Sociology of Disaster

This article discusses inter and post-war works of fiction written by Polish and German-speaking authors with biographical connections to Oder River regions. The literary texts provide insights into the vulnerability to and resilience constructions of floods, which are related to such cultural factors as migrant histories and traditions, regional beliefs and religion, and the political background of changing frontiers in 1919 and 1945 that affected residents of this cross-border area.

The capacity to cope with the flooding Oder, especially after the major flood in 1997, intertwines with the problematic Polish-German relationship, including Silesia. For Polish communities, whose environmental cultures have been distorted by wars, resettlement and communism, vulnerability and resilience perceptions lack representations of the tangible river. It is culturally bounded in the stigmatising image of the Oder as the border of division, revived after 1945 and exposed by the Polish communist party in the so-called ‘Polonisation’ of the ‘Recovered Territories’. Fiction detects the problem of overworking the difficult past in response to the Oder’s hazardous nature. Writers representing an emotional attachment to the river and an aquacritical approach express the need to learn about the river’s lively nature, both in cooperating and sharing space, which is called the environmental adaptation.

While disaster studies researchers usually view risk as a function of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability, few studies have systematically examined the relationships among the various physical and socioeconomic determinants underlying disasters, and fewer have 5 done so through seismic risk analysis. In the context of the 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake in Taiwan, this study constructs five hypothetical models to test dierent determinants that aect disaster fatality at the village level, namely seismic hazard intensity, population, building fragility, demographics and socioeconomics. The Poisson Regression Model is used to estimate the impact of natural hazards and social factors on 10 fatality. Results indicate that although all of the determinants have an impact on the specific dimension of seismic fatality, some indicators of social inequality, such as gender ratio, dependency ratio, income and its SD, are the driving determinants deteriorating vulnerability to seismic risk. These findings have strong social implications for policy interventions to mitigate such disasters. This study presents an interdisciplinary 15 investigation into social and physical determinants in seismic risk.

The task of reducing disaster risks poses enormous challenges for international and local non-governmental organizations despite the immense assistance offered in reducing disaster risks and cushioning the effect of disasters. Among other issues responsible for the setback experienced is that of institutional constraints. 'Institutions' act as a fulcrum for achieving social norms that shape behaviour and actions within society via rules, professional ethics, standards, policies, regulations etc. Government establishments in the same organizational field-particularly those recognized to deliver public goods and services for disaster risk reduction often experience institutional constraints such as lack of clear policies and mandates to guide government institutions, lack of coordination between institutions, inadequacy in the required human capacity in public sector etc. These constraints often contribute to increased societal risk conditions. Where institutions are elements of governance, framing them also becomes a simultaneous attempt to manage risks to society. An overwhelming body of existing organizational behaviour literature affirms that organizations adopt practices or behave in a certain manner to gain access to resources and legitimacy for survival including under uncertain or complex circumstances when subjected to institutional pressures. Such pressures influence operational and strategic arrangements and has been discussed from a private sector organizations perspective. Against this background, little attention has been given to influence of institutional pressures on public sector organizations and scarcely from a disaster risk reduction perspective. The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of governance and influences of institutional pressures on public sector organizations from a disaster risk reduction perspective. This is achieved through reviewing literature on institutional theory to provide an understanding on the concept of institutional isomorphism and its effect on key issues such as goal ambiguity, professionalism and structuration as well as technical uncertainty. The implication for practitioners is that it offers background knowledge required for key players and professionals to design appropriate response strategies to isomorphic pressures to support institutional sustainability, encourage homogeneity for effective DRR delivery and fills the knowledge gap presented for further research. Abstract The task of reducing disaster risks poses enormous challenges for international and local non-governmental organizations despite the immense assistance offered in reducing disaster risks and cushioning the effect of disasters. Among other issues responsible for the setback experienced is that of institutional constraints. 'Institutions' act as a fulcrum for achieving social norms that shape behaviour and actions within society via rules, professional ethics, standards, policies, regulations etc. Government establishments in the same organizational field-particularly those recognized to deliver public goods and services for disaster risk reduction often experience institutional constraints such as lack of clear policies and mandates to guide government institutions, lack of coordination between institutions, inadequacy in the required human capacity in public sector etc. These constraints often contribute to increased societal risk conditions. Where institutions are elements of governance, framing them also becomes a simultaneous attempt to manage risks to society. An overwhelming body of existing organizational behaviour literature affirms that organizations adopt practices or behave in a certain manner to gain access to resources and legitimacy for survival including under uncertain or complex circumstances when subjected to institutional pressures. Such pressures influence operational and strategic arrangements and has been discussed from a private sector organizations perspective. Against this background, little attention has been given to influence of institutional pressures on public sector organizations and scarcely from a disaster risk reduction perspective. The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of governance and influences of institutional pressures on public sector organizations from a disaster risk reduction perspective. This is achieved through reviewing literature on institutional theory to provide an understanding on the concept of institutional isomorphism and its effect on key issues such as goal ambiguity, professionalism and structuration as well as technical uncertainty. The implication for practitioners is that it offers background knowledge required for key players and professionals to design appropriate response strategies to isomorphic pressures to support institutional sustainability, encourage homogeneity for effective DRR delivery and fills the knowledge gap presented for further research.

The small island of San Francisco, Cebu in the Philippines has gained global recognition for its community-based disaster management program. By institutionalizing the purok system—a sub-village level of organization—citizens are empowered to plan and implement disaster preparedness programs that fit their specific needs and geographical context.

We interrogate the logics that underpin this prize-winning governance innovation. We find that San Francisco—the island where all survive even after the most devastating of disasters—functions through the modality of participation as knowledge transfer. It is underpinned the ethos of solidarity over conflict and takes place in a predetermined rather than citizen-driven space for participatory politics. We situate our arguments in the recent literature on public participation to understand the precise character of participatory politics in the field of disaster response.

This article analyzes how shelters act as a form of concrete governmentality. Shelters, like other forms of preparedness, are political acts in the absence of a disaster. They are materializations and visualizations of risk calculations. Shelters as a type of concrete governmentality pose the question of how to build something that lasts and resists, and remains relevant both when the object that is being resisted keeps changing and when the very act of building intervenes so publicly in the life of the restless surrounding population. Comparing shelters in India, Switzerland and the UK, we highlight three transformations of preparedness that shelters trigger. First we analyse how shelters compose preparedness by changing the relationship between the state and its citizens. Rather than simply limiting risk or introducing ‘safety’, the building of shelters poses questions about who needs protection and why and, as we will show, this can generate controversy. Second, we analyse how shelters decompose preparedness by falling out of use. Third, we focus on struggles to recompose preparedness: Changing ideas about disasters thus lead to shelters being suddenly out of place, or needing to adapt.