Abstract
When a hurricane or tropical storm threatens coastal cities, the weather service usually issues a list of potential landfall areas on the coastline. The forecasts are based on a blend of specialists’ expertise and various scientific models. Meteorological experts usually phrase their forecast in terms of a “cone of uncertainty”.
The basic raw materials on which organizations operate are informational inputs that are ambiguous, uncertain, equivocal. … Organizing serves to narrow the range of possibilities, to reduce the number of ‘might occur’. The activities of organizing are directed toward the establishment of a workable level of certainty.
—Weick (1969: 40)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See http://www.iserp.columbia.edu/news/articles/cone.html (accessed on June 10, 2009). The “cone of uncertainty” represents the forecasted track of the center of a tropical storm or hurricane and the likely error in the forecast track.
- 2.
In this book, crisis managers refer to leaders at the strategic level responsible for crisis management. Sometimes, when an analysis of leaders at the strategic level could not understand the whole picture of crisis management, leaders at the operational level are taken into consideration as well.
- 3.
Type I error (also called “false positive” or “α error”) and type II error (also called “false negative” or “β error”) are originally used to describe errors made in a statistical decision making process by Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson in 1928. Type I error means error of rejecting the null hypothesis given that it is actually true; type II error means the error of failing to reject a null hypothesis given that the alternative hypothesis is actually true.
- 4.
Uncertainty is identified as an element not just in Rosenthal et al.’s (1989) definition of crisis, but also in the definition in the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary as “a time of great disagreement, uncertainty or suffering”. Read http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=18339&dict=CALD (accessed on June 10, 2010).
- 5.
In a general sense, crises can be understood as threats posed by a wide variety of new risks and age-old calamities, from extreme weather catastrophes to desertification, from epidemics to food security crises, from social unrest to cyber terrorism, from chemical explosions to coal mine collapses, from the collapse of a bridge to major blackouts of a city, from international conflicts to financial crises, from volcanic eruptions to global warming, or even nuclear wars.
- 6.
What Quarantelli, Lagadec, and Boin refer to Trans-system Social Ruptures (TSSRs), means crises “jump across different societal boundaries, disrupting the fabric of different systems”. Beck defines this new feature as “cosmopolitanism” which means the erosion of clear borders for separating markets, states, civilizations, cultures, life-worlds of common people and its consequences. Syracuse University’s Moynihan Institute set up a research project on transboundary crisis management with a focus on how problems of governance are exacerbated when they cross jurisdictional borders. The transboundary crisis increases the possibility that some types of crises, such as pandemics disease, spread to different regions of the world.
- 7.
“New organization syndrome” means that members fail to act due to a lack of understanding on the organizational role, status and accountability in a new organization (Stern 1997).
- 8.
Please be aware that these strategies are not mutually exclusive in a single crisis. Crisis managers can select multiple strategies in coping with an uncertainty in a crisis.
- 9.
The foam was attached to the External Tank (containing low temperature fuel for the space shuttle) to prevent the formation of ice on the surface of the tank. The forming ice might damage the space shuttle during the launch process.
- 10.
This is based on interviewees #2, #3, #5, and #7 in the field research in China in 2008.
- 11.
In order to better understand the origin of the concept: institution, I hereby give an analogical example from physics, i.e. Newton’s gravitation theory. After observing an apple falling from a tree, Isaac Newton was inspired to formulate the concept “gravity” and related gravitation theory to explain the forces that draw objects to the Earth instead of up to the sky. In a similar way, the basic logic in organizational science is that organizations never perform according to their designs, and there are always some “unanticipated consequences of purposive action” as proposed by Robert K. Merton. There might be something hidden that causes these unanticipated consequences. Deeply inspired by his mentor Merton, Philip Selznick adopted the concept institution to explain the unanticipated consequences constrained by contexts, environments, and history.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. and Social Sciences Academic Press
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lu, X. (2017). Managing Uncertainty in Crisis Sensemaking: A Core Challenge for Public Leadership. In: Managing Uncertainty in Crisis. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3990-4_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3990-4_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-3989-8
Online ISBN: 978-981-10-3990-4
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)