For Emergency Management: Postmodern Disaster Theory
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2141591&download=yes
Abstract:
Legal preparedness for disaster consists of implementing the optimal portfolio of rules for managing catastrophic risks. This article extends the simpler model of modern disaster theory, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1910669, into a more ambitious model of postmodern disaster theory. A complete account of disaster law and policy based on an extended analogy to quantitative finance must address all aspects of that discipline, from the beautiful symmetries of modern portfolio theory to the disturbing behavioral insights and the vastly expanded mathematical arsenal of the postmodern critique.
Postmodern disaster theory represents a comprehensive account of catastrophic risk management. It organizes its postmodern agenda for legal management of risk and uncertainty according to higher statistical moments. Skewness has inspired alternative ways to measure risk-adjusted performance. To illustrate how the problem of fat tails and excess kurtosis confounds the measurement and management of risk, this article conducts parametric value-at-risk (VaR) analysis with the logistic distribution, a leptokurtic analog of the Gaussian distribution. Incomplete statistical models of risk dangerously blind the law to certain sources of financial or environmental peril.
Risk management through quantitatively informed legal tools is the unifying principle that harmonizes disaster policy in all domains, from the regulation of systemically important financial institutions to the prevention and mitigation of natural disasters. Postmodern disaster theory exploits the full range of sophisticated methods analogous to those used in quantitative finance. Comprehensive quantitative understanding promises to place disaster law on the efficient frontier of legal preparedness.
For Emergency Management: Tracking the evolution of the disaster management cycle: A general system theory approach
http://www.jamba.org.za/index.php/jamba/article/viewFile/54/90
For Emergency Management: The Lessons of Comprehensive Emergency Management Theory for International Humanitarian Intervention
http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/political_science_diss/24/
Doctoral Dissertation: This project seeks to expand the dialogue about international humanitarian intervention in a complex emergency or mass atrocity situation by asserting that post-intervention political reconstruction is as essential to the intervention as is the provision of material humanitarian aid and even the ostensive goal of protecting the aid regimes. As a result of this assertion, consideration of humanitarian intervention has, to this point, been too focused on the legal, ethical, and theoretical implications of war and hegemony. The current dialogue centers on its security studies aspects, owing largely to its Cold War precedent. However, a full consideration of the subject of humanitarian intervention must also consider the broader implications of the intervention, including recovery and mitigation of future events. When this is considered at all, the literature to this point largely treats post-intervention establishment of political and social infrastructure as a secondary consideration to the military intervention.
For Emergency Management: The Key To Disaster Survival? Friends And Neighbors
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/04/137526401/the-key-to-disaster-survival-friends-and-neighbors
It seems as though there have been a lot of disasters recently – the earthquake in Japan, tornadoes in places like Missouri and Alabama, and those wildfires, to name just a few. With each of those disasters, we hear a lot about the emergency personnel, equipment and ambulances that are rushed to the scene.
But new research shows there’s something more important than rescue crews and government aid.
NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam reports that what really matters are neighbors.
For Public Administration: Traditional Public Administration versus The New Public Management: Accountability versus Efficiency
http://pfiffner.gmu.edu/files/pdfs/Book_Chapters/NewPublicMgt.doc.pdf
The development of the classical model of administrative owes much to the administrative tradition of Germany and the articulation of the principles of bureaucracy by Max Weber. The development of modern bureaucracies made possible the industrial revolution and the breakthroughs of modern economies. But at the end of the 20th century that classical model of public administration was challenged by what has been called the “new public management.” This chapter will characterize the “traditional” and the “new public management”approaches to public administration and then compare them on three fundamental questions that every theory of public administration must answer: 1) what shall be done, i.e. policy direction; 2) who shall do it, i.e. personnel management; and 3) how to enforce compliance, i. e. accountability. The conclusion will examine the tension between accountability and efficiency in traditional public administration and the new public management in answering the three fundamental questions posed above.
For Public Administration: Woodrow Wilson on Administration
Woodrow Wilson on Administration.
The essay, published in the Political Science Quarterly in July 1887, advocates a trained bureaucracy that has the expertise and the will to oppose popular opinion when they deem it necessary. In contrast to the founding principle of equality—meaning that claims to superior wisdom cannot justify rule and that legitimate government is based on the consent of the governed—Wilson argues that expertise is a title to rule.
For Public Administration: The Future of Public Administration
http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~pubadmin/tfreport/kettl.pdf
Public administration faces an interesting paradox. Along with comparative government,public law, international law, and political theory, it was one of the fields that shaped the new American Political Science Association a century ago. Today, however, public administration sits in a disciplinary backwater. For the last generation, scholars have sought to save or replace it with fields of study like implementation, public management, and formal bureaucratic theory. The debate, in fact, has developed to the point that “traditional public administration” has become a nearly universal pejorative to criticize an intellectual approach whose time has come — and gone.”
For Public Administration: Why Public Administration Gets No Respect But Should
“Uttering the words “public administration” usually puts people into an instant stupor, or else sends them scrambling to check for messages on their iPhones. But in fact, the biggest problems we face in contemporary governance are often not related to what the government should do, but rather how to actually get the existing machinery to implement a policy that everyone can agree upon.”
For Public Administration: Thoughts About Government Transformation
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on June 18 entitled “Reinventing Government”. Several leaders with great experience in Federal government leadership and management issues presented testimony and engaged in an extensive discussion with the Committee on both the general topic, and on the proposal for a Commission on Government Transformation from the Government Transformation Initiative.
For Public Administration: Seven Management Imperatives
http://www.businessofgovernment.org/report/seven-management-imperatives
Periodically the IBM Center staff steps back and reflects on the insights provided by its authors of more than 300 research reports and by some 300 senior government executives interviewed over the past 13 years. Through our research and interviews, we identified several broad societal trends that we believe are changing the game for successful leadership at all levels of government.
Based on these insights and trends, we teased out what seem to be seven management imperatives that will determine the success of public leaders in what is increasingly being called the “new normal” – an environment of uncertainty, demands for more, and dramatic budget cuts. We believe government leaders and managers should incorporate these seven imperatives into their management practices to execute their organization’s mission successfully.
We have developed brief essays on each of these seven imperatives:
- Imperative One: Act with strategic intent
- Imperative Two: Leverage hyperconnectivity
- Imperative Three: Manage through collaboration
- Imperative Four: Use real-time performance data
- Imperative Five: Respond to the new security environment
- Imperative Six: Work with the private sector in new ways
- Imperative Seven: Cut costs and improve performance
USTPoliSciProf 