[...]... decisive means to measure an organization s effectiveness In a further effort to understand why disaster management organizations have been failing us, I took the potential victim’s point of view What I found was a wide chasm between how disaster management experts and potential victims of disaster see the world of disasters I found that traditional forms of disaster behavior are alive and well, that risk perceptions... subordinate, and competitive parts; cross-organizational relationships appeared in the exchange of goods and services, changes in one subordinate system affected other systems, and internal structure depended on supply and demand made by other organizations This was an important contribution to understanding organizations The implications were that organizations, the goals of which were to confront disasters... newly created Homeland Security Department The national and local politics that have become part and parcel of public organizations in disaster management are an extremely sensitive issue The reason may lie in the enormous budgets that are allocated for disaster compensation to victims of disasters and the chain of profits that are involved in the mitigation and recovery stages of disasters Billions... may be successful in preventing and mitigating disasters The degree to which this can happen remains clouded in a number of issues The primary one, I suggest, has to do with the organizational structure of disaster management agencies DISASTER MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATIONS While disasters have been coterminous with humankind over the millenniums, non-community-based disaster organization are relatively new... of public sector disaster management organizations who dominated the disaster research field and controlled academic certification Disasters were now seen not only through the eyes of the (potential victims but also within the context of the community’s social organization Disasters were being moved out of the technical sphere and redefined as the product of the community and its social organization (Quarantelli... reflecting both rational and nonrational behaviors (Daft 1998) In order to understand the implications and relevance of this duality for disaster management, the impediments on organizational behavior will need to be examined To do so, I will first contrast community models of disaster management to those prevalent in complex bureaucratic organizations Both will be reviewed in terms of organization behavior... health, and jobs of about 1.9 billion people and inflicted economic losses of around $685 billion to the world’s economies (UN Reliefweb 2002).* The apparent chaos and threatening nature of disasters—as unusual, uncontrollable, and many times unpredictable events—facilitated the development of organizational means to restore order and normalcy The fact that there is strength in numbers and that group and. .. administration manages disasters (Kouzmin et al 1995) ORGANIZING CHAOS As we have seen, there are three approaches to understanding the workings of organizations; the rational, natural, and open system approaches By matching them to how disasters are organized through the alternative disaster management models—community versus public administration—we can gain some notion of how chaos is organized and then managed... to manage disasters is supported by a rational new-science philosophy that claims the ability to control, predict, and manage our material, social, and even religious lives To this end, the institutional organization of chaos has become identified with public administration (WHO 1994) Under the rubric of modern science and rationalizing organizations, the natural content and social meaning of disasters... centers focusing on disaster studies, information clearinghouses, in-depth studies of specific disasters, and laboratory experiments (Anderson and Woodrow 1989) The great advantage of trying to make sense out of disasters from a physical and social perspective is that it allows us to view disasters from a broad perspective (Kent 1987), but as I will point out, these advantages in data and information generation, . Revised and Expanded, edited by Aman Khan and W. Bartley Hildreth 104. Handbook of Conflict Management, edited by William J. Pammer, Jr., and Jerri Killian 105. Chaos Organization and Disaster. Farazmand 94. Handbook of Comparative and Development Public Administration: Second Edition, Revised and Expanded, edited by Ali Farazmand 95. Financial Planning and Management in Public Organizations,. Thompson and Mark T. Green 68. Organizational Behavior and Public Management: Third Edition, Revised and Expanded, Michael L. Vasu, Debra W. Stewart, and G. David Garson 69. Handbook