Organizational learning II: Theory, method and practice

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Improving disaster management and recovery techniques is one of national priorities given the huge toll caused by man-made and nature calamities. Data-driven disaster management aims at applying advanced data collection and analysis technologies to achieve more effective and responsive disaster management, and has undergone considerable progress in the last decade. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is currently no work that both summarizes recent progress and suggests future directions for this emerging research area. To remedy this situation, we provide a systematic treatment of the recent developments in data-driven disaster management. Specifically, we first present a general overview of the requirements and system architectures of disaster management systems and then summarize state-of-the-art data-driven techniques that have been applied on improving situation awareness as well as in addressing users’ information needs in disaster management. We also discuss and categorize general data-mining and machine-learning techniques in disaster management. Finally, we recommend several research directions for further investigations.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3017678

Data-Driven Techniques in Disaster Information Management

Containment, the key strategy in quickly halting an epidemic, requires rapid identification and quarantine of the infected individuals, determination of whom they have had close contact with in the previous days and weeks, and decontamination of locations the infected individual has visited. Achieving containment demands accurate and timely collection of the infected individual's location and contact history. Traditionally, this process is labor intensive, susceptible to memory errors, and fraught with privacy concerns. With the recent almost ubiquitous availability of smart phones, many people carry a tool which can be utilized to quickly identify an infected individual's contacts during an epidemic, such as the current 2019 novel Coronavirus crisis. Unfortunately, the very same first-generation contact tracing tools have been used to expand mass surveillance, limit individual freedoms and expose the most private details about individuals. We seek to outline the different technological approaches to mobile-phone based contact-tracing to date and elaborate on the opportunities and the risks that these technologies pose to individuals and societies. We describe advanced security enhancing approaches that can mitigate these risks and describe trade-offs one must make when developing and deploying any mass contact-tracing technology. With this paper, our aim is to continue to grow the conversation regarding contact-tracing for epidemic and pandemic containment and discuss opportunities to advance this space. We invite feedback and discussion.

Apps Gone Rogue: Maintaining Personal Privacy in an Epidemic.

This article explores the multiplex relationships among organizations within the context of emergency management. It examines the role of friendship networks and disaster preparedness networks in p...

Understanding Multiplexity of Collaborative Emergency Management Networks

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze scholarly discussions and findings regarding collaborative emergency management (CEM) Several aspects such as leadership, decision making, intergovernmental and interorganizational relations, technology applications in CEM have been investigatedDesign/methodology/approach – Literature review was conducted using three popular search data bases, Academic Search Premier, Academic OneFile, and Info Track OneFile using the following keywords: CEM, collaborative and emergency and management, collaborative networks, emergency networks, emergency network, interorganizational networks, Interorganizational and networks, intergovernmental and networks, and National Emergency Management Network (NEMN)Findings – The paper emphasizes that high expectations of public and stakeholders in emergency and disaster management require effective use of resources by collaborative networksPractical implications – Emergency and disaster managers should be able to adopt their or

Collaborative emergency management and national emergency management network

Social network analysis and centrality measures are used with the UCINET software program to analyze the outcomes of an evolving collaborative network through the relationship structures and processes of an interorganizational governance network. The study data were collected from content analyses of newspapers, situation reports, and organizational documents. In the context of disaster response networks, the structure and performance of the planned networks are compared to the actual networks. The results indicate that the September 11 response network's performance differed from that of the Federal Response Plan network and that the outcomes of the Hurricane Katrina response network showed different structures from those of the National Response Plan. The insights generated about the structural differences between these formal versus informal and planned versus actual networks demonstrate the utility of the measurements of network performance outcomes discussed here.

Measuring Performance for Collaborative Public Management Using Network Analysis Methods and Tools

Leadership in managing disasters and emergencies can minimize the damage inflicted by an event whilst lack of successful leadership exacerbates the impact. Leaders should have certain skills and abilities in order to manage catastrophes based on the environmental conditions, organizations they lead, scope of the disaster. This study provides an overview of the leadership competencies and traits that are necessary for disaster management. A conceptual framework for leadership was provided throughout the research.

/pdf/the-role-of-leadership-in-managing-emergencies-and-disasters-ai1du9rkiy.pdf

The Role of Leadership in Managing Emergencies and Disasters

Dark networks refer to organizations that are covert and illegal in nature. Terrorist networks, organized crime groups, arms smugglers, and conspiracy organizations can all be classified as dark networks. This paper analyzes Turkey’s Ergenekon Terrorist Organization (ETO) which is a political conspiracy network that has played a significant role in the terrorist activities within the country in the last few decades. It has features of organized crime enterprises, terrorist organizations, and Gladio type clandestine armies, but it exceeds the scope of these three. This study examines the structure of the ETO using network analysis tools and court documents as the data source. Findings indicate that the network has a concentrated structure which consists of a core and periphery group of actors. The core group has a strong connectedness with each other while the density of the relationship gets lower in the periphery group. Peripheral actors are separated into subgroups which are necessary for operational purposes and also prevalent in the literature of dark networks. An efficiency-security tradeoff, which is also widely discussed in the literature, does not take place in the ETO network because the political and legal conditions of the country allow members of the network to act comfortably as opposed to being under the threat of counter-terrorism or law enforcement efforts.

Anatomy of a dark network: the case of the Turkish Ergenekon terrorist organization

IntroductionBuilding capacity and expanding services are difficult tasks for nonprofits, particularly if they are younger and smaller. The administrative and financial tasks and delivery of services can easily overwhelm administrators and volunteers. Nonprofits can be established and dissolved easily especially when they lack the human, intellectual, social, and physical capitals necessary to develop and sustain an organization. Capacity building efforts help them reach the missing components for their survival and growth; yet, most of the time they need external support for building capacity (Kapucu, 2012; Kapucu, Augustin, & Krause, 2007).There are different capacity building opportunities for nonprofits helping for better service delivery. Federal, state, and local governments act as nonprofit incubators and provide financial and physical resources, and management consulting via various programs (Hu, Kapucu, & O'Bryne, 2014). Furthermore, nonprofits develop capacity through the collaborative ties they build with their environment. There is a rich literature on the relationship between nonprofits and their environment. Nonprofit organizations' formal and informal ties with the public organizations and other nonprofits help them gain legitimacy, access additional resources, and build capacity over time (Gazley, 2008; Guo & Acar, 2005).Collaborative ties are not formed in a vacuum and understanding the factors influencing how nonprofits build collaborative ties can set the ground work for devising better managerial decisions. There are studies examining the collaboration between government agencies and nonprofits (Gazley & Brudney, 2007), preferential attachments patterns of nonprofits (Guo & Acar, 2005; Harrow, 2011), and collaborative dyadic tie building patterns of nonprofits in general, or relationship between bigger nonprofits and smaller ones (Guo & Acar, 2005). In this study, we concentrate on the collaborative relationships among small nonprofits and try to explain some of the predictors of their collaborative tie building. The literature on collaborative tie building highlights two major predictors: past collaborations and friendships (Isset & Provan, 2005). Following the footsteps of the earlier studies, we examine the role of past collaborations and friendship on new collaborations for small and younger nonprofits. Specifically, in this study, we try to answer the following research question: what relative roles do informal (friendship) ties and past collaboration ties play in the formation of new ties between small nonprofits and their environment? Given the study's focus on collaborative network ties, practitioners and researchers of nonprofit managers could use the findings in understanding how to foster organizational ties with the environment and enhance organizational capacity.We examined small nonprofit organizations in Florida that participated in Strengthening Communities Funds (SCF), a federally funded project aiming to increase the capacities of small nonprofits in economically depressed regions. The program was conducted by the Center for Public and Nonprofit Management (CPNM) at the University of Central Florida (UCF). The purpose of the program was to provide technical, managerial, and financial trainings, as well as financial support in the form of small grants ($30,000 total) to the participants. In other words, the center served as a nonprofit incubator. This research also contributes understanding of how small nonprofits build collaborative ties. Findings of the study can guide policy makers and nonprofit managers nurture their organizations, avoid their demise, and help them grow successfully.The paper is organized as follows: section one presents the theoretical rationale behind this research and the hypotheses being tested; section two provides an overview of the Strengthening Communities Funds and context of the study; and section three provides a detailed explanation of the methodology and the statistical procedures we followed in this research. …

Fatih Demiroz

Papers

Collaborative emergency management and national emergency management network

Measuring Performance for Collaborative Public Management Using Network Analysis Methods and Tools

The Role of Leadership in Managing Emergencies and Disasters

Anatomy of a dark network: the case of the Turkish Ergenekon terrorist organization

A Social Network Analysis Approach to Strengthening Nonprofit Collaboration