Coping with Crises: The Management of Disasters, Riots and Terrorism

The editors of Coping with Crises look for similarities among such diverse events as natural disasters, industrial accidents, acute social conflicts, riots, and terrorist hostage takings. They argue that all of these seemingly different events are crises because each of them confronts organizational decision makers with a threatening situation that demands urgent decisions under conditions of uncertainty. Rosenthal, Charles, and 't Hart contend that decision makers respond to these different crises in remarkably similar ways. By comparing across this collection of case studies, the editors also attempt to identify patterns in decision making that precipitate crisis development. The strength of this book is in its individual case studies; they provide a concise and interdisciplinary introduction to crisis research. However, the editors set themselves a difficult task in searching for the regularities that order such a diverse array of crises. Their search for the common characteristics of crisis decision making is hampered both by their choice of an overly diverse collection of crisis studies and by the lack of a consistent, comprehensive analytic framework.