- KOREAN
- E-ISSN2383-9449
- SCOPUS
E-ISSN : 2383-9449
Vol.14 No.2
Abstract
A growing number of studies have examined the relevance and impact of social media in building organizational resilience, which the ability to recover from a crisis, in the field of emergency management. However, few studies have assessed how these emergency response organizations perceive their own use of social media in crisis situations. In attempting to fill this gap, this study conducted a structured survey with emergency-response organization representatives in Seoul, South Korea, to examine how such organizations evaluate their utilization of social media in an urban emergency situation and how their social media uses are related to promoting organizational resilience during adverse events such as a flood. Overall, the findings imply that organizations are not yet taking full advantage of social media. Respondent evaluations of their own social media use in all three assessment areas-information provision, information dissemination, and emotional messages-were not satisfactory. However, their perceptions of how well they utilize social media were positively related to how they view their organizational resilience. Therefore, it may be that these organizations realize the powerful role of social media in building organizational resilience but lack the knowledge and experience to make the best use of social media services.
Abstract
As an effort of mitigating hazards, pro-environmental programs have been vigorously activated with regard to solid waste recycling. It is beneficial for both the environment and resource saving, but implementation and enforcement are hard to achieve voluntarily. The South Korean Government first implemented the Deposit Refund System (DRS) and later the Extended Producer Responsibility Program (EPR) to reduce waste and encourage recycling in South Korea. Un-der the DRS, producers would pay for recycling the wastes of the products. The government then repealed the DRS and implemented the EPR program. Under this program, the producers recycle as much as the Ministry of Environment determines or pay a penalty for an excessive amount of the waste. In the broader perspective of disaster management, such policy programs can mitigate environmental hazards. This paper compares those two programs that facilitated the level of recycling, focusing on how such programs regulate producers and how they were operated from the perspective of implementation and enforcement.
Abstract
Many people criticized how the Chinese government responded to the Wenchuan Earthquake. They focused on how it failed to address the psychological needs of the survivors. The study presented here approached this issue from a human resources perspective. It was determined that the Chinese government approached the situation in a bureaucratic way that limited the government's capacity and barred non-profit organizations and community groups from participating. It was also found that survivors could not contact these organizations for psychological support. This study concludes that the situation called for a more flexible and improvised institution that would respond to the emerging needs of survivors.
Abstract
This article assesses factors that affect the ability of local fire branch heads in Taiwan to mobilize volunteer organizations in local emergency responses. Data from a survey of local fire branch heads in Taiwan is analyzed by using an OLS model to test three hypotheses regarding the relationship between the dependent variable, perceived ability to mobilize volunteer organizations in emergency response, and three explanatory variables: organizational capacity, quality of communication, and the quality of citizen engagement ex-ante to emergency response. The model indicates a positive relationship between the ability to mobilize volunteer organizations in emergency response, the quality of communications, and the quality of citizen engagement in preparedness. The research suggests that local fire branch heads and volunteer organizations should begin the process of emergency response mobilization in the preparedness stage. The quality of the citizen engagement in preparedness stages should increase the ability of local fire branch managers to mobilize external resources in emergency response.
Abstract
This paper examines the New York Times' reaction to the 2010 Brazil-Turkey-Iran (BTI) nuclear deal, the very last diplomatic effort before the imposition of international sanctions track over the following years. The New York Times' (NYT) coverage of the deal is examined using the Critical Discourse Analytic (CDA) approach formulated by Teun van Dijk. The results show a strong bias against the BTI deal throughout the NYT's news coverage. The overarching theme in cover-age of the deal is the imputation of malignant intentions on the part of both Iran ("to kill time to further its nuclear weapons program") and Brazil and Turkey ("to advance their own business dealings with Iran and gaining international recognition"). Also, non-relevant information is used to imply a threat of Iranian development of nuclear weapons. Moreover, the NYT leaves almost totally "unsaid" that president Obama had asked Brazilian and Turkish leaders to go to Tehran and get this deal. Therefore, the NYT basically echoed, and legitimized, discursive practices of the U.S. government on the deal.
Abstract
Among public organizations, does variation in organizational structure explain variation in public managers' leadership styles (e.g., transformational and transactional leadership)? The study of leadership in public organizations is increasingly an area of scholarly interest partly sparked by movements to reform public organizations, particularly in the context of emergency management. There is, for example, a need for effective leadership that can help organizations respond to disasters (Kapucu et al. 2010; Van Wart and Kapucu 2011; Stern 2013). There are numerous documented cases where the lack of leadership skills has been linked to major social and economic losses as a result of poor disaster response (e.g., Hurricane Katrina in the U.S.). Yet, leadership is a complex concept and numerous theoretical frameworks have been developed to help explain it (Van Wart 2005). Practically speaking, the existence of different theories of leadership suggests that public managers can decide to exercise various styles of leadership. The style of leadership that a public manager exhibits matters because some styles are perceived to be more effective than others (Trottier et al. 2008). While the effects of leadership have been extensively studied, antecedents or predictors of leadership style have received little scholarly attention (Wright and Pandey 2009; Nielsen and Cleal 2011). The purpose of this research note then is to explore the potential causal relationship between the structure of an organization and the ability of a public manager to exercise transformational leadership in the context of emergency management in two Asian countries: South Korea and Japan. This research note consists of three main sections. The following section explores the relationship between leadership and organizational structure. The second section examines how certain concepts of leadership and organizational structure were applied in two case studies of disaster response. The final section presents some directions for future research.
Abstract
Social media comprises a vast and consequential landscape that has been poorly mapped and understood. Hundreds of millions of people have eagerly moved many of the conversations and discussions that compose civil society into these services and platforms. There is a need to document and analyze these social spaces for many academic and commercial purposes. The Social Media Research Foundation has engaged a strategy to cultivate better research into the structure and dynamics of social media. The foundation is dedicated to the creation of open tools, open data, and open scholarship related to social media. It has implemented a free and open network collection, analysis, and visualization tool called NodeXL to facilitate social media network research. Using NodeXL a group of researchers has collectively authored a publicly available archive, called the NodeXL Graph Gallery, composed of network data sets and visualizations from users around the world. This site has enabled the aggregation of tens of thousands of network datasets and images. Use of the archive has led to scholarly research results that are based on the wide range and scope of social media data sets available.