"Managing Emergencies and Crises: Global Perspectives is primarily for graduate level students and instructors who study and research on a wide range of socio-economic and political issues related to the management of 'natural' disasters from a 'social disaster' perspective. From a broad perspective this book covers various concepts including prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery, as well as vulnerability and risk assessment that need to be understood by those in the emergency management field"--

Managing Emergencies and Crisis provides future public administrators and policymakers with a comprehensive understanding of the institutional, socio-cultural, and political dimensions of natural and human-made disasters, as well as providing them with the tools needed for confronting the challenges of preparedness and response.--[book cover]

These challenges include: finding an appropriate division of responsibility and labor between public- and private-sector actors; crafting and coordinating a crisis response that addresses perceived threats to community values and avoids the twin perils of underreaction (e.g., passivity or paralysis) and overreaction (e.g., crying wolf or political grandstanding); coping with competence/authority discrepancies under stress - those who have expert knowledge of the technical issues rarely have the authority to make policy; those who have the authority generally lack the technical expertise to comprehend the subtleties and uncertainties of the issues at stake; and maintaining credibility and legitimacy when facing acute, ill-structured problems in politicized, publicized, and highly uncertain environments."--BOOK JACKET.

This text adopts a pragmatic approach to management, striking a balance between theory and practice. It offers a real-world view of each management function - planning, organizing, influencing and controlling - from the standpoint of how each function fits into the overall management process.

This book offers an excellent and highly useful overview of the history of how the federal government has responded to disasters since 1950. It puts the disaster relief program in the proper context of federal-state relations, and it illustrates the changes in the program that are under way as a result of recent developments.