Notes
285 Notes Chapter 1: Introduction 1. For an intriguing counterperspective, see Wildavsky 1988. 2. A voluminous literature exists on patterns and pitfalls of crisis management. For an overview, see Comfort 1988; Rosenthal, Charles, and t’Hart 1989; Boin 2004; Rodriguez, Quarantelli, and Dynes 2006. 3. We have made a choice to introduce a subjective dimension in order to take account of the perceptions of those within the system. If people do not perceive a disturbance as extraordinary, it does not make sense to speak of resilience. Here we follow the academic discourse on definitions of crisis (see Boin et al. 2005). Chapter 2: Resilience 1. For an alternative view, see Brand and Jax 2007; Folke 2006; Gallopin 2006; Kaplan 2005. 2. Arguably, the following quote best captures this fascination with hardship: “A five-year-old child watched helplessly as his younger brother drowned. In the same year, glaucoma began to darken his world. His family was too poor to provide the medical help that might have saved his sight. His parents died during his teens. Eventually he found himself in a state institution for the blind. As an African American he was not permitted to access many activities within the institution, including music . Given the obstacles he faced, one would not have easily predicted that he would someday become a world renowned musician. This man’s name was Ray Charles” (S. Goldstein and Brooks 2005, xiii). For criticism in psychology regarding this “Americanized ” theme, see, e.g., Pendall, Foster, and Cowell 2007. 3. For a research database on the resilience concept in ecology, see Janssen 2007; Janssen et al. 2006. 4. This means that the measurement of “ecology resilience” is much more difficult if not impossible, because the only sure way to detect thresholds is to cross them (Allen , Gunderson, and Johnson 2005; Bennett, Cumming, and Peterson 2005; Carpenter , Westley, and Turner 2005). 5. This stands in sharp contrast with product optimization and stable resource production , which become increasingly vulnerable to surprise. “Ecological resilience” is therefore considered antithetical to optimization. 286 Notes to Pages 24–66 6. Rochlin (1991, 103) describes the vital difference: “If one has perfect knowledge, correct information, and a verified knowledge-based model that encompasses all possible variations, then one can indeed exercise ‘control’ over outcomes.... Management , on the other hand, involves decision-making under the acceptance of irreducible uncertainty, using heuristic models that are corrected on the fly, as necessary, as part of on-line trial and error learning.” 7. This does not mean that resilience at the individual level necessarily translates into resilience at the organizational level (Riolli and Savicki 2003, 228). 8. Similarly, McDonald (2006, 173) argues that “the concept of resilience would seem to require both the capacity to anticipate and manage risks before they become serious threats to the operation, as well as being able to survive situations in which the operation is compromised.” 9. See CIP 2007 for a response from the critical infrastructure protection community that considers protection and emergency management to include anticipation as well as resilience, with a focus on protection and prevention as well as mitigation and response. 10. It should be stated here that these findings closely resemble the theoretical model that Perrow (1984) drew with regard to the management of large-scale sociotechnical systems. 11. Personal communication with Todd LaPorte. Chapter 3: Designing Adaptive Systems for Disaster Mitigation and Response An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Political Science Association meeting in Chicago in September 2007. This version includes additional analyses of the status data from the situation reports and a beginning analysis of the networks and subnets involved in disaster response. We warmly thank the professional staff at the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for making the situation reports available to us for analysis. We also thank Thomas W. Haase for his critical review and formatting of the paper and Clayton Wukich for his thoughtful comments. This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant #0729456, “Decision, Risk, Uncertainty: Designing Resilience for Communities at Risk: Decision Support for Collective Action under Stress.” 1. Knabb, Rhome, and Brown 2005. 2. There are no situation reports available for August 31, 2005, the second day after the storm. Chapter 4: Lessons from the Military 1. Note that militaries themselves vary on the extent of their concern with surprise ; often their surprise-reducing efforts have become opaque to themselves as tradition or as “just the way things are...
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