanation behind
them (Quarantelli 1998b), but have not replaced it with other
types of explanations. In the crisis field, the similar type of
explanation—human error and lunatic motives—has given way to
perspectives that better fit the context and process of contemporary
crises. The research on causes of crises has become an
interdisciplinary effort, paving the way for a multi-level approach
that allows us to analyze the origins of any given crisis.
At the micro level, such an approach would focus on the role
of individuals. In most, if not all crises, human errors are found at
the roots of the crisis. Therefore we should study why and how
humans err (Reason 1990). In addition, we should ask under which
conditions the inevitable human error can cause a crisis.
At the meso level of inquiry, the focus is on organizational
factors and processes that may play a role in causing crises. The
crucial question is whether organizations can compensate for both
human limitations and environmental factors that facilitate crises.
On the one side, we can distinguish a group of researchers who
166 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
argue that most organizations are unable to prevent human errors
or alleviate the consequences of human failure. Quite on the
contrary, they argue that organizations tend to bring other types
of crisis-enhancing processes to the fore. Through a combination
of sloppy management and an inherent blind spot for significant
changes (for better or worse), organizations contribute to crises in
the making (Turner and Pidgeon 1997). The extreme side in this
debate is perhaps taken by those researchers who conceptualize
the organization as a capitalist vehicle for egocentric leaders (see
Perrow 1986; Wisner 2001).
At the macro level of analysis, theorists pitch in other powerful
causes that seem to make crises more or less inevitable, and thus
unavoidable, features of modern society (Beck 1992; Turner and
Pidgeon 1997). One of the most persuasive authors in this vein,
Charles Perrow (1999), argues that large technical systems will
sooner or later produce a disaster as a combined result of sheer
potential (for instance, nuclear energy), technical complexity (few
people can understand what goes on inside a nuclear power plant)
and tight coupling (one malfunction leads to another). Others
argue that environmental pressures lead organizations to emphasize
efficiency and output targets over safety goals (Sagan 1993). If we
add such forces as globalization, ITC development and future
terrorism, it is easy to understand this somewhat pessimistic
outlook.
The so-called high reliability theorists present us with a more
optimistic vision (Rochlin 1996). This group of researchers
maintains that smartly designed and well-maintained organizations
are capable of absorbing human errors and external pressures while
preventing common organizational pathologies. Through a mixture
of strategies, organizational leaders can turn their “high-risk
systems” into high reliability organizations. This line of research
finds support in the literature on institutions, which strongly
suggests that the right kind of administrative architecture will lead
to effective organizations (Selznick 1957). The debate between
“optimists” and “pessimists” continues to generate powerful insights
(Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 1994).
167WHAT IS A DISASTER?
The challenge is to apply these static perspectives to the dynamic
process of crisis, which leads a system from one temporary state to
another. This process can take the form of linear escalation, moving
from threshold to threshold and cumulating in severe adversity
(Hills 1998). In the domains of information and communication
technology and public utilities, for instance, blackouts or
breakdowns rarely remain limited to their place of origin. Or they
may take the form of ‘reinforced feedback loops’ that gradually or
slowly—the creeping crisis—propel the system towards calamity
(Ellis 1998: 146).
Most crises flow from unique configurations of individual errors,
organizational failure and environmental flux. Because different
crises follow different critical paths, crisis researchers need a
methodology that allows them to reconstruct and compare each
and every crisis process. What is needed is some form of critical
path analysis, which identifies turning points within trends and
thus key opportunities for policy intervention (Kouzmin and Jarman
1989). We may need “new” theoretical perspectives—the evolving
field of complexity studies and the revived interest in evolutionary
perspectives come to mind—to connect the various factors operating
at different analytical levels.
Such an analysis may help us understand how human errors,
organizational pathologies and environmental imperatives combine
into system-disrupting processes, but it does not tell us why and
when some tensions, problems or deteriorating circumstances come
to be defined in terms of disaster whereas most are not. We need to
understand how escalating crisis processes intertwine with political
and societal sense-making processes.
An interesting body of research, mainly dealing with the
understanding of so-called policy fiascoes, can help us understand
these processes (Bovens and ‘t Hart 1996; Bovens et al. 2001).
Therein, the key finding seems to be that negative labels such as
“fiasco” and “disaster” are the product of social interaction between
key players in political and societal arenas. The media play a crucial,
controversial and hard-to-define role in this process. That is, as
disaster sociologists know all too well, a political process: what is a
168 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
disaster to some is a golden opportunity for others (Olson 2000).
Some see the process as an unfolding play in which the various
actors vie to dispose the blame, take the credit and emerge as a
winner (cf. ‘t Hart 1993). The definition of disaster thus becomes
separated from the impact “on the ground.” It does, however, come
closer to what people perceive to be the impact. This question
clearly poses another challenge for disaster and crisis students.
Characteristics And Coping Patterns
The term crisis refers to a situation in which a threat to a
system’s basic structures or values is present, which must be dealt
with urgently and under conditions of uncertainty or, as Yehezkel
Dror says, inconceivability (Rosenthal et al. 2001:7). The threat
of crisis can be the threat of death or damage, but it also pertains
to the invisible and intangible perils that are feared to destroy a
community (Erikson 1994). A crisis brings uncertainty with regard
to the specific nature of the threat, people’s responses, the dynamics
of the situation, possible solutions and future consequences. Crises
usually induce a sense of urgency, especially for crisis managers
(Brecher and Wilkenfeld 1997). It is, of course, the perception of
decision makers rather than some set of predefined conditions that
counts.
Crisis management is the shorthand term for all activities—
prevention, preparation, mitigation and recovery—that aim to deal
with systemic disruptions (Comfort 1988). The combined insights
of disaster and crisis research provide us with a good picture of
both the challenges awaiting crisis managers and the routine patterns
in their actual performance.
One of the pillars in a joint crisis and disaster perspective would
undoubtedly be the realization that full prevention is simply
impossible. It is true, of course, that technological progress and
increased awareness go a long way in preventing certain types of
crisis. But new technologies have a tendency to “bite back” (Tenner
1997). Moreover, public resources and political attention spans
are inherently limited. Even if this were not the case, relatively
169WHAT IS A DISASTER?
minor disturbances can create immense effects in a society that
banks on perfectionist prevention schemes. As we learn to prevent
“routine crises,” new crises emerge. The challenge, therefore, is to
balance prevention and resilience, to organize for the unknown
(Wildavsky 1988).
The practice of crisis and disaster planning bears out the
enormity of this challenge. When organizations prepare for a crisis,
their preparations are based on past experiences and routinized
management repertoires. But crisis management techniques that
worked in yesterday’s crisis may not be effective today and may
even have counter-effects in tomorrow’s crisis. Planning and
preparatory measures may fall prey to routinization or they may
become part of the high politics game. Safety and security
arrangements suffer from the reality of pro forma exercises, the
lack of safety culture, and pressures to meet productivity standards.
Moreover, the institutional tendency to routinize crisis management
practices and procedures clashes with the necessity to operate in a
flexible and adaptive way in the event of a crisis.
Responding to crisis is a challenge in itself. The research findings
show how hard it is to make critical decisions under crisis
conditions. Crisis managers must solve complex dilemmas without
the information they require, in fluctuating organizational settings
marked by bureau politics and under conditions of severe stress.
Political leadership in times of crisis may well be qualified as an
impossible job (Boin and ‘t Hart 2003).
The crisis aftermath is one of the most interesting and perhaps
understudied phases of the crisis process. There is, of course, a
number of technical issues that crisis managers must deal with in
order to restore a new sense of normality, including relocation,
insurance, grief counseling and reconstruction. Disaster and crisis
research shows that these challenges are often underestimated in
practice. The worst challenges often happen after the initial crisis
has already occurred (Boin et al. 2001). This is also the phase in
which the first evaluative notions begin to emerge with regard to
crisis management performance. As the crisis process is still in a
dynamic phase, the decisions and (perceived) actions of crisis
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managers feed back into the sense-making process that “decides”
whether this crisis will be forgotten soon or will go down in history
as a disaster.
Consequences
The consequences of crisis are often—understandably so—
viewed as dysfunctional, undesirable, if not evil. This tendency is
empirically grounded. People have to deal with material and
immaterial damages. Houses must be repaired or rebuilt, the
infrastructure restored, the dead must be buried and the wounded
must be attended to. In that sense, there is an understandable
need for restoration. The same is true for other types of crises,
which often create a desire for stability, stocktaking, a new
equilibrium or a temporary status quo. This inclination toward
normalcy is supported by administrative reflexes.
But crises also present opportunities. A massive earthquake,
killing thousands of people, may bring governmental failure to
light and subsequently force incompetent politicians and
administrators out of office—opening the gate toward much-needed
development (Cuny 1983). In the long term, crises may thus set
the stage for fundamental and drastic change of the system, tension
release, open conflict and accelerated circulation of elites. We know
that crises may accelerate social and political change, that they
may bring latent forces of change into the open, that they may
very well function as policy windows (Kingdon 1984), helping to
reconstruct the policy or social agenda.
It is a mistake, however, to assume that a crisis is automatically
followed by reform of some kind. Much depends on the actions of
crisis managers and the evaluations of both these actions and the
causes of crises among politicians, the media and the public. This
process of evaluation and assessment is political in nature and driven
by various factors (‘t Hart and Boin 2001). It is in this phase that
managerial challenges give way to political challenges, such as the
“framing” of the crisis impacts processes of accountability and blame
allocation.
171WHAT IS A DISASTER?
An interesting question for further research asks how these
political processes relate to “conventional” questions of learning
and prevention. It appears that organizations often fail to learn
(Sagan 1993), refuse to learn (Perrow 1999), learn only in symbolic
ways (Clarke 1999) or in very slow ways. The challenge for crisis
and disaster researchers is to identify conditions that facilitate
effective learning that can improve future performance.
CONCLUSION
A discussion of crisis and disaster definitions can only be useful
to either academics or practitioners, if it takes into account the
changing nature of crisis. A definition that confines itself to a certain
class of phenomena—be it natural mayhem, terrorism or riots—
poses a long-term danger to the academic field working with the
definition. As the 9/11 events have forcefully demonstrated,
tomorrow’s disaster is sure to differ in most if not all of its
characteristics from today’s. Common developments such as
technology jumps, globalization, demographic shifts, media
corporatization, and natural depletion are but a few driving forces
that will create new and inconceivable crises in the near future.
Whether these future crises will become our future disasters,
depends in part on our institutional crisis management capacity.
It is clear that the rapidly changing nature of crisis poses
fundamental challenges to this capacity and to crisis managers (Boin
and Lagadec 2000). I would guess that the sense-making processes
by which crisis events are classified as disasters are also subject to
these change processes. All in all, disaster researchers must be
prepared to deal with new questions in new ways if they want to
be recognized as disaster researchers in the future.
The discussion initiated by Quarantelli (1998b) has led to a
similar conclusion. The various contributions seem to underwrite
the proposition that the disaster community would be better off
by shedding its preoccupation with natural agents and by including
non-sociological (and non U.S.) sources of insights in its search for
organizational regularities. A merger of the hitherto strictly
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separated fields of disaster and crisis management—beginning with
jointly operated journals, conferences and research programs—is a
sensible option that should be explored. I believe that only by
joining our efforts, will we be able to address the challenges awaiting
both practitioners and academics.
173
12
DISASTER: MANDATED DEFINITIONS,
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE AND COMPLEXITY
Philip Buckle
In re-reading the previous volume What is a Disaster?
(Quarantelli 1998) it is clear that many of the papers put forward
perspectives that while not incompatible with each other did
illustrate the difficulty of achieving consensus on this question,
and even showed the difficulties in working towards consensus on
how we approach the issue of deciding what a disaster is. The
variety of approaches is not unexpected. Efforts to come to an agreed
understanding have been made, and continue to be made, without
much significant progress towards a common and agreed
understanding, witness the need for What is a Disaster? and this
successor volume. This should inform us of the difficulty of trying
to define or reach consensus on complex social phenomena, whether
they are disasters or some other event or process.
Whether we need a precisely agreed perspective or a commonly
accepted definition is open to debate. Of course it is useful when
talking about an event, process or phenomena to have a common
and shared understanding, but the level of precision we can achieve
may be limited especially when dealing with complex social
phenomena such as disasters. I acknowledge the circularity of
writing about defining disasters and then using the term without
174 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
defining it. It seems to me that this circularity is inevitable and
reflects the nature of definitions. However, the fact that we can
write about disasters and be understood before defining the term
shows that there is a commonly accepted notion of what constitutes
a disaster which exists intuitively and almost a priori. If by definition
we mean identifying the uniqueness of a phenomenon by a
description of its critical and necessary elements and the ways in
which they are related and interact then it may not be possible to
define anything precisely except for mathematical terms and some
simple physical phenomena.
This is especially the case with social phenomena which, being
influenced by the agency of human beings and their social structures
and organizations and in turn and recursively influencing those
same people, structures and organizations, may not be amenable
to a precise definition which is constant over time and across
different societies. This is emphasized by the capacity of humans
to work in ways that are not necessarily or obviously in their own
best interests, that are not necessarily rational and which may not
be based upon a full understanding of the context in which decisions
have to be made.
What we usually mean by definition is the analysis and
description of something in such a way that we can use it,
manipulate it or influence it so that we can achieve a particular
purpose. This leads us into a paradox of relativism. That if we
define things by how we want to influence them to achieve our
goals then we may be exposed to the charge that definitions will
vary according to the vagaries of our intentions and that validity
derives only from utility (itself highly variable over time, space
and society) and not from something inherent in the phenomenon
itself. Perhaps then what we should seek is not a definition of disaster
but “just” an agreed understanding. This may be still be fuzzy at
its boundaries—as many concepts of social phenomena are—but
its core, agreed meaning will provide us with a basic, commonly
understood reference point.
This agreed core meaning will be important for at least two
reasons. First, it will enable coherent policymaking (and
175WHAT IS A DISASTER?
management, programmatic action that follows) that in turn
permits the development of a consistent approach to social
phenomena that have common elements or other significant
similarities. Second, it will allow us to develop a suite of theories of
disaster causation, disaster development (how the social event/
process unfolds and changes), and the relationship of vulnerability
and resilience to each other, to broader social dynamics and to
hazard agents. At the moment models and theories in disaster
management are rarely robust, often not rigorous and use borrowed
methods and perspectives from other disciplines without formally
and coherently integrating them into an agreed perspective(s). This
is not bad in itself and as a starting point—and may indicate the
difficulty of deriving an agreed meaning and an agreed discipline
for complex, varied events and processes—but it does not lend
itself to intellectually or socially useful theory development. Much
disaster management theory really consists of basic modeling of a
limited number of the elements of the phenomena (so what is
modeled is often a model itself ) or, more commonly still, a simple
description of key elements of the phenomena being studied
whether these elements are of structure, process or agency. This
paucity of theory does not allow us to develop models or theories
that have much application to the real world or which allow us if
not to predict then to indicate social responses across different
times and different cultures. Without this capacity we are locked
within a situational and pragmatic approach to conceptualizing
disaster.1
We need to be clear about what it is we are trying to define.
This appears circular. However, as we can see in the previous volume
the authors of the various papers were coming from different
positions, and had different purposes, in trying to define what is
meant by “disaster”. Do we mean the event itself (which may be
defined variously as the impact or the consequences), do we mean
the process of disaster causation or do we mean the organizational
and social responses to the event?
Central issues for this debate and for practice are how we are
to deal conceptually and practically with the boundaries of disasters.
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At what scale and for what type of event, do disasters evolve from
accidents, at what level of frequency to disasters become day-to-
day disruptions to normal life—or is there a continuum that is
defined by the context.
An equally important issue is how we deal with the complexity
of disasters. This is not just the normal complexity, if it can be
termed such, of social systems and social phenomena where the
number of interactions between agents, the range of variables, the
number and variety of processes and the multiplicity of structures
combine to generate a complex, detailed panorama of social life.
Disasters are complex social events/processes, nested within a
wider social context. The rapid rate of change, the level of
unexpectedness of occurrence, the intensity of dislocation of social
relations and networks and the uncertainty generated by damage
to life, property, organizations and social networks combine to
make disasters significantly more complex, over a given period of
time, than most other social phenomena.
Key questions in sociology include how to relate the micro to
the macro, the individual to the system, the household to the
community; how to conceptualize the relationship between actors
and structure and how to explain discontinuous and fundamental
change. (Byrne 1998: 46). These are central issues for the sociology
of disasters. How do individuals and broader levels of social
organization relate and interact with each other, this is the case in
particular during the period immediately after impact and for some
thereafter until socially mandated agencies restore “order” when
existing social structures are overcome or become temporarily
irrelevant in meeting individual and community needs.
Understanding the relationship between actors (whether individuals
or groups or agencies) or more properly between action and
structure is critical to understanding the dynamics of mitigation,
response, relief and recovery and how individuals or small groups
relate to each other and to broader social, political and economic
strictures. Finally, a defining characteristic of disasters is the way
in which they destroy existing linkages and processes and institute
a period of change that is often not evolutionary but discontinuous.
177WHAT IS A DISASTER?
Explaining the contingent conditions necessary for such change
and the modes of change are important if management is to be
more effective. I am not yet convinced by Byrne’s claim that
complexity theory offers a method for analyzing sociological issues,
though I do believe strongly that it offers a framework within which
to assess disasters in insightful, imaginative and powerful ways.
INTRODUCTION
What we, and by “we” I mean governments, public officials,
not for profit organizations, commercial enterprises, professional
and volunteer disaster managers and the community, mean by
“disaster” is of critical importance. It is critical to policy
development and implementation, program development and
operations. It is critical to planning and to mitigation activities as
well as to relief and recovery. It is critical to people affected by
disaster to whom the turn of a legal phrase (as in the declaration of
a state of disaster) may mean the difference between assistance and
no assistance. It is critical because without a) consensus on the
concept and phenomena we are addressing and b) an agreed
conceptual understanding that more or less reflects what is going
on “out there” (however socially constructed “out there” might
be), we are not going to have basis for coherent and effective policy
and programs. But we do not have a clear understanding, or at
least we do not have a commonly agreed formal understanding, of
what this word “disaster” means and nor do we, inclusively, have a
good sense of what governments, organizations, communities and
so on mean when they use the term.
Nonetheless, there is a semantic heart to “disaster” that disaster
management professionals and lay people understand. We
understand that it means unwanted loss, often but not necessarily
death, injury, bereavement and trauma. Often the disaster has a
rapid onset so opportunities for self-protection, evacuation and
warning are constrained, (although slow onset disasters such as
droughts and famines may approach imperceptibly and inexorably).
We know that disaster is non-trivial but understand also that it
178 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
may affect a single family, a community, region or a nation. So up
to a point this common understanding has value and utility. But
in some circumstances and at certain thresholds this common and
shared understanding breaks down. At best this may lead to policy
and programmatic confusion, in other cases it may lead to the loss
of entitlements (at least as seen by potential recipients but not
necessarily by donors) and it other situations it may lead to grief
and suffering where action and expectation are predicated on an
understanding that is not accepted by other agents.
I will approach this task from three different positions and in
doing so and by a process of triangulation, make an attempt to
clarify some of the meanings we attribute to “disaster” and to
delineate the definitional boundary a bit more precisely. These
three positions are first, mandated organizational operational
definitions, second, community definitions and third, the emerging
concept of complexity and its use by the social sciences to
understand and explain process, change and multivariate
phenomena. I shall draw on some examples to illuminate certain
points. These examples will mainly be drawn from Southeast
Australia, an area with which I am familiar. The points and issues so
illustrated will have a wider relevance and will apply more or less
directly to, any other countries in both industrialized and
industrializing, North and South, developed and developing, countries.
When we ask for a definition we need to be clear what it is we
are attempting to define, though as previously noted this may
involve in a circularity. Disasters are not phenomena that occur as
isolated, autonomous entities. They exist as the impacts on and
consequences for individuals, families and groups of people within
a specific social time and geography and a particular culture. We
therefore have to ask what constitutes a disaster for the people of a
particular society or group and how this may differ from the views
of people from another society or group. I expect a very considerable
degree of overlap, in most instances almost indistinguishable
definitions of how disaster is understood.
A feature of all the definitions argued for in the previous volume
was that they were put forward by researchers and academics. Many
179WHAT IS A DISASTER?
of them are eminent in their field and have worked conscientiously
and with great skill for many years. Some, such as Ken Hewitt,
have been among those who have transformed how we see disasters,
in shifting our attention from the hazard agent to social impacts
and in the process indicating to us that vulnerability and cause are
linked, directly and indirectly, to broader and structural social
processes and dynamics.
None of these definitions, or efforts to resolve the issue of
whether a definition is possible and if so how it may be achieved,
referred to the common sense definition employed by people who
are not disaster management professionals. This definition may
lack the rigor and clarity of other definitions but it does have at its
core an agreed and understood meaning. We all know what
“disaster” means when we use the word and when others use it.
We all know what it is not. Its connotations include typically a
sense of damage, a sense of loss, a sense of significance and a sense
of irreversibility or at least of the need for long term recovery.
However for the purposes of intellectual rigor, as well as policy
development and program implementation, we cannot rely on this
common sense meaning alone. But it serves as a touchstone or
starting point.
It does highlight one issue that previous contributors ignored.
That is the inclusion in the definitional process of local or
community views of what disaster means. This exclusion has applied
to other actors in the policy and program arena, including,
governments, bureaucracies, disaster management agencies and the
media to name some of the major actors. However, for my current
purpose I shall confine my comments to the local, informally
expressed views of the term “disaster” which, for convenience I
shall refer to as community views.
MANDATED OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS
Victoria is a State in Southeast Australia. It has a population of
about 5 million people in an area the size of England and Wales.
Australian States may be compared with the current status of
180 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
Scotland and Wales and USA states. Australian States have their
own legislature, the capacity to raise certain taxes and are responsible
for law and order and disaster management. The Federal
Government holds powers for major taxation, defense and foreign
affairs. Melbourne, the capital and largest city, has a population of
about 2 million people in an area the size of Greater London.
When working, respectively as Manager and Assistant Manager
of the then Disaster Support and Recovery Unit in the Victoria
Department of Community Services, John Edwards and I developed
the following working definition of disaster in 1985. A disaster is:
1. an unwanted, unintended event or process which damages
property and/or threatens life and personal well being; and
2. an unwanted and unintended infrequent or novel event,
process or set of circumstances to which communities are
not adjusted; and
3. an unwanted event, process or set of circumstances that
alters the functional conditions and relationships of a
community to the extent that basic needs cannot be met
satisfactorily; and
4. a set of novel conditions that result in the basic needs of
individuals and communities being met less than
satisfactorily and which can be altered only by the application
of resources external to those affected and by the application
of specific systems.
This effort to define disaster was developed as a pragmatic
response to an operational need to delimit the boundaries of agency
responsibility and operations. This effort occurred during a period
of intense and creative revision of disaster management
arrangements in Victoria following the catastrophic bushfires of
Ash Wednesday, February 16, 1983, in which over 4000 house
were destroyed, as many farms and business burnt out and over 60
lives lost. This definition was an attempt to move us beyond the
limiting and unrealistic notation of rapid onset natural disasters as
the only “authentic” disasters. This definition was never given
181WHAT IS A DISASTER?
widespread acceptance we succeeded in partly influencing the
policy making process in Victoria and across Australia.
The key issues we tried to draw out are that:
1. disasters are unwanted and undesired,
2. that they may be processes as much as events which occur
at a single moment in time (the clumsy phrase “set of
circumstances” was intended to refer to disasters such as
droughts which are not due to their duration disasters
in a traditional sense nor are they obviously processes,
being too diffuse),
3. they imply lack of social adjustment to a hazard of a given
nature; they are novel in so far as they are not routine (When
for example do drought conditions recur so frequently that
“lack of rain” becomes a typical situation and so part of the
expected, background environmental conditions that require
social adaptation rather than emergency services),
4. they alter basic relationships, linkages and flows within
society so that necessary requirements for health, safety, food,
shelter and well-being are not met, and
5. in the short term at least these basic needs can only be
met by the application of knowledge, skills and resources
that are derived and/or coordinated from outside the
affected area.
In retrospect I would alter this definition, in two ways
particularly. I would give more emphasis, in contradistinction to
the last point, to the contribution of local knowledge and skills. I
would also try to find a way to logically include slow onset disasters
(such as drought) and events such as riverine floods, and storms,
that are more or less predictable within a defined probability at
certain locations.
For a short time this was a serviceable, operational definition.
As the review process continued in Victoria the Emergency
Management Act 1986 was drafted and passed by the State
legislature. For the purposes of operations in Victoria and for this
182 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
chapter “emergency” is synonymous with “disaster”. This Act
contains the following definition of disaster:
. . . the actual or imminent occurrence of an event
which in any way endangers or threatens to endanger
the safety or health of any person in Victoria or which
destroys or damages, or threatens to destroy or damage,
any property in Victoria or in any way endangers or
threatens to endanger the environment or an element of
the environment in Victoria, including, without limiting
the generality of the foregoing: an earthquake, flood,
wind storm or other natural event; and a fire; and an
explosion, a road accident or any other accident, a plague
or an epidemic, a warlike act, and a hi-jack, siege or riot, a
disruption to an essential service (“essential service” means
any of the following services: transport, fuel (including gas),
light, power, water, sewerage, or a service (whether or not of
a type similar to the foregoing) declared to be an essential
service by the Governor in Council).
This legislative definition tried to deal with the dilemma of
specificity (with the attendant risk that some events may be missed)
and inclusiveness (with the risk of vagueness) by providing a generic
definition and then indicating specifically certain types of hazard.
This definition has been in existence more or less unchanged
for 16 years and has by and large proved a useful in describing
boundaries to organizational responsibility, (always provided that
you are not too close to the boundaries). There are particular
difficulties with this definition. First it refers to potential disasters,
which logically and practically are not actual disasters. But by
referring to “imminence” and to “threats to endanger,” it draws
attention to disaster as process but otherwise refers implicitly to
disasters as events and as events defined by the hazard agent rather
than their cause or their consequences. This reference to process is
to the procedures of agencies and not to the procedures and
processes of communities or systems.
183WHAT IS A DISASTER?
However, this definition has some more significant difficulties.
Scale of event and process is not addressed. Hence, a fire that destroys
a single house is the same type of disaster as a fire that destroys
1,000 homes. I think that most of us would agree that the latter
event has a number of qualities that distinguish it by type from a
single house fire. The scale of the event has significant resource and
management implications for local emergency and medical services.
The type of loss is different too. As well as losing a dwelling(s) in a
major disaster local support systems, commonly owned infrastructure,
community networks and relationships may be destroyed and local
capacity to provide support is likely to be reduced in a large-scale
event compared to a small or localized event.
Second and less importantly, the initial part of the definition
is open ended in terms of the type of event. There are sound
pragmatic grounds for this in terms of agency roles and
responsibilities. It is impossible to nominate all potential events.
An evolving society and environment will generate new types of
hazards and risks. However, in operational terms this open-ended
ness is a mixed blessing. It allows scope for local interpretation and
individual management judgment when an event occurs. But it
gives little guidance on how professional, exert or lay judgment is
to be exercised.
For this reason the following list of characteristics was developed
by the Victorian Government (Government of Victoria 2001).
Emergencies are characterized by some or all of the following:
They are disruptive to individuals and communities;
They are not part of day-to-day experience and are outside
normal life expectations;
They are unpredictable in occurrence and effects;
They require a response for which normal local resources
may be inadequate;
They have a wide range of effects and impacts on the human
and physical environment;
There are complex needs in dealing with them;
They can be of sudden onset;
184 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
They are destructive of human, animal and/or plant life,
health, property and/or the environment;
They overwhelm normal prudent protective measures.
This is a useable list, but similarly to the list set out in the
Emergency Management Act 1986, it gives no sense of scale.
Within the Department of Human Services and in response to
municipal and regional requests for a clear statement of what sort
of events managers had to deal with I developed (in my capacity as
Manager, State Emergency Recovery Unit) the following criteria
to guide operational activation. When any one of these existed,
then at least a minimum level of activation was required to assess
whether support and recovery services should be made available:
Large numbers of people are involved;
Numbers of fatalities occur and are public;
Damage to homes or other essential property;
Children or other vulnerable people are involved;
Local resources are unable to meet needs;
Police or response agencies request assistance;
Public and media interest is high; or
Horror element is high.
This list was prepared as an entirely pragmatic effort to set
some working boundaries to a field which was growing at an
increasing rate as success at providing recovery services generated
an increasing demand from Government and the community for
those services and assistance measures to be extended to small events
and to be applied to an increasingly broad range of events. Apart
from the logic and internal consistency of extending services to all
similar types of events there were significant resource implications
in this expansion of eligibility for services and assistance. There
were increasing countervailing pressures to limit assistance to events
of a certain size or type (typically large scale, destructive, rapid
onset events that resulted in death, injury or loss of homes.). This
countervailing pressure was driven almost entirely by resource
185WHAT IS A DISASTER?
constraints. Not logical, consistent or equitable, but reflective of a
messy, corporeal world.
The purpose of these definitions was to set policy and
operational boundaries for managers and practitioners could work
to. As such these very practical definitions could perhaps to some
degree relax academic rigor and logical consistency, though not
much. However, they had to meet tests of public and political
acceptability, equity and to be more or less workable in the local
organizational context. These types of definitions are not unique
or isolated. Alexander (1993 pp 4-5) writes:
A natural disaster can be defined as some rapid,
instantaneous or profound impact of the natural
environment upon the socio-economic system . . . In general
terms we are not only dealing with phenomena of high
magnitude. In fact, we can define an extreme event as any
manifestation in a geophysical system . . . which differs
substantially or significantly from the mean.
Alexander cites a number of authors in support of this definition
and reiterates it in a later work (Alexander 2000). Alexander is not
an exception in his use of this sort of definition, but he refers only
to events, and events that autonomously impact on human systems.
His definitions (and those of others) give no sense of scale or type
to the event or process that they are defining.
Without the capacity to deal with issues of scale and type it
became impossible to differentiate on any defensible grounds
between, for example, a transport accident in which 30 people
were killed and a transport accident where one person was killed;
though one was a rare event and the other a frequent, though no
less personally tragic, event. Slow onset disasters, especially where
the effects were compounded by inappropriate agricultural use
(European stock and plants) in an environment adapted to a
different regime of plants and animals, became hard to distinguish
from background environmental conditions). How were criminal
events that lead to death and injury, grief and bereavement to be
186 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
separated (if they were to be separated in logic and practice) from
other events that caused similar losses?
So the question was constantly asked: “which events are within
the defined boundary, and which are outside?” To this there was
no answer other than to say that sensitive, expert, managerial
judgment was required to resolve this question. This really left the
decision criteria to individual managers to evaluate on a situation-
by-situation basis within the prevailing political sensitivities. This
approach is pragmatic but hardly equitable or logical.
It must be emphasized that efforts to delineate “disaster”
precisely occur across all sectors and all countries. For example the
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
(IFRCRCS) accepts as a definition of disaster (IFRCRCS 2002
p181):
A situation or event which overwhelms local capacity,
necessitating a request to national or international level for
external assistance, . . . 10 or more people reported killed,
100 people reported affected, a call for international
assistance and/or declaration of a state of emergency.
At least one of these criteria must be satisfied for a disaster to
be listed on EM-DAT, a database maintained by the Center for
Research on Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). CRED is
supported by the IFRCRCS, World Health Organization (WHO),
the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs (OCHA) and the European Community Humanitarian
Office (ECHO). These criteria are not situated in a context but are
pronounced arbitrarily and there utility in any given situation is
extremely limited.
To conclude this part of the discussion it seems clear that
mandated definitions of disaster are of little value conceptually or
practically, except as a road map indicating from where we have
come. However, inclusive they try to be they fail in two key areas.
They cannot anticipate all disasters types that may arise, partly
because “disaster” is a social construct and as such its’ meaning
187WHAT IS A DISASTER?
will vary depending on a specific culture and set of values and the
broader social, economic and political context. Second for any given
disaster type a mandated definition will not be able to set out
robustly the limits to the event, that is the point at which a disaster
is nothing more than an accident, or an event or process that is
part of the expected background of day-to-day life. If what is meant
by disaster is context specific then at best any boundary will be
fixed only at a particular point in time within a particular society.
This matters conceptually if what we require are clear cut definitions,
and it matters in practical terms where disaster managers need
guidance on which events they are allowed and required to deal
with and to commit resources to.
COMMUNITY BASED AND
INTERPRETIVIST DEFINITIONS
Interpretivism as a social science approach and methodology
locates meaning and significance in the ways in which local actors
themselves ascribe meaning and in how they construct (meaning
both to build and to interpret) the world. If mandated lists,
focusing on disasters as events, are inadequate in defining :disaster
are there other perspectives that may be more rewarding in the
sense that they can lead us to a broader and more robust agreement
of the meaning of the term “disaster”? In this section I want to
draw upon some recent research conducted by myself, Graham
Marsh and Syd Smale within local rural, peri-urban, suburban
and metropolitan communities (Buckle et al 2001a, 2001b). This
research, sponsored by Emergency Management Australia,
examined the perceptions, attitudes and values of local people
(including emergency service personnel, volunteers and lay people)
in a variety of settings across Victoria in Southeast Australia, but
drawing also on relevant research in other parts of the country and
internationally. This research is now being replicated in England.
These studies followed major bushfires in 1997 on the outskirts
of Melbourne, extensive and difficult to manage floods in June
1998 in East Gippsland (a remote, mountainous area in the far
188 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
Southeast corner of Australia, reliant on agriculture, tourism and
primary resource exploitation for its economy) and loss of the gas
supply to 2 million households in September 1998. All of these
events displayed characteristics that made them particularly
difficult to manage. But the process of developing and working
through a management strategy informed the process of
vulnerability analysis, the process of linking disaster and
development and caused us to reflect on the scope of disaster
management in Victoria when it became clear with the gas shortage
that we had moved into another realm of disaster management,
the gas shortage being the first instance of a wide area utility failure
whose impacts directly paralleled the impacts of “traditional”
natural disasters. We employed a number of methods to triangulate
our results. Interviews with local people, local municipal and
emergency service personnel, local focus group sessions, interviews
with State officials, Australian and international researchers were
supplemented by a comprehensive literature review, expert focus
groups and case studies.
In the first of a series of studies we examined vulnerability at
local level. That is, the focus was sub-municipal, leaving it to local
respondents to define the geographic extent of their community.
We also examined perceptions of vulnerability and how these varied
between areas and between municipalities, emergency management
agencies and local people. The results surprised us in the strength
and consistency of the views expressed across different communities.
Emergency service personnel and municipal officers provided the
answers we expected (based on our understanding of mandated
organizational definitions) to questions about what constituted a
hazard, local risks, local and regional disasters and vulnerable
populations. In all cases the responses were predictable from the
charter of their agency. So fire services saw hazards, risks and
disasters in the context largely of fires, while flood control agencies
saw floods as the most important threat. This is in one sense
understandable since these agencies have a legislative mandate and
statutory responsibilities to meet. Municipal officers had a wider
view of hazards, risks and disasters that reflected the broader span
189WHAT IS A DISASTER?
of interests and responsibilities of local government. For all agencies
a “disaster” was in effect what the legislation specified it to be and
as we have seen legislative definitions are generally proscribed and
reflect which events have been dealt with in the past and do not
include those events which may have recently arisen or are emerging
as significant threats to personal and community well being. For
local people the situation was entirely different, both in terms of
the events they considered “disasters” and in the priority they gave
to the perceived risks they and their communities faced.
The background in all communities to their sense and
understanding of “disaster” was their unequivocal and robust sense
of their community. This sense of community embraced a
geographical dimension; they knew where their community “was”
and where its boundaries lay; that is they could differentiate
between “them” and “us”. They understood the environmental and
ecological processes and status of their area. In addition to a
geographical sense they had a sense of history and of the future.
They knew where they had come from (this applied most strongly
but not exclusively to rural) communities and they had a sense
(usually filled with foreboding but not without some hope) of
where they were going. Interwoven in this sense of continuity from
past through the present to the future were a number of myths
and fallacies about social processes, usually involving forced
immigration of social welfare recipients from metropolitan areas
and of Government bias against small and rural communities. This
false perception of forced immigration was most a metaphor for
the fear of unregulated and unwanted change in and of the
community. Local people possessed a strong and determined sense
of daily life. They knew who they were in the sense of having a
coherent and confident set of values and norms, they understood
local enterprises and the economic basis of their communities and
they understood and participated in the many social and governance
activities that make up the warp and weft of community life.
Allied with the sense of local community and of daily life local
people had a strong body of hopes, aspirations and fears. Their
feeling for a desired future was very much “more of the same”, a
190 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
continuation of contemporary daily life (or of daily life located in
a recent past in which contemporary problems had not merged).
Interwoven with this sense of history, culture, place and future
was a very definite sense of what constitutes a “disaster”. It was
noticeable from our very first interviews and focus group meetings
that when we introduced the notion of a “traditional” set of hazards
and disasters, such as fires, floods, major transport accidents and
similar rapid onset, physically damaging events. Local people
acknowledged the importance of these events. But almost
immediately all local respondents moved the discussion away from
these events and towards their principal concerns which were
typically long term social processes, which the respondents
themselves clearly identified as disasters in the same way in which
rapid onset, destructive events are disasters.
This point is critical to any definition of disaster. For local
people a disaster was any event or process that significantly
disrupted local daily life and which jeopardized the future. For
these people the loss of young people to metropolitan centers for
education or work, an aging population, environmental damage,
changing agricultural practice, accelerating rural depopulation and
the loss of government services were all of greater significance than
“traditional” disasters. Local people made no distinction between
traditional events and processes of (perceived destructive) social
change. For local people unwanted change, however it was caused,
was damaging and disastrous. But long term social change was feared
more than events such as floods and wildfires because the social depth
and the comprehensiveness of change was significantly greater for the
continued well-being and the future of the community. Houses and
roads can be rebuilt after a wildfire. Businesses and farms can be restored,
but the loss of young people, the depopulation of an area or the loss of
small businesses such as butchers and bakers and grocers is irreversible
and impacts on everybody in the community. Of course there are
substantial epistemological grounds for considering these events and
process as more or less similar. Both generate uncertainty about the
future, both put the present at risk, both attack contemporary values
and aspirations to the extent that they invoke or are manifestations
191WHAT IS A DISASTER?
of uncontrolled and uncontrollable change and both may lead to
systemic change.
Local people therefore specifically and obstinately set out a
number of events and processes that they labeled “disaster” which
emergency services and governments did not. This broadens what
local people at least mean by “disaster”. This also challenges
Governments and emergency services to review and to redefine
their understanding of “disaster”. First, in a democratic, pluralist
society account has to be taken, de jure or de facto, of sectoral
opinions and values. Second, the processes of social change and
development identified and nominated as disasters by local people
are in significant ways indistinguishable from the impacts of events/
processes that are already commonly acknowledged as (slow onset)
disasters, such as droughts, soil erosion and land salinisation2. All
have a long-term time-scale, all lead to social disruption, family
stress and dislocation, and will often cause profound social,
economic and environmental change. Third, the measures that need
to be put in place to deal with structural change and dislocation are
not day-to-day government or social support programs, or event
supplemented programs. They are the same as the measures put in
place to deal with major disasters and include additional or
supplementary management arrangements (which may in time be
melded with day to day arrangements), specific, targeted assistance
measures and collaboration from local to national levels.
Local people also often saw clearly the linkages between
vulnerability or populations, economies and environments at risk
and the hazard agent which combined to generate a disaster, which,
in other circumstances would not have occurred. For example, in
East Gippsland, a remote, mountainous sparsely populated area,
local people saw that their vulnerability was significantly increased
not just by unreliable telecommunications, poor road access but
also by processes of change, such as depopulation, that reduced
local hazard knowledge and reduced community coping capacity.
To conclude this section, it is clear that local and community
definitions of disaster are quite different to those of emergency
management agencies and to government. Local people are as
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concerned with processes as they are with events; scale (that is
“big” as against “small’) is less of an issue for them, although they
do have a sense of history and of the future and are able to place
contemporary hazards and disasters in a temporal context. Local
people are concerned with the totality of risks to every day life,
and not just with a certain range of events. Local people understand
the “significance” of losses, being the emotional and cultural weight
of loss and incorporating intangible elements and items (such as
mementos, photographs, wedding rings, trophies and certificates)
that cannot be replaced even if the physical item itself is replicated.
The original contains an irreducible and ineluctable emotional
investment that can only be attached to, and only inheres in, the
original and cannot be transferred to a facsimile.
For local people “disaster” overlapped significantly with change
whose direction was not obvious and which was not controllable
by local efforts. Globalization is a current example of this, where
changes to agricultural practice induced by global markets remote
from the source of production lead in turn to localized social changes
that are not desired and which are having a demonstrable present
effect on the local community through such mechanisms as changed
land use, changed agricultural practice, changed communications
(opening up the world and opening up the community to the
world) and changed job opportunities drawing young people away
from traditional occupations. This gives us not another perspective
on “disaster” but an entirely different frame of reference for assessing
whether an event or process is a “disaster”. Where legislative and
mandated definitions focus on events and to a lesser and less strong
extent, some processes, local community definitions emphasize
process over event and locate the meaning of “disaster” in losses
(and not the hazard agent) and in particular to losses and damage
and dislocation to everyday life.
COMPLEXITY AND DISASTER
Despite their differences both definitional epistemologies
described above provide us with some criteria for deciding what a
193WHAT IS A DISASTER?
disaster is. These criteria are located within a social milieu and as
such are contingent on the prevailing concerns and values of the
society in which they are situated. In the one instance the definition
is based on the mandate of an organization and in the other instance
in the continuity of daily life. What is perhaps most important is
not the differences between these “definitions” but how they and
agencies and communities that use them are to be integrated into
a shared and common purpose whose generic purpose is to improve
public safety, reduce risk and sustain well-being.
One step to achieving this is perhaps to acknowledge in theory
and practice that “disaster” is not a phenomenon that is susceptible
to definition. This is partly because as disasters are socially
constructed and as they are located at a particular but evolving
social/historical point in time then any definition will have currency
only for that particular time and place. This in itself may not be
logically problematic, but it is difficult for agencies and
communities if the terms by which they set standards and allocate
resources are constantly, but not predictably, evolving.
Even the elements that contribute to “hazard”, “risk” and
“disaster” are not predictable. For example, which weather
conditions may contribute to a “disaster” and how these conditions
are nested within a broader climate which itself is changing are
not easy to predict (Maslin 2002). In some situations acts of nature
leading to “disaster” losses may be unpredictable and unforeseeable
and even counter intuitive. (Berz 2002). One approach to resolving
these difficulties of linking disparate views of what constitutes a
disaster is to abandon the notion that disasters are susceptible to
definition, at least in terms of carefully delineated lists and instead
to locate meaning in the experience and values and norms of the
community.
This acknowledgement that attempts to define and to delineate
“disaster” in precise ways are bound to be incomplete and even
misleading relates clearly to complexity theory and its’ emerging
use in the social sciences. David Byrne (1998, 2002) lists the
following attributes that belong to complex social systems. The
properties of complex systems and phenomena include:
194 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
The whole system is not reducible to its parts, and is not
predictable from its’ constituent elements;
Paths and modes of change, development and growth can
be very sensitive to initial conditions;
Networks and interactions and processes are as important in
understanding the whole as is understanding discrete
elements;
Phase shifts (or thresholds) may arise where a significant
change of state occurs often over an extremely short
period of time and often unpredictably given initial
conditions.
Emergence, the unpredicted development of new elements,
characteristics and networks;
Systems are dynamic and change over time.
To which we can add,
Irreversibility. Development of complex systems cannot
be “unwound” or reversed and in some cases it may not be
possible to work backwards along a causal brachiation to
identify causes and consequences (this relates in part to
sensitivity to initial conditions, discontinuous change
characterized by phase shifts and emergence all of which
limit the capacity for retrospection.)
Those events and processes we characterize as disasters, starting
with our commonplace, shared understanding of the term, clearly
meet these criteria and even meet them in an exaggerated form.
Events such as wildfires and processes such as droughts lead to and
evolve into situations that are not predictable from initial
conditions, not least because the dynamic of attempted control
and mitigation, and the contingent political dynamic of mitigation
and relief make the progress of each event/process non-identical.
In addition, each event/process occurs within a specific social setting
and with which it interacts in ways which make detailed prediction
of outcomes difficult to achieve. Disasters are not reducible to
195WHAT IS A DISASTER?
individual elements. Death, injury, loss of homes and businesses
and damage to the environment and infrastructure do not exist
separately from each other. One loss will often compound another
and in turn be amplified. Interactions and processes (how the hazard
agent is transmitted, how information flows and is interpreted,
how communities work together in new settings for example) are
at least as important in understanding disasters and in their
management as are a knowledge of static situations such as the
number of dead or injured or the number of houses lost or the
number of people evacuated at any given point in time.
Social systems during disasters often show emergence (where
the system itself changes fundamentally) or emergent properties
(new entities arise within a system) (Buckle et al 2001a). For
example, local action groups that coalesce around particular issues
may arise spontaneously after a disaster and unite disparate
individuals and groups who would otherwise not work together or
share a common interest. Equally, some groups may approach a
threshold of membership (where numbers are insufficient to meet
the functions of the group) or where new functions arise that the
group is incapable of dealing with. In this case a threshold may be
stepped over (a phase shift occurs) where the group is suddenly
and unpredictably unable to function and collapses. This can occur
on a broader scale with entire communities, where an existing
community (and I am thinking here of particular communities
affected by the 1983 Ash Wednesday bush fires just outside
Melbourne) where a small proportion of homes may be destroyed
but where this initiates a change process so that over the next few
years the entire community population changes in what was once
an apparently stable community. The same level of destruction in
other communities may lead not to re-population but to greater
social cohesion and a renewed sense of community togetherness
and purpose.
What is the significance of this for understanding the nature
of disaster? It is the case that those events and processes we
characterize as disasters on the basis of “common-sense” meanings
display most or all of these descriptors. It is the case also that there
196 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
are a number of events and processes that we do not necessarily or
at the present characterize as disasters but which do display these
characteristics. Climate change and its attendant environmental
and social changes, other environmental processes such as the
decline relative to global population numbers, soil degradation are
all processes in which can see the potentiality for most or all the
points mentioned above. Animal population decline is a good
example. Animal populations tend to decline in line with changes
to habitat, normal population dynamics, pollution, externally
imposed changes on environmental health as well as hunting and
harvesting practices. At a certain point, however, stocks may fall so
low that the population crashes spectacularly and often irrecoverably.
The line at which population crash occurs is usually not discernible
before the event.
CONCLUSION
Byrne (2002: 163) argues that social science needs to based
on a new assessment of complexity as the central organizing principle
of many social phenomena. He makes a number of points which
include:
1. Complexity; understanding of the character of real complex
systems in terms of wholes, parts, interaction of parts with
parts, parts with wholes, and of systems with other systems
in their environment, within which they are embedded and
which they contain:
2. Non-linearity; recognition that interesting and significant
shifts in the trajectories and hence characters of complex
systems are those that involve radical shifts of kind
3. Localism; the recognition that knowledge is inherently
c o n t e x t u a l a n d t h a t a c r u c i a l c o m p o n e n t o f t h e
specifications of any of any item or system of things and
relations known is the delimitation of the spatial and
temporal boundaries within which that knowledge might
hold good . . .
197WHAT IS A DISASTER?
4. Connectionism; the recognition that any useful description
of real complex systems must itself be complex. This does
not preclude the representation being less complex but it
must incorporate some element of complexity, for example
in the form of explicit interaction, within itself.
5. Action research—the recognition that knowledge is always
used in the reconstitution of the social world and that we
must take specific account of this in our research processes
and practices.
We have seen that mandated, linear descriptions, usually
composed of lists, of the apparent elements of disaster fail to
adequately deal with complexity, change (predictability), thresholds
(phase shifts) and emergence. These definitions are arbitrary and
reflective of past events (process is often ignored and covertly
transmuted to event) and do not even acknowledge, let alone take
account of, changing contexts, values and the social construction
of disasters and what we mean by disasters. Mandated definitions
have a clear but limited, purpose in informing agencies what actions
they must and will be engaged in. But the list is rarely complete or
consonant with existing and foreseeable social, cultural, economic,
environmental and political trends.
De Greene (1996:9) has indicated that:
. . . complex systems are dynamic rather than static,
evolve or are driven into domains of instability, and emerge
into new structures. There is now a growing gap or loss of fit
between our systems-management capabilities and the real
world. Policymakers and decision makers must deal especially
with severely reduced time frames, consequences-of-action
uncertainty, and actions that produce diminishing returns.
He goes on later to emphasize this (De Greene 1996:11):
The concept of evolution is finding increasing
application in physics, chemistry, astronomy and
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astrophysics, as well as, of course, in biology, geology and
paleontology. But it appears that all too few behavioral and
social scientists use the evolutionary framework, and that all
too many theories, hypotheses, and empirical research efforts
are directed toward the static, the cross-sectional, the linear,
the equilibrium seeking, the stable, the reversible, and the
structurally constant. These efforts . . . operate within a
prevailing but exhausted paradigm.
Local community definitions of disaster locate disaster much
more firmly in the context of daily life and in systemic and long-
term changes. These definitions however are rarely explicitly stated
and may often resort to the descriptive “I may not know what a
disaster is, but I know what is disastrous to me and my family and
my community”. It is this local context in which agencies and
governments have to act and we can see how over recent decades
even the mandated definitions of disasters have moved from
focusing on large area, physically destructive and rapid onset
natural disasters to include other types of events and processes
s u c h a s e n v i r o n m e n t a l c h a n g e , c o m p l e x h u m a n i t a r i a n
emergencies and terrorism. This change has occurred as a result
of community expectations that local assessment will influence
central perceptions of disaster and that local values and needs
will influence central priorities.
All definitions of social events, processes, structures and action
have no eternal and objective validity, they are fixed in a particular
culture at a particular time. Given the in ability to formally
(mathematically or logically) define disasters—given the nature of
complex systems—by identifying autonomous, constituent
elements we are left with definitions that are specific to a particular
perspective and given that social, cultural and political perspectives
are value-laden then these definitions must explicitly or implicitly
represent a particular point of view, a particular view of the world.
And this being the case, then all definitions contribute to Byrne’s
“action research” whereby any definition and any action based on
199WHAT IS A DISASTER?
that definition is intended to effect some change in the world even
if he intent is conservative aiming to avoid further change.
There is nothing invalid about definitions that reflect and are
derived from a particular stance; all definitions in social science are
such. But it is important that we acknowledge this and acknowledge
that if definitions and the events and processes they are intended
to define do derive from a specific stance then we must assess whose
definitions we should be using. We can reduce this discussion to a
few statements.
1. Mandated lists do not completely account for all types of
disasters, do not address emerging disasters and treat disaster
as an event rather than a process.
2. Local people locate disaster in the context of daily life and of
broader society and see disaster in terms of process at least as
much as they see them in terms of events. Disasters are defined
by their consequences and not by the hazard agent
3. In a democratic, pluralist society account needs to be taken
of local norms, values and definitions and organizations and
governments have to acknowledge the rights of local people
as well as the practicalities that unacknowledged, extraneous
definitions cannot be successfully imposed.
4. Disasters are complex events and are typified by
characteristics of complexity, such as emergence, the total is
greater than the sum of its parts and cannot be estimated
by aggregating the parts, phase shifts and irreversibility.
Accepting these statements offers a new view on what a disaster
is. For operational purposes it may be located within the mandate of
an organization, but this is insufficient when the organization has to
deal with the community (and which do not?) who will often have a
profoundly different perspective on what constitutes a disaster.
Communities locate disaster in daily life and in the interaction of
daily life with change, both short term and long term. However, given
the nature of disaster as a complex social phenomena
200 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
NOTES
1 I have bypassed the issue of whether social science is able to develop theories
for the real world. My view is that theories are generally relatively weak in
their predictive power, but often much stronger in explanation.
2 This sort of systemic change can also be generated by rapid onset disasters
where the disaster is on a sufficiently large scale and is destructive or where
it destroys key elements such as entire settlements of essential infrastructure
or where the event occurs at a time of pivotal social change and the disaster
“tips the scales” in one direction.
201
13
IN THE EYES OF THE BEHOLDER?
MAKING SENSE OF THE SYSTEM(S)
OF DISASTER(S)1
Denis Smith
Disasters, as a broad category of phenomena, have been
important in shaping the nature of many communities and
societies. As a consequence, there is a considerable body of literature
that has focused attention on the impact that physical (sometimes
expressed as environmental) disasters have had on human activities
(Alexander 2000; Chester 1993; Davis 2001; de Boer and Sanders
2002; Fagan 2000; Hewitt 1997; Pelling 2001; Smith 2001;
Steinberg 2000). The selection of these “physical” disasters for
investigation has largely been a function of the extent of their
destructive capability, the speed of their onset and the impact that
they have had upon human communities.
In definitional terms, the focus on the human element has
been an important defining factor in the classification of an event
as a disaster and investigations of other cataclysmic events have
often remained outside of this categorization (see, for example,
work on mass extinction) (Benton 2003; Boulter 2002; McEntire
Fuller et al. 2002; Moran 2003; Walker 2003). Other areas of
research that have often been excluded from classification as a disaster
202 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
have involved the impact of intentional human destruction, notably
war (Hewitt 1998), and, until events of 9-11, much of the work
on terrorism, despite the extent of the damage caused by these
events. The scale of the devastation imposed upon the population
of German cities during World War II, for example, is captured by
Sebald (2003), who observes that the UK’s Royal Air Force alone:
. . . dropped 1 million bombs on enemy territory . . .
of the 131 towns and cities attacked, some only once
and some repeatedly, many were almost entirely flattened,
that about 600,000 German civilians fell victim to the
air raids and 3.5 million homes were destroyed, while at
the end of the war 7.5 million people were left homeless,
and there were 31.1 cubic metres of rubble for everyone
in Cologne and 42.8 cubic metres for every inhabitant
of Dresden—but we do not grasp what it all actually
meant. The destruction, on a scale without historical
precedent, entered the annals of the nation as it set about
rebuilding itself only in the form of vague generalizations.
It seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the
collective consciousness (Sebald 2003: 3-4.)
By any physical measure, the devastation caused by such
bombing would justify the inclusion of the event as a disaster. In
addition, the last part of Sebald’s description of the bombing also
raises an important issue relating to the trauma of such catastrophic
events and the manner in which it is dealt with by those who
experienced it directly. He argues that the devastation caused by
such bombing seemed to have generated a degree of “self amnesia”
with the result that the “images of this horrifying chapter of our
history have never really crossed the threshold of the national
consciousness” (2003: 11). Such a psychological-social impact of
an event would also be a characteristic for its classification as a
disaster. Similarly, there is little doubt that the terrorist attacks on
New York and Washington in 2001 have led to considerable physical
damage and trauma and a re-conceptualization of “disaster”, at
203WHAT IS A DISASTER?
least in terms of public consciousness (Cohen et al. 2002; Greenberg
2002; Walker 2002). One might question why the academic
integration of such deliberate, human-induced disasters into the
mainstream literature has been seen as limited (Hewitt 1997,
1998), when many other disasters have been shaped and influenced
by human in/action. It is clear, therefore, that the definition of
disaster needs to be systematically undertaken if we are to include
or omit certain groups of catastrophic event from any taxonomy.
These phenomena include plagues, viruses and disease (Barnett
and Whiteside 2002; Berridge 1996; Cantor 2001; Epstein 1996;
Hooper 2000; Karlen 1996; Rhodes 1997), environmental impacts
(Davis 2002), medical and health catastrophes (Davis 2001.
2002; Rhodes 1997; Smith 2002; Stephens and Brynner 2001;
Vass 2001), and a range of technological accidents (Bird 1962;
Chiles 2001; Perrow 1984; Reason 1997; Sipika and Smith
1993; Smith and Sipika 1993; Turner 1978; Turner and
Pidgeon 1997). The question of what, if anything, unites these
diverse events in such a way as to provide insight into the
manner in which disasters are generated and “managed”, has
been the subject of considerable discussion and debate (Etkin
1999; Gilbert 1998; Hewitt 1997, 1998; Kreps 1998; Pelling
2001, 2003; Porfiriev 1998; Quarantelli 1998b; Turner 1976).
It is the unification of key constructs around the term “disaster”
that this, and previous volumes (Quarantelli 1978a, 1998b) have
sought to address.
The aim of this present chapter is to explore the elements of
the term disaster, by working through the analytical lens provided
by literatures relating to crisis management (including systems
thinking and, to an extent, management). Whilst this focus on a
specific set of literature for such a multi-dimensional problem is
inevitably artificial, the rationale for the primary focus on crisis
management is two-fold. In the first instance, a considerable amount
of the disaster literature has focused on the social dimensions of
such “events”, with any discussion of “management” as a
contributory factor being largely framed in terms of the nature of
the response to the event by the various regulatory and controlling
204 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
authorities. Secondly, the work on crisis management has not had
a significant impact upon the traditional literature on disasters,
with some notable exceptions (Rosenthal 1998; Shrivastava 1987;
Turner 1978), and there are several key theoretical concepts relating
to incubation and latent error that can be seen to be relevant to
the wider debate (Calman and Smith 2001; Reason 1990, 1997,
2001; Turner 1976, 1978; Turner et al. 1997).
IDENTIFYING BOUNDARIES
Given the nature of the problem addressed here, there are several
assumptions and caveats that need also to be made clear, in order
both to clarify the approach taken and to explain the boundaries
imposed upon the discussion. This is not done in an apologetic
way, but rather to ensure that there is a reduction in any
ambiguity around the arguments. The first caveat concerns the
perspective offered by the crisis management approach that is
adopted here. In many respects, this body of literature offers
some potential to extend the existing work on the sociology of
d i s a s t e r s , b y i n c l u d i n g a d d i t i o n a l m a t e r i a l r e l a t i n g t o
organizational vulnerability and resilience. It also serves to raise
the profile of a range of management processes that act as core
contributors to the development of that vulnerability, both for
organizations as well as for communities. The second caveat is
that the crisis approach generally sees the physical “triggers”
(i.e. the events themselves) as secondary factors in the overall
process, with the issues of primary concern often being expressed
in terms of the incubation of systems vulnerability and the
constraints imposed upon coping strategies as a consequence.
In the context of disasters with a “natural” (or more accurately,
an environmental) trigger, the generation of coping strategies for
damage reduction (engineering responses, population zoning and
contingency planning) are all processes in which “management”
has a significant role to play. In addition, a whole series of
managerial and organizational assumptions are inherent within
the development of such contingent responses and these have been
205WHAT IS A DISASTER?
largely ignored, or relegated in importance, within certain segments
of the disaster literature. This is not to say that the managerial
aspects of disaster research should have primacy, but rather that
they should be given more prominence than at present. The third
caveat is that the systems perspective heavily influences the crisis
literature that is drawn upon here, as well as being important in
influencing much of the work within the earth sciences, human
factors and crisis management. The approach can also be seen to
allow for a greater integration of the “human” elements with the
physical-technological aspects of a disaster and, as a result, offers
the potential for a more holistic approach to complex events. A
systems approach also allows for the integration and consideration
of such concepts of “space-place-time”, “vulnerable-resilient” and
“emergence” as explanatory/analytical constructs within a disaster
context.
Inevitably, the approach taken here will prove too constraining
for some and, possibly, too diffuse for others! By surfacing these
underlying assumptions, however, an attempt is being made to
define the limits of this inquiry in the hope that subsequent debates
around the boundaries may generate additional insights. As such,
this essay tries to bring a range of literatures together in an attempt
to “make sense” of the issues raised by disasters.
DISASTERS IN TEMPORAL AND SPACIAL
CONTEXT: A SEARCH FOR BOUNDARIES
“ . . . in social theory simplicity should not displace the
complexities of tension” (Law 1999: 1).
One of the obvious difficulties that exist within any attempt
at defining a disaster is the risk of over-simplifying what is an
extremely complex and highly emotive term. One might argue
that, given their diversity and complexity, disasters are not easily
reduced to a simple definition. However, in order to frame the
debates in this essay, it is proposed to establish an early definition
of the term disaster and to test the suppositions within that
206 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
definition against subsequent insights developed from the literature.
As a starting point, it is proposed that we establish an early “straw”
definition of disasters that can be used as a basis for discussions
around the term. Disasters can, therefore, be seen as:
multi-level issues that unfold through the impacts that
they have on elements of society via processes of agency
(and in some cases because of the actions of agents), the
networks of inter-dependence that they expose or damage,
and through the consequences that they generate for actors
(as victims of the physical processes of generating harm).
(Definition 1)
This definition identifies several important elements that are
worthy of further discussion and elaboration. Firstly, disasters are
complex, “multi-level issues” (Yammarino and Dansereau 2002) and,
as such, should be seen as having impact beyond the immediate physical
damage that is normally associated with a “disaster event”. In any
disaster, it is likely that the physical impacts of the event will trigger
the emergence of several issues that also require intervention and action.
In exploring the implications of such multiple levels for disaster
research, Haggett (2000) has identified three strands that are seen to
be important. The first of these strands involves a focus on location
and the importance of space as a conceptual and practical framework.
The second focus is concerned with the human-environment
relationships and the impact of the various “processes” of production,
consumption and destruction on ecological systems. Hagget (2000)
argues that it is important to remember that this interaction is a two-
way process and it is also possible for human activities to impact upon
physical processes. The final element in Haggett’s definition of the
discipline is the notion of place, on the unique character of particular
places . . . [which] . . . fuses the social and ecological strands on to a
specific area or region (Hagget 2000:2).
Secondly, the notions of space-place-time relationships have
also permeated other research relating to issues of risk and hazard,
207WHAT IS A DISASTER?
notably the work on post-modernity and globalization (Giddens
1990). Urry, for example, argues that there are five key elements
within the processes of globalization, which can be seen to have a
relevance to our current discussion. These elements are seen as
structure, flow, ideology, performance and complexity (Urry 2003)
and they can be used as a framework through which to illustrate
the “multi-level” nature of “disasters” (see table 1). This mosaic of
elements serves to generate a dynamic, emergent set of issues that
will face any community or network exposed to the disruption
and damage associated with a disaster. The impacts of globalization
should not be underestimated in terms of both disaster causation
(incubation) and mitigation. [Of course, “Globalization” has also
proved to be a concept that has been subject to debate and
disagreement.] This is especially important for technological
disasters, due to the actions of trans-national corporations in
exporting hazard, but it also has implications for “natural”
disasters (Blaikie et al. 1994; Pelling 2001, 2003) and terrorist
acts (Baxter and Downing 2001; Vidal 2002). What emerges
from the interaction of these elements is a sense of the complicated
nature of disasters (see Table 1 and Figure 1) and the manner in
which networks of connections can shape the dynamics of
catastrophe.
Table 1: Globalization, modernity and their implications for disaster
Characteristics of the elements
(source: Urry 2003)
Relevance to disasters
Structure –increased interconnections between
agents
–compression of space-time
–increased interconnections may generate
emergence associated with both the
creation of and response to hazards
–structural factors may inhibit the various
organizations’ abilities to learn lessons
from events
–the creation of immediacy, in terms of
the manner in which disasters are
communicated and responded to, generates
demands on decision making
–greater internationalisation of disaster
agencies removes the power of localised
control
208 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
Flow –flows occur within scapes
–increased communications processes
with the compression of time and
space
–importance of nodes within scapes
–information, images and messages
transferred quickly
–revised flows create inequalities of
access across social groups
–relative location may be seen as
more important than absolute
–importance of disaster/aid agencies as key
conduits of resource and information
–relative location may increase access to
information and expertise and serve to
exclude other elements of society
–imbalances within confined zones of
disaster may exhibit inequalities, especially
in more economically challenged areas
–the interactions between key agencies is
seen as being important in shaping the
complexion of a particular disaster
–nodes may become key barriers to the
effective response to hazardous events
–a focus on the frequency, (natural)
occurrence and type of hazard, rather than
on their social and economic impact upon
communities, may serve to distort the
nature of the problem and shift policy
negatively
Ideology –transnational corporations assume
greater power within globalized
economies
–generates problems of regulation
–organizations’ lack long term
commitment to place
–erosion of the power of the state
–emergence of technocratic elites
–technological risks may be increased as a
function of the power of capital to evade
regulation and control (e.g. Bhopal)
–hazardous activities may be exported from
the point of production as a means of
maximising profitability and reducing
interference
–expertise becomes a surrogate for
democracy and groups are disenfranchised
from debates concerning the nature and
acceptability of hazards and policies
towards their mitigation
–the legitimacy of technical elites negates
and minimises the role and importance of
local (expert) knowledge
–the power of global capital may escalate
the physical impact of a disaster by
spreading its economic impacts
–assumptions are made about the power of
technology as a means of mitigating the
consequences of a disaster
Performance –nature has become a global,
interconnected and political process
–“This global nature has resulted
from fusing various social practices
that are remaking space”
–disasters have become a global rather than
a local issue and the political infrastructure
may be seen to by-pass local controls and
systems
–resource availability may be enhanced by
reference to global networks
–issues exist with regard to absorption
capacity both locally and globally,
especially in terms of recovery and
rehabilitation
–the level of interconnectivity with regard
to disasters (and their impacts) increases
with globalization
–communication factors increase the
severity of an event and widen the scope of
its impact
209WHAT IS A DISASTER?
Complexity –systemic and dynamic character of
globalized processes
–dynamic and shifting processes
generate new and emergent issues for
management and control
–patterns of networks generate
emergence and complexity
–cause does not equal effect as a
consequence of emergence
–disasters can no longer be seen in
isolation and there is a considerable degree
of interconnectivity between events and
the damage that they cause
–there is a growing and ever more complex
global network that seeks to deal with
disasters
–knowledge around disasters becomes
more the domain of the expert and may be
beyond the access of local publics
–power relationships change and evolve to
meet the demands of the globalizing
society
Figure 1. Disaster: towards an initial construction
Another aspect to emerge from our opening definition is that
disasters can also generate impacts across a considerable distance
and over a long time period and this raises further issues within
the structure-performance-complexity aspects of Urry’s framework.
The causal factors that serve to shape the event may also incubate
over time and space and will be shaped by social, political and
economic factors in addition to the geo-physical or technological
issues that are in operation (Alexander 2000; Bird 1962; Chiles
2001; Davis 2001; Fagan 2000; Fisher et al 1997; Turner 1978).
210 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
The connected nature of disasters has become all the more apparent
within a globalized world. The images of a disaster and the sense
of human suffering take on a new dynamic when they are
transmitted in real time into our homes. The sense of being one
step removed from a disaster has been eroded.
The connected nature of the system in which disasters occur
also allows the consequences of one event to influence the
conditions that will shape the complexion of other disasters in
different spatial and temporal settings (Davis 2001; de Boer et
al. 2002; Fagan 2000). In addition, one disaster may influence
t h e r e s i l i e n c e o r v u l n e r a b i l i t y o f a c o m m u n i t y t o t h e
consequences of other events (Davis 2001; de Boer et al. 2002;
Elliott and Smith 1993). This interconnected dynamic of a
disaster is an important element in the inclusion of an event
within any taxonomy of disasters.
An additional element that emerges from this perspective sees
disasters as also having a sense of place—they cause damage within
a community that is located in a “place”, although in a globalized
and e-enabled society, this notion of place has taken on a new
dimension (Auge 1995; Hudson 2001; Jackson 1994; Urry 2003).
The interaction of networks, both within and between communities
and organizations, and the impact of “culture” upon the reactions
of those “communities” generates a set of socio-political-cultural
dynamics that provides a unique element to the environmental
aspects of the event. In this setting, the notions of “communities
of practice” are also important, as a disaster will shape the
subsequent behavior of those professional groups who have a role
to play in disaster management and prevention. Finally, our initial
definition also recognizes the importance of actors and victims
within the process. It does, however, see them not as passive entities
but rather as dynamic, interconnected elements in a socio-physical
setting.
By taking these discussions into account, it is now possible to
refine our opening definition in the light of the material reviewed
thus far. As a result, our second definition of a disaster sees the
events as:
211WHAT IS A DISASTER?
multi-level, complex and damaging systems-related events
that unfold over time and space, through an emergent
complex interaction of elements involving structures,
connections and networks and which are shaped by
ideological, economic and social factors to generate impacts
on elements of society that changes the performance of the
“normal” order of that societal setting. The damage that
occurs is shaped via processes of agency (and in some cases
because of the actions of agents), the networks of inter-
dependence that they expose or damage, and through the
consequences that they generate for actors (as victims of the
physical processes of generating harm). (Definition 2)
In order to test and refine the assumptions within this revised
definition, it is necessary to explore this “system” of disasters further.
For the purposes of this paper, a system will be defined as “a set of
interconnected elements that interact together to generate emergent
properties”. The notion of a system serves to help conceptualize,
frame and explain the phenomena under investigation.
SYSTEMS OF DISASTER
The use of a broad systems approach is adopted within this
paper because it allows both for the abstraction of complex ideas
and concepts as well as the subsequent “testing” of those
abstractions. As such, it is argued that the approach has considerable
benefit within debates around “disaster”. One of the techniques
that has been developed to deal with complex, ill-defined issues is
the “soft systems methodology” (SSM), that has emerged out of
the work of Checkland (Checkland 1981; Checkland and Holwell
1998; Checkland and Scholes 1990). Using a framework developed
by Checkland, it is possible to shape the discussion of disasters
around the CATWOE framework in order to move towards a root
definition. At the core of the CATWOE framework are six elements
that are deemed to be of importance in shaping the characteristics
of the system and these elements need to be outlined in turn.
212 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
In the first instance, we need to consider the “customers” of the
disaster. Whilst at first glance this might seem to be a somewhat
bizarre expression of a group within a disaster setting (due primarily
to the transactional and economically based nature of the term
“customer” in common usage), the customers here are seen as those
individuals who are the victims or recipients of the activities and
costs generated by the disaster. The second group are the “actors”,
and these play a direct and active (as opposed to a passive) role in
shaping the nature of the events. The actors are important within
the context of a disaster as they have a major part to play, both in
terms of the incubation of the event, as well as influencing the
aftermath of the disaster. Clearly then, it is likely that the nature,
composition and actions of these actors will change in terms of the
time-space-place relationship and may be closely identified with
the various phases of a disaster as a consequence.
The third component of our root definition centers upon the
“transformations” that take place during the timeline of any disaster.
Clearly this is a complex and potentially ill-defined process,
especially due to the importance of emergence within a system
that is operating under conditions of traumatic change. Inevitably,
the sheer complexity of a disaster generates conditions that are
both difficult to predict and yet which can be shaped both by the
physical manifestation of the event as well as the intervention of
human agency in the processes of incubation, mitigation and
recovery. An obvious transformation within a disaster is the
destruction that is invariably associated with an event and it is
clear that for certain types of phenomena this destruction can
span generations as well as geographical borders. In some cases
i t i s p o s s i b l e t o s e e t h e d i s a s t e r a s a t r i g g e r f o r f u r t h e r
manifestations of the event’s consequences. For example, AIDS,
whilst a major catastrophe in terms of loss of life and more
general humanitarian issues, may also generate a crisis for any
health care system that does not have the resources to cope
with the demands generated by the scale of the illness. Another
example would be the UK’s BSE crisis, which indirectly had
an impact upon the nature of the 2001 Foot and Mouth
213WHAT IS A DISASTER?
outbreak, largely as a consequence of the reduction in the
numbers of abattoirs, but also in terms of regulatory change.
Whilst BSE, and its human variant VCJD, has resulted in a
considerable number of deaths, these have occurred over a long
timeframe and across a diffuse geographical area. This led to greater
distances traveled for the slaughter of the animals and seems to
have contributed to the spread of the disease. Thus, one might
argue that the notions of space and time are also important elements
in this transformation process.
The fourth element of the CATWOE definition centers on
the “Weltanshuung” or World-views of people involved in the
events. This is very much an exercise in “sense-making” (Weick
1988, 1993) and is an important element of the disaster process,
particularly so given the perceptual and stress related aspects
of the phenomenon. The earlier observations about the denial
or reconstruction of events within the disaster timeline are
important elements of the human aspects of the process. These
may, in turn, add a different interpretation to the phase that
follows on from the initial destructive period of the disaster
(Sebald 2003).
The fifth element concerns the “operators”, those who are seen
to have control of the event, or can help shape the responses that
are made to it. The notion of control implicitly raises issues relating
to power relationships within organizations, between organizations,
and between organizations and those who become victims of a
disaster. Once again, the dynamics of control are important here
and they will change throughout the timeline. There is a sense in
which any disaster may represent a loss of control on the part of
one group over elements of their environment, and an attempt by
another group at reasserting that control. The processes by which
disasters can be incubated will also have significance in terms of
our concepts of control. In this case, it could be argued that the
assumptions and beliefs that people have about control will be
critical in allowing system defenses to be bypassed. Alternatively,
they may create a false set of assumptions concerning the nature of
the risk (in terms of its probability of occurrence and the associated
214 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
consequences) and the manner in which it can be managed. Clearly,
the worldviews of these actors are important in shaping the
“configuration” of a particular disaster.
Finally, a root definition has to consider the Environment
in which the disaster is contextualized. The environment is
important in providing a set of (local) conditions within which
the rest of the CATWOE framework is set and it will inevitably
shape the manner in which the event unfolds. An attempt at
developing a CATWOE root definition framework for the notion
of a disaster is shown in 7. It should be noted at this point that
this is a general attempt at dealing with the issues and each
specific disaster will generate its own character that makes it
u n i q u e . T h e b r o a d f r a m e w o r k p r ov i d e d b y s u c h a r o o t
definition could also be extended across the timeline associated
with the event and the dynamics between the CATWOE
elements would invariably change over time as a result. In order
to illustrate this argument, it is necessary to explore the notion
of a “timescape” (Adam, 1998) of disasters in more detail.
Figure 2. Elements of disaster research
215WHAT IS A DISASTER?
TIMESCAPES OF DISASTER
“a timescape perspective conceives of the conflictual
interpenetration of industrial and natural temporalities as
an interactive and mutually constituting whole and stresses
the fact that each in/action counts and is non-retractable”
(Adam, 1998: 56).
In discussing the role of time in shaping environmental hazards,
Adam (1998) uses the term “timescape” as a means of
conceptualizing the role of time as an influencing factor on the
nature of hazard. For an organizationally based crisis, the timescape
could be seen in terms of three distinct but related stages: the
crisis of management, the operational crisis and the crisis of
legitimacy (Sipika et al. 1993; Smith 1990a, 1995; Smith et al.
1993). The notion of control implicitly raises issues relating to
power relationships within organizations, between organizations,
and between organizations and those who become victims of a
disaster. In order to explore the implications of time on our
discussion of disaster, this framework can be analyzed in more detail.
There are a number of analytical frameworks used within crisis
management and most of these make use of a staged framework in
order to examine the differing mix of processes in operation in
each phase (Pauchant and Mitroff 1992; Reason 1997; Smith
1990a, 1995; Turner 1976, 1978). With that in mind, it is
important to recognize that each of these phases will offer a different
perspective on the nature of the event. They will also be shaped by
the manner in which the various networks of association operate
within the space-place-time frameworks and these will help to
generate multiple interpretations and understandings of the
disaster.
The existing literature on disaster makes the distinction
between various forms of “time” (social, industrial, geological)
(Adam 1998; Jackson 1994; Le Poidevin 2003; Repcheck 2003)
and disasters provide us with a useful context in which to illustrate
the impact of the different timeframes on the configuration of the
216 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
event itself. In discussing the nature of volcanoes, for example,
Fisher has observed that,
Our lives are single frames in the moving picture of the
constantly changing earth . . . Volcanoes, however, are geological
systems operating in real time” (Fisher, 1999:4).
Thus, the notion of time is seen as important in understanding
the particular construct that is a volcanic disaster, but there are clearly
two timelines in operation; the geological and the human. The build
up to the disaster can take place invisibly over many thousands of
years but the event once it occurs is marked by its rapid onset and
catastrophic impact and the resultant disaster is shaped by its
immediate and long-term impacts upon human activities (Davis 2001;
de Boer et al. 2002; Fagan 2000; Keys 1999; Kreps 1998).
There are also subtle dimensions to the disaster timescape in
terms of the generation and emergence of the event. The first
concerns the processes of incubation for the event (Turner 1976,
1978), which can take place over a considerable period of time for
socio-technical disasters and considerably longer for natural hazards.
This timeline would also include the process of recovery after such
an event, which can, in certain circumstances, also take place over
a long time frame. The second dimension concerns the immediate
responses to the event itself, which is typified by the high-energy
release and the immediate demands for containment, control and
remediation. One analogy that tries to encompass all of these
elements is the notion of a “vibrating string” (de Boer et al. 2002).
A disaster can generate a series of effects over time, in a process by
which the initial event triggers a series of subsequent impacts. These
can clearly have consequences beyond the immediate timeframe of
the specific disaster and may span generations of “victims”. These
impacts will invariably contain less energy than the initial
catastrophic event but they may last for considerably longer periods
and, thereby, cause greater damage (de Boer et al., 2002).
Despite the multiple time frames at work in a disaster, there
are often early warnings of the impending catastrophe which can
provide prior indications of the event (Ravilious 2001; Reason
1997; Scarth 2002; Turner 1978) although it is obvious that these
217WHAT IS A DISASTER?
warnings are not always clear and unequivocal in their message.
For example, Scarth (2002: 31) observes that:
. . . volcanic eruptions rarely behave like clockwork and follow
exactly the same pattern. Sometimes, indeed, the preliminary
symptoms do not even lead to an eruption, but at least they warn
that something sinister might be brewing in the entrails of the volcano.
Issues of connectivity and interaction are also important within
the generation of the disaster event. It is important to consider the
holistic process of damage, rather than the narrowly confined timescape
that is associated with trigger of the eruption, earthquake or explosion.
For the purposes of our current discussions, it is proposed to outline a
particular framework for considering a timescape that sees such events
occurring in three overlapping stages.
The “crisis of management” (Smith 1990a) phase is that period
prior to the generation of damage. It is typified by a gradual erosion
of capability and resilience, and will involve the creation of
“pathways of vulnerability” within both organizational and
community defenses and capabilities (Smith 2000b). It is this
phase of a “disaster” that has attracted the attention of those who
seek to create resilient organizations and communities, although
the problems of developing an effective audit framework remain
elusive (Smith 1995, 2002; Smith and McCloskey 2000).
Similarly, the search for predictive indices of disaster has also
attracted attention (Ravilious 2001) but may ultimately prove to
be something of a “Holy Grail”(Smith 1995). The second phase of
the timescape—the operational crisis—is that phase in the disaster
timeline where the destructive event itself occurs. This phase is
typified by damage, disruption, confusion, the need to implement
contingency plans and the failure of control systems (Smith 2000a).
This phase is also typified by the intervention of “rescuers”, who
can be individuals (including victims of the disaster), or
organizations with responsibilities to act as first responders in a
disaster. This phase becomes somewhat complicated, however, if
we include the more chronic types of disaster in our discussion.
Here, those events in which the phase of damage generation takes
place over a long time period, will not have the clearly defined
218 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
timescape typically associated with a disaster. These events are more
diffuse and tend to be marked by disputes and debates concerning
the nature and extent of the hazards. Problems associated with
“public health” disasters illustrate the diffuse and complex nature
of such events (Angell 1996; Baker 2001; Brown and Duncan
2002; Redfern, Keeling, and Powell 2000; Smith 2002; Stephens
et al. 2001). The final stage, “the crisis of legitimation”, is concerned
with the aftermath of the event itself and is typified by the processes
of recovery, reconstruction and rehabilitation, organizational
learning and regulatory change (Sipika et al. 1993; Smith 1990a;
Smith et al. 2000; Smith et al. 1993). This period is also often
marked by a search for culpability and the processes of learning
and to a degree scapegoating (Smith 1990a, 1995). This search
for culpability is often undertaken by government(s) through the
formal public inquiry/presidential commission process as a means
of ensuring that learning takes place or, more cynically, that blame
is apportioned and state legitimacy is maintained (Smith 1990a,
2000b). Whilst the framework has been applied to technological
disasters and organizational crises, rather than “natural” or
environmental disasters, it is felt that the issues have a validity
within that broader setting.
Table 2 seeks to outline the main characteristics of each of the
three phases. This table is adapted from the collective work of
several scholars (Reason 1990, 1997, 2001; Smith 1990a, 1995,
2000a, 2000b; Smith and McCloskey 1998; Smith et al. 2000;
Smith et al. 1993; Turner 1976, 1978). Each stage of an event
brings with it its own subtleties and nuances, and the energy levels
associated with each stage will also be significantly different across
the timeline. What a crisis framework brings to the discussion is a
greater emphasis on the role of human agency and, in particular,
the role and importance of management as a contributory factor in
the generation of the event. Obvious examples of such a role include,
amongst others, decisions taken around hazard zoning, additional
engineering for structures, and the development of contingency
plans. It can be argued that such a framework has a relevance to
natural as well as technological disasters although the role of human
agency prior to a natural disaster may not always have the clarity
that can be provided by a socio-technical event.
Ph ase of th e
event
Ch aracterist ics and Processes
-role of assu m p tions and b eliefs in sh ap ing d ecision m aking for
d isast er p revention (grou p th ink)
-assu m p tions and b eliefs sh ap e th e d efences th at are p u t into p lace
-relu ctance to consid er and p lan for w orst case scenarios d u e to
p erceived low p rob ab ility of occu rrence (and h ig h cost of
int ervention)
-d istract ion of d ecision m aking b od ies b y oth er issu es w h ich are
given h ig h er p riority
-trad e-offs m ad e b etw een “risk” and b enefit– risk m inim isation
-failu res in “m anagem ent” to id ent ify and p revent erosion of
d efences
-excessive p ow er given to tech nocratic elites in d ecision m aking
-d ifficu lties arou nd com m u nication inh ib it early w arning s of
p otential d isaster
-em erg ent p rop erties in com p lex sy stem s generate cond itions
b ey ond th e tolerance of control sy stem s
-creat ion of p ath w ay s of vu lnerab ility and fractu res w it h in control
-erosion of resilience
-trigg er events exp ose w eaknesses in th e “sy stem ” d evelop ed in th e
crisis of m anagem ent p h ase
-release of “energy ” or p rob lem s relating t o em ergent p rop erties
cau se severe d am age and d isru p tion
-em erg ent p rop erties exceed cap ab ilities of conting ency p lans
-need to u tilise ad d itional resou rces to d eal w ith d em and s of th e
event
-need for containm ent and control
-recovery and rescu e team s m ob ilised
-d isru p tion of “norm al” p roced u res and services
-ad d itional d em and s p laced on oth er organizations to d eal w ith
d am age and d isru p tion; p otential for knock-on effects is h igh (m ay
serve as an incu b ation m ech anism or trigg er for anoth er event )
-h igh t ask d em and s from vu lnerab le p op u lations generates
“p olitical” p rob lem s of resou rce allocation
-”crisis m anag em ent t eam s” m ob ilised to d eal w ith th e task
d em and s of th e event
-constrained com m u nications and control m ay com p ou nd initial
p rob lem s
-p rior failu res t o t rain rescu e and crisis team s m ay lead t o an
escalation of t h e event
-involvem ent of m ed ia increases th e p rofile of th e event and
h eig h tens stress levels for th ose ch arged w ith “m anag em ent” of t h e
p rob lem s
-m ob ilisation of aid and resou rces from ou tsid e of t he “reg ion of
d am age”
T he C risis of
M an a gem en t
T he
O pera tion a l
C risis
220 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
-need for rehab ilitation, stab ilisation and recovery
-investig ation of cau sal factors and lessons to b e learnt– high level of
governm ent involvem ent
-re-evalu ation of control m echan ism s and contingency p lans
-heightened p ossib ility of scap egoating throu gh a search for
cu lp ab ility
-organizational learning constrained d u e to assu m p tions of those
“m anaging” the p rocess
-m ed ia investigations into the cau se of the event and the attem p ts
at d ealing w ith its d em and s
-im p act on financial p erform ance of organization or state thou g h
reh ab ilit at ion and recovery d em and s
-failu re to ad d ress the core p rob lem s of assu m p tions and b eliefs
lead ing to single-loop learnin g
T he C risis of
Legitim ation
If we consider the relationship between the CATWOE
framework and the three stages of crisis model then it is possible
to capture something of the complexity of the interactions that
take place within any disaster, by tracking the timeline of the
event relative to the changing root definition of the disaster.
Again, this adds a layer of complexity associated with the concept
of a disaster and is an important reflection of the ways in which
such events unfold in reality. One of the distinguishing events
of a disaster is the manner in which emergence plays a major
role in shaping the event. By framing a disaster using these
concepts, the potential for that emergence—expressed in terms
of the interactions between elements of the event and the
g e n e r a t i o n o f n e w a n d u n f o r e s e e n c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s a s a
consequence of that interaction—is considerable.
If we take the key elements from the CATWOE analysis,
expressed in figure 2, and test them against our opening definition,
then it is possible to identify a number of further omissions within
the definition. The first set of issues that challenge our definition
emerge out of the transformations that take place within a disaster.
These events clearly bring with them emergent properties that
often contain a tremendous amount of energy, much of it negative,
and they also generate considerable fear, confusion and
misunderstanding (Bird 1962; Raphael 1986; Weick 1993). The
second issue concerns the multiple phases and layers that are
221WHAT IS A DISASTER?
inherent within a disaster. This, in turn, also generates a sense of
the complexity associated with the event and this is compounded
by the manner in which the event is reported through the media
and social networks. Thirdly, there is a sense in which collaboration
is required in order to allow the various groups to cope with the
demands of the disaster.
By incorporating these elements of the analysis into our
discussion, it is possible to move towards a third iteration of our
evolving definition. Disasters can now be seen as:
“multi-phased and multi-level, complex and damaging
systems-related high-energy events that unfold over time
and space, through an emergent complex interaction of
elements involving structures, connections and networks
and which are shaped by ideological, economic and
social factors to generate impacts on elements of society
that change the performance of the “normal” order of
that societal setting. The damage that occurs is shaped
via processes of agency (and in some cases because of the
actions of agents), the networks of inter-dependence that
they expose or damage, and through the consequences
that they generate for the psychosocial well-being of
actors (as victims of the physical processes of generating
harm). These events create considerable problems
associated with complexity, communication, stress and
sense-making. (Definition 3)
As a working definition, this has clearly evolved from our
opening attempt and it now has a strong sense of the psychosocial
dynamism of a disaster associated with it. Of particular interest
here are the difficulties that the notion of disaster generates in
terms of “sense-making”, an issue that will be returned to later. At
this point, it is necessary to calibrate our working definition of
disaster by reference to attempts made elsewhere to define the
term.
222 (EDITED BY) RONALD W. PERRY & E.L. QUARANTELLI
EXPLORING THE BOUNDARIES:
SETTING THE FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSIS
In order to test our third working definition of disaster against
the literature, it is proposed to set out a series of spray diagrams
(commonly used in systems research) as a means of identifying the
key elements of the construct. Figure 3 represents a first attempt
at framing this “networked nature of disasters”, by making a simple
expression of the issues dealt with in this paper thus far. What is
clear from this diagram is that no single definition could provide
the richness that is encapsulated in the issues identified within
Figures 1-3. Above all, what is of interest is the manner in which
these elements interact together to generate a construct that is
richer and infinitely more complex than the simple sum of the
parts. In employing a human centered approach to the term, the
importance of the physical phenomenon becomes relegated in
importance and is seen largely as a trigger event for the disaster. In
this way, human agency can be seen to provide input into the
incubation process for the disaster in a way that could be lost
within a more event-centric approach. The key elements of our
expression of disaster, emerging from figure 3, would suggest that
emergence, resilience and vulnerability are important in shaping
the nature of an event.
