Organisation Behavior
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he safety and success of individuals, families, communities, organizations, and nations rests substantially on the ability of organizations to anticipate and respond to disasters and terrorism (9/11 Public Discourse Project, 2005; Committee on Science and Technology for Countering Terrorism [CSTCT], 2002; Department of Homeland Security, 2009). As is outlined in the Introduction to this special issue (James, 2011), catastrophic events are occurring regularly in every part of the world and are affecting organizations of all sorts, as well as their employees. To this point, however, organizational science has given limited attention to the topics of planning for or coping with terrorism or disaster.
This theory paper is intended to promote development of the disaster/terror thread of organizational science. In line with Lynham (2002) and others (e.g., Peterson & Zimmerman, 2004), I adopt the perspective that theory building in the organizational sciences should serve two interconnected functions. The first is to advance scientific research on, and scientific knowledge about, a topic. The second is to give guidance to application in the field by organizations and organizational-science practitioners. Accordingly, the theoretical models developed and presented are intended to stimulate development of both research and practice on organizations and disaster/terrorism. The literature reviewed and analyzed and the models presented are, therefore, intended to be heuristic toward stimulation of future research, theory and practice on organizations attempts to deal with disaster and terrorism.
Two heuristic models and sample research propositions for the science of organizations and disasters/terrorism are presented. In developing the models, I started from the premise–long present in systems theory approaches to organizations (e.g., Kast & Rosenzweig, 1972; Katz & Kahn, 1978; Weick, 1977), and more recently revitalized in the “multilevel” (e.g., Cappelli & Sherer, 1991; Hofmann & Jones, 2004) and organizational network (e.g., Burt, 1997; Kilduff & Tsai, 2003) movements–that this topic requires integrative and multi-level organizational science investigation for viable scholarly and applied knowledge.
Systems, multilevel, and network theories are all premised, in part, on the idea that the points of intersection of different organizational levels are: (1) often particularly valuable for illuminating key organizational processes and issues and; (2) frequently under studied (Borgatti & Foster, 2003; Katz & Kahn, 1978). In line with that, and because there has been very limited past research on organizations and disaster/terrorism, the models focus on important intersections among levels and constructs, as well as on constructs that are under-addressed in existing works.